FAILED chief executives do it, shamed civil servants do it, even dribbling football stars do it . . . when you mess up big-time or your performance slumps, you feather your exit with a big reward.

The headlines are full of the names of individuals who, far from hiding their heads in shame for the mayhem they’ve created, are caught walking away with huge golden handshakes.

It could be that their organisations are just glad to slip them a few bob to become seriously scarce, but it seems totally topsy-turvy when performance-related rewards — including pay and promotion — appear to favour the non-achievers.

The injustice is compounded by the fact that those so lucratively dispensed with simply grab their ‘rewards’, turn round and start all over again, using the experience as an enhancement of their CV.

Remember the disgraced Health trust chief given a £75,000 payoff after a superbug epidemic rampaged through her local hospital? Not only did she demand a larger settlement, but then she and her partner, who also resigned with a £170,000 payout from the National Health Service after leadership failures in his department, set up a consultancy advising NHS doctors and administrators.

Sadly, it appears to be a culturally entrenched thing. You can sack the supermarket shelf-stacker for liberating a couple of cans of peas, but the chief executive of a rock-solid building society-cum-multi-million-pound-bank, who presided over the loss of millions of shareholders’ hard-earned cash, walks away with a £760,000 pay-off — and that’s modest by current standards.

OK, so he may not have actually stolen the bank’s equivalent of a can of peas, but he was in a position of trust and therefore just as responsible for goods going out the back door.

Curiously, the ‘failure’ which inspired far more venom from the popular press was the £2.5m pocketed by the departing England soccer manager who had failed to spur his team sufficiently to qualify for even greater international humiliation on the pitch.

I suppose that a lot depends on expectation and accountability.
If you’re locked into a ring-fenced automatic bonus benefit system, the fact that the bonuses aren’t actually ‘earned’ in the normal sense of the word means that you won’t expect to carry any cans when, say, your employer, a government department, actually loses CDs carrying the private data of thousands of citizens.

Indeed, you’ll have no problem sharing out the £19m coming your way. And if you get your fix from a heady culture of adrenalin-pumping risk-taking on money mar-kets fuelled by greed and destabil-ised by stupidity, you’ll depend on picking up huge kickbacks, oblivious to the grief experienced by those whose businesses are threatened with run-down or closure as a result of the original recklessness.

Don’t just take my word for it; the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, no less, sounded off very prominently against the culture of rewarding failure in the City by giving bonuses to executives who have done little to deserve them, and challenged boards to justify why City bankers received an estimated £7 billion in bonuses last year.
Obviously, in the current economic downturn, it’s the world of finance that has come in for perhaps more than its fair share of public anger. There is undoubtedly a jealous streak in all of us which can’t abide others getting away with more than ourselves.

No surprise, then, that with all the kitchen protocol of pots and kettles, MPs lashed out at the bosses of Railtrack for sharing more than £1.4m in bonuses despite the public being subjected to a series of station closures and over-running repair programmes.

Given the reluctance of Honor-able Members to open their own books to public scrutiny, it wasn’t surprising that their cries of ‘stinking fish’ fell on deaf senior executive ears as they banked hundreds of thousands of pounds apiece, courtesy of taxpayers and long-suffering travellers by the trainful.

Then there’s the philosophy behind the winners and losers in the entertainment world. No real incentive any longer, I’m afraid, actually to work your way doggedly through the traditionally hard route to the bright lights. These days, if you behave outrageously and show yourself to be intellectually just short of a turkey sending Christmas cards, you will achieve notoriety by the bucketful and cash by the trough.

Indeed, when displacement activity and artifice rate more highly than morality, sobriety and honesty, perhaps it is fitting that sham and making an impact should receive more plaudits than boring old feet-on-the-ground graft.

At least there is some light in the darkness. First, there was the low-energy bulb gesture by the chairman of British Airways who gracefully declined his £70,000 bonus following the chaos of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 — well, he couldn’t really have accepted it, could he? — even though his airline wasn’t strictly the main culprit in the debacle.

Second, there’s the bright torch spectacle of the upcoming Olympic Games, in which sheer personal achievement will be championed not with financial reward, nor as a result of a lucky click on a stock exchange keyboard mouse, nor even the happenstance of a studio-couch encounter. I’m talking determination and pain traded for exhilaration and personal glory.

But let’s not get too carried away. Didn’t I hear that despite the costs of the 2012 London event spiralling way over budget, the bonuses paid to the senior executives of the Olympic Delivery Authority topped £1.7m last year, including a £35,000 bonus for its communications director?

With a salary of £186,000, he earns the same as the Prime Minister. I’m sure he thinks he’s worth it!