Crisis in Governance at BP: Examining the Broken Boardroom Culture
- Laura McCracken
- Jun 7
- 8 min read
The ousting of Albert Manifold as BP's chairman in May 2026 - after less than eight months in post - has been widely reported as a story about one man's conduct. In my view however, the issue is bigger than one person. It is a story about a board that has repeatedly failed to solve ongoing leadership culture issues over the past decade.
BP has now seen several CEOs in the last few years and cycled through multiple chairs at pace. Browne resigned under personal scandal in 2007. Hayward departed in the wake of Deepwater Horizon in 2010. Looney was dismissed in September 2023 for misleading the board about personal relationships with colleagues. Auchincloss exited abruptly in December 2025 with no clear explanation offered publicly. And now Manifold - removed unanimously by the very board that appointed him - has been shown the door, fighting back against what he calls a "false narrative" built on anonymous allegations.
BP's leadership churn is a pattern. And patterns point to wider governance and cultural issues. BP is not uniquely disfuctional. Yet it is uniquely exposed: a £70 billion company of sufficient scale and visibility that its governance failures play out in real time - in front of investors, regulators, employees, and the public.
The lessons here apply to any board that believes 'appointment quality' can substiute for 'culture development' or that firing decisively is the same thing as sound leadership. It is not. BP more than most should know that by now. This article examines the public case study and makes recommendations for how BP might avoid repeating the same mistake for the sixth time.
Who Was Albert Manifold? What Happened?
Manifold was named as BP's new chairman in July 2025 as the company grappled with underperformance and a major strategy reversal. He had spent eleven years as CEO of CRH, the Irish building materials group, where he delivered a near 5-fold increase in the company's share price through disciplined cost management, portfolio restructuring, and relentless operational focus.
He was the investors' choice. Elliott Investment Management (which holds over 5% of BP) had been pushing for exactly the kind of lean, oil-and-gas-focused turnaround that Manifold represented. He was expected to implement strict fiscal discipline and streamline BP's operations. He moved quickly. In March 2026 he announced plans for a slimmer board as part of BP's reset strategy, removing several directors including Simon Henry, who had joined only months earlier.
But crucially, this was Manifold's first chair role. He was a first-time non-executive, parachuted into one of the world's most scrutinised boardrooms, with no prior experience of the relational, facilitative demands of the chair function. He had spent eleven years at the top of a command-and-control executive structure. His tenure at CRH spanned years of international expansion, and he was regarded as a disciplined, results-focused executive. But sources familiar with the matter suggested, those same qualities may have translated poorly into the more collegial, consensus-driven environment. Reminds me of a book by Marshal Goldsmith, "What Got You Here won't Get You There".
The warning signs appeared early. At April's annual general meeting, shareholder support for Manifold's reappointment came in at only 81.8%. In UK corporate governance terms, a vote below 90% is considered a significant signal of dissatisfaction. The governance advisory group Glass Lewis had recommended investors vote against his re-election. Less than six weeks later, he was gone.
Two Versions of the Same Man
What makes the BP/ Manifold case genuinely complex - and worth digging into seriously - is that there are two credible accounts of what happened, and they are not entirely incompatible.
The investor narrative is broadly sympathetic. Manifold was the change agent BP's shareholders wanted: cutting costs, reversing the company's underperforming renewables pivot, reducing the size of an overstaffed board, and moving at pace. He brought "welcome focus and pace," as BP's own Senior Independent Director Amanda Blanc acknowledged in her statement upon his dismissal - before noting that the board was "surprised and disappointed" by what it had learned. (Note: Whether pivoting away from renewables back to traditional oil and gas was the right long-term strategic decision is a separate debate altogether, but it was certainly appreciated by the shareholders in a period of rising oil prices!)
The employee narrative is markedly different. Manifold allegedly engaged in bullying behaviour (used course language, belittled senior executives, frequently raised his voice at employees), created a culture of fear, and attempted to consolidate power within the company by limiting the authority of BP's new CEO, Meg O'Neill. One source quoted in the Financial Times said that describing Manifold as merely "shouty" would be "understating it," adding: "They thought they were hiring a tough change agent; they didn't think they were hiring a bully."
Manifold has rejected these accounts entirely, saying he "pushed hard and challenged people directly" during his tenure. He has characterised the allegations — which were made anonymously — as a "false narrative," and has since turned his public fire on what he describes as BP's culture of lavish executive overspending. The dispute will likely continue well beyond the boardroom.
For governance purposes, however, the factual dispute matters less than the structural one: how did a company with BP's resources, its governance infrastructure, and its recent history of leadership failures, end up here again?
Five Questions BP's Board Must Ask Itself
From a governance perspective, this situation raises questions that go well beyond any individual's conduct. At Blackheath Advisors, we work with boards and senior leadership teams on exactly these challenges - and the BP case is a near-perfect illustration of what happens when they are not addressed systematically.
