Nick Leeson, who famously lost £830m in trading and was held responsible for the biggest financial scandal of the 20th century, claims HR can learn a lot from his experiences.
Employers must not lose sight of their workforce, the former employee of investment bank Barings warned.
“The thrust of everything at Barings was always ‘how much money are we going to make?’ Organisations need to focus more on the welfare of staff,” he told Personnel Today. “I don’t think any attention was paid to that.”
With 10 years of hindsight, Leeson said employers could draw important lessons from his experiences – especially from the psychological aspect of the way the stress affected him.
Leeson said the change in his behaviour in the workplace was glaringly obvious, yet people ignored it for months. He never received any training, and there was never a proper employee-manager relationship in place at his Singapore base.
Go to www.personneltoday.com/31647.article to find out what HR can learn from Leeson
