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Ropes & Gray attorneys provide timely analysis on legal developments, court decisions and changes in legislation and regulations.
Andrew Dale: Hi, I’m Andrew Dale, a litigation and enforcement partner based in Hong Kong and Singapore. Welcome to a short introduction to this episode of the Culture & Compliance Chronicles.
The team is joined by someone with personal experience of navigating one of Europe’s largest financial scandals offering an insight into the realities of whistleblowing from the perspective of a whistleblower.
I first met Pav when he was a guest speaker at an investigations forum in Singapore. His story captivated the room. As organizations increasingly recognize the value of candid feedback and the risks of a culture of silence, his perspective is useful for stakeholders and clients wanting to foster a speak-up culture and building safety and trust.
The team explore the human side of compliance, the barriers to speaking up, and practical strategies for creating an environment where concerns can be raised and addressed constructively. Over to you Nitish.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Welcome back to the Culture & Compliance Chronicles, the podcast that gives you new perspectives on legal, compliance and regulatory challenges faced by organizations and individuals worldwide. The clue is in the title—culture is at the heart of everything. It’s the endlessly shifting patterns that govern our environment and behaviors. The magic is in amplifying certain patterns and dampening others. Let’s see if we can pique your curiosity, get you to challenge some of your perceptions and give you space to think differently about some of your own challenges. I’m Nitish Upadhyaya, and I’m joined by Amanda Raad and Richard Bistrong. Hello, Amanda and Richard.
Amanda Raad: Hi, Nitish. Hi, Richard.
Richard Bistrong: Hello, everyone.
Amanda Raad: Last time we were here, we were with Rachel Samren talking about all the skills it takes for a modern board member on a board of directors, everything you need to do to navigate uncertain times and manage crises. Who do we have with us today, Nitish?
Nitish Upadhyaya: I’m delighted to welcome Pav Gill. Welcome to the show.
Pav Gill: Thanks for having me.
About Pav Gill and Lighting Round Questions
Nitish Upadhyaya: I first met Pav on a rooftop in Singapore, and over a drink we had a fascinating conversation. I’ll let Pav introduce his history, which is storied to say the least, but we talked about barriers to speak-up, organizational culture, and all sorts of interesting things. The thing that really struck me, Pav, about your experience is you’ve been there—you’ve lived it. You aren’t proselytizing from a perspective of, “This is what you should do.” You have firsthand experience of the entire process, and so, I’m excited to get your views on how we promote transparency in organizations, the story that you went through, and ultimately, how we create safety for whistleblowers. I’ve teased a lot there. Let’s do a rapid-fire round to help the audience get to know you. Give us three things that we should know about you.
Pav Gill: I used to be a lawyer—started my career at Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, King & Spalding. At some point in my life, I wanted to be a rapper, so I used to call myself P-Gizzy. Don’t judge—that was in my youth. Otherwise, I’m the founder and CEO of the Confide Platform, so I’ve made the leap from being a lawyer to an entrepreneur/CEO.
Nitish Upadhyaya: What’s one thing that you are curious about?
Pav Gill: I think the world. There’s just so much to see. There’s so much to learn. I think true evolution is the evolution of the mind, where every day you’re just learning so many different things that I think that’s the beauty of life, and I think that’s really what evolution means.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I am hoping we get a chance to explore that a little bit more, the existential piece as well as the dos and don’ts in the whistleblowing space. What’s the last thing that surprised you?
Pav Gill: That I’m not as fit as I used to be. That was a shock to the senses. A bit of a realization, getting backaches and stuff—that’s what shocked me.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Next time, we’ll have to do a podcast while we’re running or doing something active but thank you very much for the high level. For those of our listeners who might not be familiar with Wirecard and your role in exposing the misconduct that was there, can you give us a quick overview to situate us?
