Who Pays If We Leaders Are Wrong?

The question I ask after hard calls, before I pretend I’m fine

I remember a Friday night where nothing was on fire and I still couldn’t shut my brain off. No incident channel. No angry customer thread. Just the quiet after a decision I’d approved that afternoon: a reorg that cleaned up an org chart, reduced confusion, and made the roadmap look tidy. It also moved people onto work they didn’t want, pulled teams away from a problem they’d poured themselves into, and stretched managers past what they’d been doing. The decision was defensible. It also had weight.

Ethics in leadership usually shows up like that. It rarely arrives as a big red button with a clear label. It’s the slow accumulation of choices that sound rational in the meeting and feel personal when you’re alone. Over time you learn that “can I sleep at night?” has less to do with whether you can explain yourself and more to do with whether you’d accept the same outcome if you were on the receiving end, with the information and power that person actually had.

Earlier in my career I treated ethics as a set of guardrails: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t break the law. That keeps you out of obvious trouble. The harder part sits in the gray zones, where incentives are loud, timelines are tight, and every option has a cost. That’s where leaders quietly teach their teams what counts as acceptable collateral.