Boards Audit the Numbers. Few Audit What People Are Allowed to Be.

On October 5, 2026, Alan Murray shared a revealing story in The Wall Street Journal. UPS CEO Carol Tomé had served on the company’s board since 2003. Yet when she took the top job in 2020, she found a company very different from the one directors had been shown. “Management was telling us what they wanted us to hear,” she told him.

Inside the buildings, the picture changed. Early in the pandemic, essential workers were told to wash their hands in facilities where sinks were hanging off the walls. Appearance rules restricted hairstyles, facial hair and tattoos, the tattoo policy being stricter, she said, than the U.S. Army’s. And the annual culture survey showed that only 51 percent of employees would recommend UPS as a place to work. Tomé has since raised those scores. Murray’s conclusion is that directors spend hours on financial audits and very little time auditing people, a clear miss when most CEOs call people their most important asset.

He’s right. What the story leaves open is why the miss happens and what a people audit should actually measure.

The tour is not the building

Boards rarely lack information because no one has it. The people on the loading docks knew about the sinks. The employees covering their tattoos knew the policy. The survey data existed. The information was inside the building all along. What was missing was a path that carried it to the boardroom without being curated along the way.

Every layer between the front line and the board softens the truth a little. A slide smooths it. A site visit stages it. By the time it reaches directors, it has been edited into what management believes the board wants to see. No one in that chain has to be dishonest for the picture to drift. I’ve written about how a well-designed system can create the illusion of progress. A curated board tour is that illusion in its purest form.

Audit what people are allowed to be

A financial audit asks whether the numbers are true. A people audit should ask whether people can be who they are and do their best work. For years, I’ve measured that with five questions: Who do you let in? How do you see them? What do you allow them to be? What do you let them do? How do you let them do it?

Tomé’s discoveries map almost perfectly onto the third question. Rules about hair, beards and tattoos told people across the company, in effect, to edit themselves before they clocked in. None of those rules made packages move faster. They signaled that fitting the mold mattered more than the person inside it.

Consistency in how a company serves customers is a real strength, and UPS’s reliability is built on it. But standardizing the work is different from standardizing the people who do it. The first creates dependable service. The second quietly drains the energy and judgment that dependable service relies on.

The 51 percent figure shows where that drain ends up. Likelihood to recommend may sound like a soft metric, but it behaves like an early warning. It signals future turnover, safety lapses and service problems the way an audit finding signals financial risk. When half your workforce wouldn’t recommend you, customers will feel it long before it appears in the quarterly results.

What directors can do now

Walk the buildings unannounced. Talk with people without their managers present. Ask what they think the board doesn’t know.

Ask for people data with the same rigor as the financials. Likelihood to recommend by site and role, turnover by tenure, the policies that generate the most complaints. Then ask what is being done about the worst numbers, and by when.

Hear from the newest employees. They haven’t adapted yet, so they’ll tell you what long-tenured people stopped noticing years ago.

Bring one frontline voice into the boardroom each quarter. Unscripted, and without a rehearsal.

Conviction at the top

None of this works without conviction from the CEO and the directors. Asking for the unvarnished picture means accepting that some of it will be uncomfortable, and then acting on it before you know exactly how the fix will turn out. Tomé saw what was wrong once she was inside, and she acted. Directors don’t have to wait for one of their own to become CEO to see the same things.

Boards that reward only good news end up getting only good news. I explored that pattern in Success Theater Is a Culture, Not a Surprise. The antidote is directors who make it safe, and expected, to bring them the truth.

The best boards ask whether the numbers are right. The wisest also ask whether the people behind those numbers can be themselves. The numbers tell a board what happened. The people tell it what is about to happen.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.