Pav Gill and the Wirecard Scandal
Pav Gill: I was hired as Wirecard’s head of legal for the Asia-Pacific region. There was a whistleblowing case that came to me—I was told to investigate it. I thought I was doing my job pretty well. The board thought otherwise, so maybe they thought it was too well for their interests, and they spent several months trying to make my life difficult, including trying to kill me at the end of it. When that failed and I left the company, they still didn’t stop, so I was forced really into becoming an external whistleblower. As of today, Wirecard’s still one of the largest European financial scandals. I think it’s still the biggest fintech fraud in the world—40 billion USD—and really a shock to not just Germany but I think Europe as a whole. What was once the fintech darling—like the PayPal of Europe—how did it just collapse overnight into a situation where the CEO is the most wanted man in Europe, a former Russian spy? Pretty crazy times in the Wirecard case. Also, very crazy times for me and those innocent lives that were involved, finding ourselves in a situation where we are actually working for a company that’s now dead overnight.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I realize you’ve told this story so many times, and one of the powerful things for lots of whistleblowers out there and for companies more generally is hearing that story. I don’t feel like you can gloss over something like the sort of retaliation that you faced. To the extent it’s not too traumatic, can you talk through what you tried to do and what actually happened?
Pav Gill: There were things that didn’t really add up in the company. All the subsidiaries were loss-making, and where was the money coming from? The Asian side was announcing EBITDA results in the hundreds of millions, which was similar to what the European side was doing, but no one really saw where the money was coming from. Of course, my job as counsel, if things don’t make sense—nothing’s perfect in every company—what you’re waiting for in that situation is the smoking gun event. That happened when a senior member of staff came to me, said she was afraid for her life. She’s tired of being forced to carry out illegal transactions. And my job was primarily to figure out what she’s talking about, and also, to protect her—that was really my focus. I called this person “Bobby” because I didn’t want anyone to know whether it’s male or female. Right away, I told the deputy general counsel, “We’ve got a whistleblowing case.” So, he said, “Go investigate.”
I got a law firm involved. We had access to inboxes of a few of these major suspects, and what we found was pretty mind blowing. These guys were lazily committing fraud basically, emailing logos of third-party companies to themselves, and creating Wirecard templates with different logos on it. So, to me, it’s like a slam-dunk case, “Let’s just get rid of these guys.” But instead, they started investigating me. They were shouting at me. The general counsel was attacking my credibility. They created an HR case against me, which is a very horrible thing to do. That took three months to investigate. It didn’t get anywhere, and that’s where, I think, the company really got desperate. They said, “We want to send you on a business trip to Jakarta,” which is where the prime suspect, Edo, was from. He was very fond of saying he’s married to a drug-dealing family from there.
When I didn’t want to go to Jakarta, I received two anonymous phone calls on my land line saying, “Hello, is this Pav Gill? We understand you’re being told to go to Jakarta. Don’t go. You won’t come back.” So, that’s when I didn’t want to go. And the company was very happy, because finally, they’ve got a good business reason to fire me, which is I’m not going on a business trip. So, I left—I was very disappointed. But even after I left, they were sending people to follow me and my mom, setting up fake interviews for me where the interviewers in those companies would just ask me about Wirecard, why did I leave, so I knew they were trying to trap me into an NDA breach or something. At that point we decided, my mom and I, that enough is enough, and instead of being sitting ducks we should really go on the offensive and expose this company for what they truly were, which is a criminal organization. So, that’s what happened, in a summarized version I can give you.
Amanda Raad: Well, thank you. It is a lot to take in, and you can’t really gloss it over. You share it with such impact, because I can almost feel what it must have been like over time, but one of the things is courage. You talked a little bit about your role originally in protecting the original whistleblower, and that’s something that obviously you came to experience what happens when people aren’t protected. But it sounds like that was something that was really core to you from the very beginning, so can you talk a little bit just about your philosophy on the role of whistleblowers and the importance of how they are treated within an organization?
