Movember Reviews

• Post-COVID financial pressures have driven Movember toward a commercially oriented model, with a growing reliance on corporate hires. While intended to improve efficiency and growth, this shift has widened cultural and capability gaps internally. Not-for-profit expertise and the nuance required to deliver impact in this environment has been sidelined. • People can be left to feel like they’re replaceable, interchangeable cogs. It is sapping value and self-worth across teams. • Independent and bold thinking is rarely rewarded. Nor is intuitive, lived experience and gut feel. Dissent – however constructive or well-founded – can be often branded as annoying incompetence. • Movember is struggling with its identity. The original ethos – culture brand, community-driven – has been lost. It now swings between being a men’s health charity, a moustache movement, provocative think tank, advocacy body, and government health service. The lack of focus shows in its increasingly inconsistent voice, decision-making, and internal confidence. Original swagger has given way to corporate mimicry, and a milquetoast tone internally and in market. • Recent leadership hires bring a type of cold, consultant, commerciality that might work elsewhere, but misaligns with Movember’s DNA and what you need to do to be successful at an org like Movember. Some are reaching the same pitfalls as their predecessors – only faster – and often with more collateral damage along the way. • Tenure and institutional memory are treated as a liability. To win support to drive change you either need to be a new hire or an external consultant. Tenured staff begin to lose trust placed in them and are almost all gradually marginalised, scapegoated for Movember’s problems and squeezed out of the business. • If you’re in mid-level management, you’ll likely spend much of your time justifying your team’s existence or mediating between disconnected leadership above you and frustrated specialists below you. • Governance is problematic: the board meddles in operations, exec turnover is high, priorities are ever-changing • Efficiency is now king. The erosion of craft is especially stark, particularly with how Movember communicates. Writing, design, experience – have all been devalued. • Leadership avoids direct difficult and decisive action. Instead, it has a habit of slowly withdrawing trust and oxygen until individuals and entire teams collapse on their own. • Strategy has become performative theatre. Planning cycles result in artefacts, not momentum. You’ll see endless decks and decent chunks of data – often interpreted and prioritised to reflect current internal pressures. But there’s little in the way of coherent, actionable direction. Surface wins out over substance. Outputs win out over outcomes. High-level plans win out over operationalisation. • Major initiatives are routinely launched, abandoned and then quietly shelved, associated with failure, and never spoken of again. Pushing leadership to revisit them – in order to learn from or build off – is often met with resistance or reputational risk. Movember can feel like it is constantly starting over again. • Decision-making structures are dysfunctional and have been for many years. The expertise and experience of the people involved day-to-day is often ignored in favour of executive gut calls and the pressure coming from markets. • Organisational direction shifts weekly. Staff are left reeling – asked to adjust, pivot, adapt, and then blamed for the oscillation. The internal experience is disorienting: frequent restructures, shifting priorities and little shared clarity on direction.