McKinsey Distances Itself From Partner's Glass Cliff Comments

McKinsey has publicly disowned comments by a senior partner who mocked the concept of the "glass cliff" on LinkedIn, calling the exchange "inconsistent with our views and the standards we expect."

The comments came from Chris Bradley, a senior partner and director of the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm's research arm. They appeared under a LinkedIn post promoting Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling, a book published in September by Julia Carreon, a former Citigroup and Wells Fargo executive.

"The comments were made in a personal capacity and have since been deleted," a McKinsey spokesperson said in a statement. "We stand by our research and leadership on these topics. We are disappointed by these comments and do not endorse them." Bradley did not respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg first reported the exchange.

What did the McKinsey partner actually say?

Bradley questioned whether the glass cliff — the academic term for the tendency of women to be appointed to leadership during a company's rough patch — exists at all.

"We once had a problem of female advancement to CEO, but now we have a new problem that the jobs they get are too hard? Is this actually a thing?" he wrote. He went on to call the concept a convenient excuse to "always be a victim in the rain."

When Carreon suggested he research the topic, Bradley replied: "I am not going to start researching glass cliffs as I don't think it ranks in the top 1000 problems of the world."

Carreon tells Fast Company she initially assumed the comments were a joke. "I wasn't understanding that he didn't know that the glass cliff was a thing," she says. "It finally hit me in real time that he thought we made it up for our book."

Why does this embarrass McKinsey?

The irony is structural. Bradley directs the McKinsey Global Institute, which has published research on gender inequality across leadership roles. McKinsey itself produces the annual Women in the Workplace report in partnership with Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In. A 2020 McKinsey report on women in healthcare even cites the term glass cliff directly, in a discussion of challenges facing women of color.

"This is very squarely a black eye over the fact that their senior partners do not live their values," Carreon says.

Is there evidence for the glass cliff?

Yes, though the literature is contested. Multiple peer-reviewed papers, including work by Michelle Ryan — one of the researchers who coined the term — and Utah State University sociology professor Christy Glass, conclude that women are more likely to be installed in leadership when companies face headwinds. Some studies contradict those findings.

Glass's research adds two nuances: women appointed to leadership get shorter timelines to turn things around, and they shoulder more blame even when a company's problems predate their arrival.

Ryan's 2007 paper found that men minimizing or dismissing the glass cliff is itself a documented pattern — Bradley's reaction is not unusual.

"The unspoken reality of the research on barriers to leadership for women is that men have not had to prove themselves to the same degree that women leaders have," Glass says. "I think there's something deeply threatening [about] anything that suggests that you've had it easier than some other people."

What does the incident say about accountability?

Glass notes that Bradley made the remarks on a professional social platform, in full view of his employer and women who might report to him.

"Good leadership means evaluating complex evidence, engaging diverse stakeholders, and truly seeking to understand how your organization works and what the landscape looks like—not just for you, but for everybody," she says. "Here's a person who is this far into a highly visible, high-status leadership role [and] career, and he has never had to face accountability for this kind of behavior before."

The stakes are visible at the top of corporate America. As of this year, about 11% of CEOs at the 500 largest U.S. companies by revenue are women — a record high, but still a stark minority. Women at that level, Glass argues, get less space to make mistakes.

For Carreon, the exchange echoed her years on Wall Street. She is currently pursuing a sexual harassment lawsuit against Citigroup, her former employer, which has said the claim has "no merit."

"I feel like women are constantly having to relitigate our value," she says. "And it's enough already."

The episode leaves McKinsey managing the gap between its published research and the private views of the people who run it — a gap that played out, this time, in public.