The Importance of How You Treat Whistleblowers
Pav Gill: Primarily, I’m a human-first person, for lack of a better description. I think human resources is a category that we just gloss over, but to every company, it’s the human beings that drive it, whether for better or for worse. So, if a person comes to me in confidence, my job is not to break that confidence, no matter what. I took that approach, and I think as a general counsel—as anyone that you may be, whether you’re in HR or in compliance—if you have that mindset, people will naturally find you approachable and trustworthy. You can always protect someone while still doing your job, and still trying to protect the company, so that was my philosophy. What I didn’t expect was that the company didn’t want to do the right thing, so, I think, that was the shock.
As someone who receives whistleblowers coming from everywhere around the world every couple of weeks, what I’ve also found very interesting is that most of these people are very senior staff, and they’ve gone through exactly the same thing, which is because of their position, their access to info, their experience, when they find themselves in a situation where they didn’t expect the company’s feedback to be the way it was, it’s like, “I’ve been here for so many years. I thought everyone was good, and the governance worked. But then, when I raise an issue, I’m now the deer in the headlights.” I think that’s where you find yourself in a “what should I do” situation. And that’s also why I hate all these hotline services for whistleblowing, because they are not going to go call some random guy in a hotline and tell them what the issue is—they’re actually looking for real advice in, “What should I do? Should it be a legal thing? How do I protect myself?”
Why People Find It Difficult to Speak-Up
Richard Bistrong: That’s a great point, because there’s the proliferation of hotlines out there, which I think has become quite commoditized. So, why do you think that people struggle using hotlines, given the availability of them?
Pav Gill: Because the person on the receiving end of the hotline is not connected to the business, doesn’t understand what’s going on there, what the culture is, what the operational setup is, and they’re just taking down potentially with the risk of giving it a different spin. So, maybe whatever you said could be misinterpreted—or worse, it could be going back to the very person you’re reporting about. There are a lot of cases in real life where these things have had a very adverse consequence on the people reporting. Some of these are very high-profile companies, and they’ve resulted in deaths. What you really want, I think, as a human being in a company is if you come across something which doesn’t make sense, you want to have that extremely basic setup where you can raise that, whether as a concern or as a clarification, without the person on the other side looking at you like you’re a bad person. So, I think fundamentally, from a unit standpoint of an organization, that culture just simply has to exist. Now, of course, whistleblowing is the extreme opposite end, but, I think, fundamentally as a unit, if we don’t even allow people to raise concerns or clarifications while we’ve instilled that fear in them, then something’s really wrong. I always tell companies that there’s a difference between a culture of silence, where your employees are just generally quiet, like in Asia—they like to just do their own things and go home—or they are actually quiet because they have seen what’s happened to someone who actually spoke up and the consequences that were rendered upon that individual. That is the wrong kind of silence that you want in the company.
Amanda Raad: One of the things you’ve touched on just briefly was both your experience but also when people come and talk to you about their experiences, that you may be going along and have one impression of your organization, and then, you come across a certain turning point or situation where the information that you receive is contradictory to everything you thought, how things would be handled or treated. And as you say, it’s a human approach—organizations are made up of lots and lots of different people. Was there a point for you, and generally speaking, in the experience that you have where you realized that it is more than one person, it is different than you anticipated, it’s different than the policies and procedures say, it’s going to have to be another mechanism?
Pav Gill: Yes. Wirecard is a very interesting case of two kinds of whistleblowing. It was me as the person managing an internal whistleblower and then me becoming an external whistleblower. So, to my benefit, I would say, I was anonymous all the way until the end, until a year after Wirecard collapsed. That’s when the Sky documentary called Wirecard: A Billion Euro Lie came up. That’s the same day I told the FT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the public who it is. So, I kept myself anonymous, I protected myself, but oftentimes, whistleblowers are not protected—they’re exposed in the process, and that’s where things go downhill extremely quickly. One of the things you may think is you’ve got truth on your side, you’ve got all the evidence, but if a company’s in the habit of forging documents and doing all kinds of crazy stuff, what makes you think they can’t do it against you, especially in an age of deepfakes and AI? They could say, “Yes, he’s been part of these things. In fact, he was signing off and advising us that way.” How are you going to then, if your identity is exposed, have the ability to defend that? So, that’s very important for people to also keep in mind.
