Every chief executive and board member will say that “tone at the top” is critical to a business, particularly in turbulent times. Yet few leaders can verify whether such tone has penetrated the permafrost of middle management to get to individual employees.

Top executives strive to model what one boardroom leader described as more “honest dialogues, not burying bad news or potentially bad news”. This approach has to be coupled with new ways to make lower-level employees feel empowered – and perhaps even obliged – to shout from the rooftops when they have intelligence that needs to heard by those above.