Some news is hard to read.
Over the past week, two of India’s most respected IT firms have been in the headlines for reasons none of us wants to associate with the industry we grew up in. Tata Consultancy Services is facing a serious investigation in Nashik, with multiple police complaints, arrests, and a formal inquiry ordered by the Tata Sons Chairman himself. Infosys is responding to allegations surfacing on social media about its Pune operations. Both have shaken the industry.
Having spent three decades in this space, I have no doubt the veterans at both firms, known for their integrity, will follow due process and address whatever is found. That is not what I want to write about today.
I want to write to the young founders and early-stage CEOs who read my posts.
Because the lessons here are not really about large firms with 100,000 employees. They are about what happens in your firm of twenty, fifty, or two hundred people, long before any headline is possible.
The instinct that quietly hurts young firms
When I started out almost three decades ago, I used to take every piece of misconduct in my firm personally. Thankfully, there were not many. But when something did happen, I felt it reflected on me as the founder. It took years, and guidance from my mentors, to understand that this view, while well-meaning, was not quite right.
No founder can build a perfect firm. We must aspire to one and keep working towards it. What matters far more is whether your people have a safe, trusted way to raise concerns, and whether you act on them the moment they come in. That single question, asked honestly, will tell you more about your culture than any town hall ever will.
In The Founder Catalyst, I devote an entire chapter to the idea that trust is the quiet currency of a business. It does not appear on any balance sheet, but it underwrites everything else. It is earned slowly, through small repeated acts of doing the right thing, and it can be damaged quickly, sometimes by a single moment of looking the other way. I wrote about a travel agent I had used for years, who processed a refund I was due, but only after I spotted the error myself. The money came back, but a small dent remained in my confidence. That is how trust works. It notices the moments when you could have acted and did not.
Why young firms get this wrong
In the early years, founders rarely have the experience or the tools to handle harassment complaints well. The instinct is often to downplay, to manage, to protect the team you worked so hard to build. That instinct, however understandable, is exactly how small problems become large ones.
There is also a second trap. In a small firm, the accused is often someone the founder personally recruited, worked alongside in the trenches, and considers a friend. Objectivity becomes genuinely hard. This is precisely why the complaint process cannot rest on the founder’s judgement alone. It needs to sit with people who can act without that emotional entanglement, follow a defined process, and report findings honestly.
I learnt a related lesson early in my publishing family’s business, which I write about in a chapter on guiding people through change. When I introduced new software into my father’s firm, the resistance came not from the technology but from people’s fear of the unfamiliar. I eventually realised that the breakthrough came through an unexpected internal champion, the senior-most manager, whose endorsement made the change acceptable to everyone else. The same principle applies here. A workplace safety policy on paper changes nothing. A respected senior person inside the firm, visibly committed to taking complaints seriously, changes everything.
The founder sets the ceiling
There is something I often remind myself. A team will not take safety, fairness, or ethics more seriously than the founder visibly does. If the founder rolls their eyes at compliance training, so will everyone else. If the founder treats an uncomfortable complaint as an inconvenience to be managed, the team learns that such complaints are inconvenient to raise.
The same applies to safety. A founder who signals, through action, that no revenue target and no star performer is more important than the dignity of the team builds a firm that people stay in and recommend. A founder who signals the opposite, often without realising it, builds something more fragile than they know.
What to do before you need to
The good news is that today, unlike when I started, there are serious professionals who help firms build the right systems. My friend Viji Hari has spent years doing this work, and her book Behind Closed Cubicles is one I often recommend to founders. Industry bodies and local business chambers also run regular workplace conduct and anti-harassment programs for founders and their teams. Please attend them. Send your HR lead. Send yourself.
A few practical steps any founder can take this quarter:
I am not the person to give you a checklist for building these systems. That work belongs to specialists who spend their careers on it, and the rules vary by country, by industry, and by the size of your firm. What I can offer is a few questions worth asking yourself this quarter, the same questions I have seen good founders ask when I mentor them.
Does every person in your firm know, without hesitation, whom they would go to if something happened?
Is that person someone with enough independence to act, or someone who reports to the alleged offender?
When was the last time you, as the founder, personally sat in a workplace conduct training session rather than sending a calendar decline?
If a complaint landed on your desk tomorrow, do you have a clear process to follow, or would you be figuring it out under pressure?
None of these questions has a universal answer. But sitting with them honestly and then finding people who do have expertise in your context is itself the first step. Speak to a lawyer who specialises in employment matters in your country. Speak to HR professionals who have built these systems in firms larger than yours. Speak to founders who have quietly handled difficult situations well; they exist, and most are willing to share if you ask privately.
The long view
When I look at firms that have lasted across generations, and I have studied many of them, including my own family’s seventy-year-old publishing business, one thing stands out. They treated the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping faith with their people as seriously as the glamorous work of winning new customers. They paid salaries on time, kept a clean record with vendors and governments, and when something went wrong, they fixed it without being asked twice.
The firms that will earn the trust of the next generation of employees, customers, and investors are the ones that take workplace safety as seriously as product quality. In a world where every incident travels on social media within minutes, there is no quiet way to handle these things later. Only an honest way to prevent them now.
Do not wait for a problem to force the learning.
What are you doing this quarter to make sure someone in your firm can speak up without fear?