It’s never advisable to download gigabytes of data from your company. A lot of times it’s easy to bandy around advice to people saying, “Yes, go cover yourself. Make sure you have sent the as-discussed email.” But then, what happens if one day we come to the office and we no longer have access to our emails, and everything we apparently covered was there? There’s a tendency in that same mindset to be like, “No, that’s okay. I’ll forward it to my Gmail each time I do that.” But again, that’s a big issue—you can’t be just forwarding stuff to your email. I think these are realistic, practical issues which people should think about in these situations. But from a company standpoint, it sounds so basic, but it’s true—it’s really in your interest to find out first. So, create that safe environment, find out first, deal with the problem—then, you don’t need to deal with it when it goes outside and everyone’s scrambling around, looking at what happened. Who dropped the ball? Who’s to be blamed? Is it middle management? Just create something safe, have a healthy environment, and deal with it.
How to Help People Speak-Up
Amanda Raad: Do you have a top tip on how companies can ensure that happens? The information can come into so many different people, but from your perspective, what can companies do to make sure that they find out when somebody is trying to raise these concerns so that they can take action quickly and appropriately?
Pav Gill: I think it’s important for whistleblowing procedures to have skip-level reporting, so you need to be able to have case managers that sit at the very top. I think the very interesting thing about whistleblowing is that in every company, the process is different. In fact, the case manager is also different. It could be internal audit. It could be an RC committee member. It could be legal. It could be compliance. And in my least favorite case, it could be HR, because HR is often untrained in dealing with these cases, whether it’s from the investigation side, financial crimes side, or whatever. So, I think fundamentally, what companies should be doing is creating safe environments for people to be able to raise concerns, because as I said, you want to know first. You want to be stress tested by your own employees and not by your customers or other parties outside, so that, I think, really should be the mindset. If you think about how the world’s been evolving, people are getting more vocal—people are speaking up more. There’s access to technologies, Glassdoor, Google Reviews, all these things. What you want to do is really be able to manage that process first. So, be smart about it. Create that safe environment, because no longer do we live in a world where you can tell people, “Just keep your head down, earn your salary, don’t say anything, and just go home.” If you do say that, they will just take the phone out, record you doing it and suddenly you look really foolish.
Nitish Upadhyaya: That’s a really interesting perspective. We’ve heard a little bit about how you might drive business success by allowing people to raise concerns, ideas, creating that safety, and then, there’s also this defensive piece around letting people come to you rather than go externally—there are rewards mechanisms, various other things, incentivizations out there. You’ve already talked about respecting confidentiality and anonymity, creating that skip-level reporting, but what else should people be thinking about when they’re auditing their own process? This is the context: a lot of companies say, “We won’t retaliate. We promote speak-up.” But sometimes, what they say and what they do sends a different message to their people—the social norms, for example, in an organization. So, top tips for companies as they’re looking to create this culture and genuinely doing it when they’re auditing their process rather than just saying what they’re going to say?
Pav Gill: That’s a very difficult question because there are so many ways to go at it. You can go at it from a board level. Boards, they always say, “It’s a tone from the top.” And sometimes, that’s used as a defense, like, “The tone from the top sucks,” or “Everything’s bad—there’s no point.” Everyone takes a defeatist approach, which I always say is not necessarily the right way either—just because the tone from the top isn’t good, that doesn’t mean, as business leaders in our own departments, we can’t create a subculture that’s positive and that we manage upwards.