Was Manifold properly assessed before appointment? A rigorous chair selection process - particularly for a first-time non-executive stepping out of an executive CEO role - should include structured behavioural assessment, leadership style profiling, and explicit testing of how the candidate operates in a governance rather than an executive context. The appointment followed a self-described "rigorous global search" led by Senior Independent Director Amanda Blanc. And yet nothing in the public record suggests that Manifold's conduct risks - well documented by some accounts from his CRH tenure - were identified or tested before he assumed the role.
Was there a structured onboarding and transition plan? Moving from CEO to chair is one of the most misunderstood leadership transitions in corporate life. The power base shifts entirely: from positional authority to influence, from directing to enabling, from setting the agenda to holding space for others to do so. Manifold had eleven years of CEO muscle memory to override. Several colleagues reportedly saw the level of control he exerted as more akin to that of an executive chair. Did anyone sit with him - formally, using evidence - and help him understand what that transition required? There is no evidence that they did.
Did the board have the psychological safety to raise concerns early? The AGM vote in April 2026 of 82% signalled dissatisfaction with Manifold. What was said in private between that vote and his removal in May? If NEDs felt unable to raise concerns directly with Manifold, or with each other, that is itself a culture problem. Independent directors have a duty that is personal, not collective. Courage cannot wait for consensus.
Is the board too quick to fire rather than too slow to develop? This is the harder question. Four CEOs in a decade, a chairman removed in eight months, multiple abrupt exits - at what point does the board examine its own role in the pattern? Decisive action in a genuine conduct crisis is right. Bullying should not be tolerated. But if leadership development, structured assessment, and early-stage coaching had been deployed consistently, the company might never have reached this point.
What does this say about BP's underlying culture? BP has seemingly existed in a constant state of upheaval and instability since the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in April 2010. That is sixteen years of chronic leadership instability. Culture is cumulative. Every abrupt exit, every unexplained departure, every unnamed source briefing against a departing leader adds to a psychological environment in which executives and directors learn to protect themselves rather than to build. That is reactive leadership at the organisational level - and it is measurable.
What a Collective Leadership Assessment Would Have Revealed
The Collective Leadership Assessment (CLA) is a diagnostic tool we deploy at Blackheath Advisors to give boards and leadership teams a precise, evidence-based picture of where they are - and where they want to be. It measures 31 dimensions of leadership effectiveness across two axes: Creative (how the group relates, develops, achieves, and leads with authenticity) and Reactive (how it controls, protects, and complies under pressure).
BP's profile - based on all that is publicly known - would almost certainly show elevated scores on the Controlling dimension: a reactive tendency to pursue results at the expense of people, to use aggressive tactics, and to establish worth through task accomplishment rather than relational integrity. Manifold's personal style appears to have amplified that dynamic rather than providing the stabilising, integrating leadership function that a chair role requires. It is also likely the results would show elements of Complying (particularly amongst the existing leadership team), which is also a reactive tendancy that would experience friction with and potentially reject a Controlling style of leadership.
The CLA's gap analysis - comparing current collective leadership effectiveness to desired effectiveness - would have given BP's board a structured, non-political basis for that conversation. Not "is the chair behaving badly" (a subjective, politically charged question) but "what kind of collective leadership do we need, and are we building it?" That question, asked properly and early, might have changed the trajectory entirely.
This is precisely what the Blackheath Virtuous Circle of Resilient Organisations is designed to support. The cycle: Governance → Leadership → Culture → Strategic Agility → Crisis Readiness — does not work when any element is missing.
BP has been attempting to drive strategic agility and crisis readiness without first addressing the leadership and culture conditions that make both possible. The circle is broken, and it has been for years.
Our Recommendation to BP
BP's immediate priority will be finding a permanent chair - and the temptation will be to move quickly, to project stability, to appoint someone credible and uncontroversial. That is understandable - but it is also insufficient.
Before making another appointment, BP's board should commission a structured assessment of its own collective effectiveness. Not a governance review in the traditional, process-oriented sense - but a genuine diagnostic of how this group of directors leads together: what the gaps are between current and desired culture, what reactive patterns are running beneath the surface, and what the new chair will actually be walking into.
The new chair must also receive structured, evidence-based onboarding that explicitly addresses the executive-to-non-executive transition. This is not a soft intervention. It is how you protect a £70 billion company from repeating the same mistake for the sixth time.
BP is not uniquely dysfunctional. Yet it is uniquely exposed: a company of sufficient scale and visibility that its governance failures play out in real time, in front of investors, regulators, employees, and the public. The lessons here apply to any board that believes that appointment quality can substitute for culture development, or that firing decisively is the same thing as leading well. It is not.
Hiring and firing is not a substitute for leadership and culture development. BP, more than most, should know that by now.
Blackheath Advisors works with regulated boards and leadership teams in on governance, culture, strategy, and leadership development. The Collective Leadership Assessment is one of the diagnostic tools we deploy to help organisations understand and close the gap between current and desired collective effectiveness. To discuss how we can support your board, contact us at blackheathadvisors.com.
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