A few years ago, one of the first Black Kenyan managers at a major tea producer told me a story. In the early 1970s, while he was still a trainee, he was supervising field work on a tea estate when a senior expatriate manager arrived. The manager did not walk over or say hello. He stood at a distance, shouted and harangued at him for several minutes, turned around, climbed back into his car, and drove away, all in front of workers he was supervising.

“What did he say?” I asked. He could not remember the words. But he remembered exactly how the encounter made him feel and view that manager: respect disappeared in an instant.

On a tea estate, the way managers behave determines whether they are heard, whether they are respected and, ultimately, whether management systems including human rights work in practice.

The problem with mechanistic human rights work in tea

In the Corporate human rights and certification sector, structure is favoured. Auditors, certifiers, and advisers develop compliance systems, grievance processes, toolkits, indicators, principals, certification requirements, tick boxes, technical guidance, committees (of many diverse types), social-dialogue forums and models for producers to implement. In essence the sector wants to impose an unnuanced global social structure and their specific sense of order onto human behaviour in the workplace.

These systems are then layered (sometimes forcibly) onto tea producers, their workers, and communities on the assumption that, if they do X, Y will follow. When the expected results do not materialise, another mechanism or requirement is added, or it comes with the damning label that the producer is non-compliant.

Yet after decades of audits, codes of conduct and expanding certification requirements, discrimination, harassment, intimidation, and other human rights abuses persist. Why? Because people and behaviour were left out.

A grievance process can record a complaint from a plucker or factory worker, but it cannot repair fear, disrespect, or mistrust. A toolkit cannot compensate for estate or factory managers and supervisors who shout, blame, or intimidate. Nor can either approach, on its own, create the empowerment, learning, coaching, and genuine engagement needed for sustainable change. This helps explain why formal grievance mechanisms can exist while attracting few callers.

Management culture is the real human rights system

When the same human rights failures recur across fields, factories, and worker communities despite the systems in place, management culture is often a central cause. That possibility requires a distinct set of questions:

• Do workers feel respected in the field, factory, and community?
• Are managers trained, permitted, and supported to manage?
• Can managers ask for help without being judged?
• Who are the unofficial power brokers on site?
• Why might managers, pluckers, factory workers and seasonal workers be afraid to raise concerns?
• Can supervisors receive constructive criticism?
• When behaviour breaks management systems

When behaviour breaks management systems

At T-Evolve, we have worked with producers seeking to repair decades of poor workplace culture. In those operations, a deep disconnect between senior leaders, estate managers, factory managers, and supervisors existed. Shouting, harsh criticism, ethnic objectification, and blame had become normal and used as tools of control. New managers entering that environment were culturally expected to fit in, whether they agreed with its norms or not.

The result was predictable, tension, distrust, and weak communication from the field to the factory. The ambition was no longer to become a good manager or improve the operation; it was simply to survive. Managers, afraid to approach senior colleagues, turned to experienced supervisors for guidance. Informal power structures filled the gaps, and supervisors became the real decision-makers. In practice, human rights performance was left in the hands of people who had acquired influence without the support, authority or accountability needed to use it responsibly.

At that point, no system works as intended. Worker committees stall, grievance processes lose credibility, and human rights mechanisms become exercises in form rather than substance because the relationships needed to sustain them have broken down. Yet the instinctive response—and often the expert advice—is to commission another lengthy toolkit, assess the processes again or revise the audit protocol in an attempt to regain control.

Some common reactions in the industry centre around other misguided approaches such as:

Paternalism is not protection. In some tea-growing regions, workers are still described as “children”—language rooted in a paternalistic history. Producers may speak proudly of a “cradle to grave” or “womb to tomb” approach to worker management. This model assumes that workers cannot navigate a complex world without protective and controlling, often male, management. A culture that does not respect or listen to individuals and treats them not as adults, but reinforces a dependency mentality, cannot ultimately support positive human rights outcomes, as it depends on the unicorn of the idealistic benevolent manager.

Worker committees are not a substitute for leadership. Worker committees—for example, the Rainforest Alliance Assess-and-Address Committee—can be useful. On tea estates, however, they can also shift responsibility away from management and into a community forum that may be vulnerable to manipulation. In one case we witnessed, a committee considering a harassment complaint included close friends of the alleged perpetrator. Confidentiality quickly broke down, and details of the complaint spread through the community.

People who understood where power sat secured election for them and their allies, then used the worker committee to protect their influence. That is not human rights governance; it is estate politics and undermines accountable management.

When real authority sits informally with powerful households in the estate village rather than transparently with accountable management, fear spreads through the community and workers move into survival mode.

Tea-sector culture flows from the top

Corporate culture cascades from senior leadership. If leaders model respect, discipline, accountability and demonstrate emotional intelligence, those behaviours spread too.

If leaders shout, blame and humiliate, junior managers will copy them. When poor culture undermines the authority of responsible managers, they become bystanders.

When behaviour contradicts the purpose of any management system, then the system becomes irrelevant.

Shouting is not leadership

The opening story makes the point plainly: shouting is not strength. It is often a sign that a manager has run out of better tools. It undermines trust, obscures the message, and signals weak, poor management.

Leaders who cannot communicate clearly, motivate teams, or explain why production and quality targets matter may resort to intimidation. Junior managers and supervisors then enforce instructions without understanding them—and learn to lead in the same way. It is little wonder that complex social issues remain misunderstood, ignored and carefully designed systems fail in practice.

Human rights are human, not mechanical

Human rights compliance will never succeed through toolkits alone.

Meaningful progress begins when organisations stop treating human rights in a purely mechanistic approach and start looking at it as a complex nuanced relationship—built through respect, communication and leadership that understands people, not merely processes.

So, when the next 60-point solution arrives, ask three simple questions:

• Where are the people in this?
• What kind of culture will it create?
• Does it empower people (including managers)—or reduce them to nebulous components in a system?

A solution that cannot answer those questions is unlikely to deliver change.A challenge for tea producers and buyers

People in the tea industry have a strong sense of community and a deep connection to each other and places that produce tea. There are some fantastic producers and managers operating within very difficult, political, economic, and social operating environments driving positive human rights outcomes.

However, even with tight margins, significant sums continue to flow into audits, systems, toolkits, and compliance exercises. The answer is not to abandon structure altogether. Instead, producers should be allowed to select the toolkits, committees and systems that fit their needs and operating realities, rather than adopting them as a pre-condition of market access. Every intervention should support—and never substitute for—good management. Producers should invest in the everyday capability and behaviour of estate managers, factory leaders, and supervisors.

Certification bodies and buyers should ask not only whether a process exists, but also whether workers trust it and managers have the capacity to make it work. They should also examine the assumptions behind the model of a “structured workplace society” that they promote and assess their own toolkits and systems as critically as they assess producers.

Human rights progress in tea will come when the industry places positive behaviour and culture at the centre—not when it reaches for another toolkit invented 1,000 miles away.

By Michael Pennant-Jones, Director, T-Evolve Limited