There’s also the ability to make sure there’s no sacred cows around. Doesn’t matter if the person’s the highest biller or the most important person—if there’s wrongdoing, they should be held accountable. And accountability needs to be demonstrated and shown. That’s also very difficult in practice, because, for example, you could have a case where the COO is going around, say, sexually harassing female staff. Then, suddenly, there’s this big bunch of whistleblowing cases against that person or grievances. The board may then tell the COO, “Look, the heat is very strong. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Why don’t you just leave?” That person might say, “Okay, I’m going to leave in three months, but just don’t talk about this thing. Don’t tell anyone anything.” But then, from the victims’ side, the company’s not doing anything. They’re not responding to me. They’re not taking any action. And now, as a victim, I’m potentially going to cross over into the blackmail space or the threatening-the-company space and say, “If you guys don’t do what I want or it’s clear you’re not doing anything, I’m going to go outside. I’m going to go to the press.” So, managing communications with people and reporting is often overlooked. At the end of the day, as human beings, we want to feel heard. So, that feeling heard thing, you need to communicate back, at least even if it’s an acknowledgment, which to the EU’s credit, with the EU Whistleblowing Directive, that’s a requirement within seven days. I always tell companies that even if it’s a requirement, even if you’ve automated it, make sure it’s not a boring, automated message—have some human aspect to it.
You also need to stress test your processes. I always tell board members, “You’ve got a whistleblowing policy and all these things. A lot of times, you have reported statistically, ‘We’ve got three cases these last few months,’ whatever. Ask the question, ‘What are those cases?’ If any cases historically have been closed, maybe one day just go open one of these cases, find out what happened, speak to the person that reported, and say, ‘How did you find the process? Were you happy with the outcome,’ and so on, because you might gain some insights which you never expected.”
Richard Bistrong: That’s great, Pav. The whole concept of helping people to feel heard, I think, is so powerful. On that narrative, let’s look at the other side of it, because when I think of, “We have a whistleblowing hotline, we have a speak-up policy, we have an open-door policy,” who is all the pressure on? It’s on the person to go through that open door, to pick up the phone, or to engage with any of the reporting lines. My question, Pav, is if we want people to speak up, we have to show that we’re good listeners, so what can we do to be better listeners so people feel like, “I’m not scared to approach someone that might be higher on the organizational chart, that I’m not fearful about speaking up, that there’s a space here that I feel safe to do it”? So, what are some of the listening qualities we can help people with?
Pav Gill: A lot of times, there’s hesitancy because of the exposure, and that’s exposure of identity. So, yes, you can have the open door, but you don’t want to walk through it because people can see who you are, including the person that’s meant to be listening to you. Listening is one thing, but how are you then going to act on it? That’s, I think, a very different step altogether. Once we receive a case or a complaint—not everything’s whistleblowing—the tendency tends to be, from a human standpoint, I think it’s to ask the question, “Who is this person, and why are they reporting this?” So, instantly, the knee-jerk response is to go into a motive of reporter, which I think it’s not very useful. The first question you really should ask is, “I’ve received this report. Assuming it’s true, if there’s objective evidence to back it up at some point, if I don’t act, would that be a material adverse impact on my company?” If so, then I’d better act on it. Later on, I can go find out who this person is, if I really need to, or the motive, or whatever. But I don’t think it should be the very first question, and I think that’s the problem with companies—the whistleblower becomes the topic, not the subject of the whistleblowing case. So, that would be a really good way to start listening and acting on the content and not the person. I like to say, just because you don’t like the person that lit the match doesn’t mean you ignore the fire.
The Importance of Being Informed by Reports
Amanda Raad: I love that you brought that up, because I do think there is an instinct sometimes to go almost into defense mode instead of just taking the allegation or the facts as what they are. If you have information on who the reporter is, then I think there is that instinct sometimes where you see companies try to assess the credibility of the reporter in order to assess the credibility of the allegation. I think that is a huge, huge mistake. It’s wasted time. It’s wasted energy. And in fact, it’s harmful. Whereas, I often try to say that any information is information that is good to test. Even if it ultimately ends up that it was not accurate, it’s a chance to take a look at what’s going on, and it’s information that you’re going to learn more about your business, what’s working and what isn’t working. I do think time, energy, and money gets wasted sometimes on those early stages of trying to really drill down into whether there’s an issue that requires further follow-up or not. So, I’m really glad you pointed that out.
