Every manager, at some point, encounters an employee who breaks a rule, misses a deadline, or does something that triggers an accusing, instinctive response: ‘You’ve just violated our rules!’ To explain this well, here’s a story that is deeply relevant to how we live in our society.
An out-of-school 15-year-old boy was caught stealing a pack of bread from a convenience store. He gets caught and ends up in court. The store owner and the police expected jail time.
However, they witnessed a masterclass in leadership disguised as a legal proceeding. The judge asked the boy three basic questions: ‘Why did you steal? Why didn’t you buy it? Why not ask your father or mother for help?’
The boy’s answer revealed society’s failures. He’s supporting a sick mother while his father abandoned them. They have no money and no support from similarly-impoverished relatives.
He begged on the street. But people routinely turned him away so desperation pushed him to commit the smallest crimes with the biggest consequences.
After hearing this, the judge did the unthinkable. He fined everyone in the courtroom $10 each, including himself giving $50 – for allowing a society where a young man is forced to steal to feed an ailing mother.
The collected money was given to the boy as a symbolic apology.
Whether historically accurate or not, this anecdote is often attributed to former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as a powerful illustration of how context can change our understanding of wrongdoing.
Masterclass
I find such a story as a masterclass in root cause analysis. It illustrates the importance of looking beyond the immediate cause and investigating the conditions that contributed to the behavior.
Here are the key lessons of the story:
1. Fix the root cause, not the symptom. Punishing the boy appears to be justified at first glance. However, it ignores the condition of his family’s poverty, illness, and lack of government support. In the workplace, punishing a worker for a mistake may address the immediate incident, but it does not necessarily correct the underlying process. There’s no assurance that the broken process would not happen with a different worker.
Organizations should investigate the underlying causes before deciding whether discipline is appropriate. One root cause analysis tool is by asking Five Whys. This aligns well with W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) who said: ‘A bad system will beat a good person all the time.’
2. Ensure psychological safety. Avoid a blame culture that aligns with the logic of the store owner who demanded retribution rather than understanding the context. When employees fear disproportionate punishment for honest mistakes, they may become reluctant to report errors or near-misses.
In our story, the judge acknowledged that the failure belonged to the entire community, not just the individual boy. In any organization, correcting failures is a shared responsibility of all workers and their managers who must ask:
‘Does the organization provide the right training? Were the job standards unrealistic? Were the tools or equipment faulty? Did management ignore early warnings?
3. Install a robust preventive system. Simply jailing the boy would cost the society more money while leaving his mother starving to death, perpetuating a downward cycle. Relying on punishment alone can encourage defensive compliance, where employees follow procedures mechanically to avoid blame even when those procedures produce poor results.
That’s why world-class organizations focus on pokayoke or mistake-proofing system so that workers would have difficulty making the same mistakes.
Lessons
Before judging anyone for their ‘bad’ behavior, study first the context. Weigh everything. Understand that a behavior is a symptom, not the root cause. The judge in our story did what modern managers often fail to do. He asked questions that went deeper than the mistake itself.
The question is – What system contributed to the employee’s error? It’s not about excusing bad behavior. It’s about discovering and understanding the conditions that created them. That’s how leadership begins where being judgmental ends.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) has a passage in Les Miserables (1862) that summarizes this article: ‘If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’