Pav Gill: Yes, just because something’s not an issue today, that doesn’t mean that that won’t be the missing piece of a jigsaw down the line. I think it’s already very difficult to get honest feedback from your employees as to what’s happening, how they feel, so any feedback should be welcomed, and it’s just a matter of categorizing it in an intelligent way. Once you start taking a very dismissive approach—or worse, you’re putting the burden of proving something onto the person raising that issue—then, I think, you’ve completely lost the strategy. At the end of the day, whistleblowers should not be the ones who have to prove as well what the wrongdoing is—they’re just there saying, “This is the little info I have. It doesn’t make sense. It smells bad. Can someone else go now figure it out?” So, to then turn around and punish them—and some regimes actually do that, the laws that exist actually say, “If you raise something as a whistleblower and it doesn’t turn out to be correct, you can be sued,” whether that’s through defamation or it’s through all kinds of other things—that puts the fear. Why is the burden on the person reporting to have to also now be investigator and case manager? 99% of employees are not hired for those functions anyway. So, I think there’s a lot of these things to think about.
Mitigating ‘Open Secrets’
Richard Bistrong: Pav, I want to return to the culture of silence theme. I often call that “open secrets,” the things that are going on in an organization that everybody seems to know about but no one’s talking about. And as Amanda said, companies are spending time on campaigns and resources to try to get people to speak up. So, if you had to sit with an organization where they have this culture of silence, open secrets are everywhere, can you just give us one or two steps as to where they might even start to shift that narrative from silence and secrets to a feeling-safe environment?
Pav Gill: I would start with telling companies and their executives to get off the pedestal, as rude as that sounds—just come down to the ground. Hang out with the people—try to really talk to them. Oftentimes, this is a social thing. For example, even if you’re a junior person trying to get your message across to a senior person, you don’t need to do it in a formal way. You could always be strategic. You could go for lunch. You could go for coffee. You’re trying to understand what that person’s job is and then you sneak in your concern about a compliance thing, or you’re trying to give them the heads up. I think the problem with companies in general, especially the bigger they get, they tend to just disconnect from the “ground troops,” as I call them. And you don’t just see this in companies—you see this, as everybody here probably agrees, with governments as well. We always say, “The leaders are so disconnected from the man in the street.” I think that exactly translates into the company setting, which is why I said if you’re a board member, if you’re a senior leader and someone’s positioning silence as stability to you, I think you should really try to dig down into it. You’re not second guessing them—you’re actually just indulging in the environment of the company you’re in, so to speak. Not everything’s about snooping around or trying to find fault, but it’s really, from an operational standpoint, being in the field with what’s happening on the ground.
Richard Bistrong: To pivot on that, I had a client that said, “Compliance leaders are always talking about getting a seat at the table with their business peers.” And he said, “We need to shift that narrative. We need to get a seat in the car. We need to ride with our sales force,” and that’s such a great point. Come to the ground and listen to what’s going on.
Pav Gill: Yes, even in the whistleblowing sense. One of the exercises I do tell people to conduct, for example, is ask the case managers, “How do you determine what’s serious and what’s material?” In the UK, for example, the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which treats whistleblowing as an employment dispute, if anyone within the company has a reasonable belief that the case is not good enough, that’s their defense—that’s why they didn’t take it forward or whatever. But then if you’re a board member, then go figure out what determines reasonable belief, what determines the thresholds of what’s serious, what’s material, because in massive frauds, oftentimes, the very people that are determining those things are part of the problem.
The Personal Impact
Amanda Raad: Great tips. I want to shift back to where we began, which is I really can’t imagine the physical and emotional toll that this all had to have taken on you personally. You’re clearly very resilient. You’re doing amazing things as an entrepreneurial person now in business. How did you manage on a human level through all of this, to take care of you?
Pav Gill: People call it a “courageous act” and all that. Yes, in hindsight, it is, but when I was in that situation, I didn’t think of myself in that way. I was just wondering, “Why is this happening?” The Sky documentary that I was in, I opened with the lines of Macbeth saying, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” because, oftentimes, in fraudulent companies, whatever is fair is deemed as foul, and whatever is foul is deemed as fair—everything’s upside down. So, I think in those situations for many people, whether you’re in control functions or you’re a whistleblower, whoever, you’re trying to figure out why everything is not making any sense because of that. For me, it was a very logical approach, and then, it became very isolated, “I’m trying to now protect myself, at the same time not being exposed to whatever weird stuff is happening.” Also, as a lawyer, you can’t even tell your peers what’s going on because of legal privilege and all these other things, the sensitivity of the investigation. So, I just kind of lived every day as it was.
I didn’t understand the mental toll this would have many years down the road. It actually snapped at some point with panic attacks, anxiety, and all these things—and I think that was when, for the first time, several years after Wirecard crashed, I was forced to confront this whole thing of mental health. As someone who used to go to a gym, if a person came to me and said, “I’ve got anxiety,” I’d be like, “Okay, go to a gym,” or “What do you want me to do, smack the anxiety out of you?” I had that pseudo-alpha mindset. But then, when it happens to you, that’s when you’re forced to realize that your brain, your mind is actually a muscle in a way, and if you don’t control it, it can cage your entire being. If you can’t enjoy yourself, if you become a prisoner within your own frame, then I think that’s where you really need to start taking mental health seriously, and that’s why I went into things like breathwork. I do it religiously still every day—it literally cured my situation. I don’t really talk much about this, because my focus tends to be on telling companies to just be wiser and not create more Wirecards or people like me. So, that’s really my philosophy as of today—how you’re navigating it, what you’re learning from it, and what then you can do to share your experience or inspiration to soldier through that process.
Final Thoughts and Take-Aways
Nitish Upadhyaya: Absolutely amazing telling of your story and thank you for being so open with everything—the process you went through and the intensely human experience that you described, but also the toll that it took. I don’t know how many people will really realize how difficult it can be to be in that sort of situation. And maybe this helps reframe, “It’s another whistleblower. It’s another speak-up report I’ve got to deal with,” to “I really want to help this company. I care. I’m doing this because this is something people need to know.” So, that’s my big takeaway. Richard, I’ll come to you first, have you got a key takeaway for us?
Richard Bistrong: I think we all appreciate your heartfelt transparency as to what this meant personally to you and your family. It’s not fair to ask for a quick takeaway because there are so many to unpack here, but I think the whole concept of helping people to feel heard is incredibly strong, and messaging that having a whistleblowing hotline does not solve that problem. I think that’s so powerful, Pav. Thank you.
Nitish Upadhyaya: And what about you, Amanda?
Amanda Raad: The power of the mind for sure. You opened and closed with that, and it’s something I’m incredibly fascinated by. Getting in the field and the importance of being in the field, and as leaders, not sitting in offices and thinking you understand everything. Then, also, all information is good information, and just the reminder, which I still see, of we shouldn’t be assessing the credibility of any information based on who is sharing it—I think it’s a very dangerous trap and a really important reminder.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Pav, any final advice for our listeners?
Pav Gill: At the end of the day, just be true to yourself. We’re all human beings. Do what matters most to you and what you want to be remembered for. This may not be a financial reward, a degree, or qualification, but I think that the small things we do with no tangible rewards are the ones we tend to sit and be most proud of and the ones we would potentially, in the future, tell our grandkids or kids.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Where can listeners find out more about you and your work?
Pav Gill: My only social media is LinkedIn—that’s where I am most active. That’s where I try to talk about these things every now and then, so if you want to connect with me there, I’m always very responsive to the extent practical.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, your story, just being candid, and I’m excited for our next rooftop drink when you resume your role as a rapper and come out with a top number one hit in years to come.
Pav Gill: Alright. Thanks, everyone, for having me.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Thank you all for tuning in to the latest episode in our Culture & Compliance Chronicles series. For more information about our series and any of the ideas discussed today, take a look at the links in our show notes. You can also subscribe to the series wherever you regularly listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Amanda, Richard and I will be back very soon for our next chapter. If you have topics you’d like us to cover or novel perspectives you want everyone else to hear about, get in touch. Thanks again for listening. Have a wonderful day and stay curious.