Why Do We Punish Everyone When One Person Faces No Consequences?
Consequences are avoided. Rules keep multiplying. And high performers pay the price.In my latest monthly column for the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, I explore why organizations often punish everyone when accountability is missing for one, and what real leadership looks like when performance truly matters.
My son does not have it easy. His older sister sweeps up the awards as the best student every year. We do not expect the same from him, but we also do not accept poor grades. Recently, it happened again: an insufficient mark, followed by an email from his teacher about repeated disruption in class.
We introduced what we call the “Ajax rule,” inspired by Ajax Amsterdam, where young footballers are only allowed to play if their school performance is solid. We communicated clear consequences. If the behavior continued, he would be removed from the school team and the planned football trip to London would be cancelled. The key point was this: we did not introduce new rules for all children. We applied consequences only to him. Since then, things have improved.
This exact principle is missing in many organizations. In my workshops, I often hear: “We have no consequences for low performers.” Instead, something else happens. When one employee fails to deliver, new rules are introduced for everyone. More approvals. More meetings. More control. High performers suffer, while the original cause remains untouched.
The data is clear. Managers spend almost an entire day per week dealing with low performers. Studies show that in two thirds of teams, morale declines as a result. Nearly half report that managers increase the burden on high performers instead. The best people leave. The damage includes lost productivity and lost innovation, costs that companies rarely quantify.
Even more problematic, the absence of consequences leads to more control. Leaders avoid difficult conversations and compensate by adding processes and rules. New travel policies because one person went too far. Additional approval steps because someone made a mistake. Everyone is punished because consequences were avoided for one individual.
Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, puts it bluntly: “If you make your organization idiot-proof, only idiots will want to work there.” Netflix focuses on what it calls talent density. Small teams of exceptional performers instead of large teams of average ones. The mechanism is the so-called keeper test. Leaders regularly ask themselves a radical question: Would you fight to keep this person if they resigned tomorrow? If the answer is no, it is time for a conversation.
Gary Hamel shows in Humanocracy that 70 percent of jobs in the American economy require little originality. Not because people lack ability, but because bureaucracy suffocates creativity. Only one in five employees feels that their opinion truly matters. Bureaucracy is not inevitable. Companies like Morning Star, Nucor, and Haier prove that there is another way. They rely on flat structures and individual responsibility, with strong results.
In Germany, the situation is more complex. Employment protection laws, works councils, and legal constraints add layers of difficulty. Precisely for that reason, works councils and HR must understand this dynamic. When high performers leave, the entire workforce loses. Organizations that fail to retain their best people eventually disappear.
The solution begins with honesty. Which rules exist only because you are avoiding difficult conversations? What would happen if you removed them? How many high performers would you free from unnecessary constraints?
Leadership does not mean making life harder for everyone because one person is not performing. Leadership means creating conditions in which the team can deliver its best work. That framework must not be too tight. It needs room for innovation, trust in people’s capabilities, and clarity that performance matters. And it requires courage: the courage to have difficult conversations, to enforce consequences, and to stop punishing the strongest for the weaknesses of a few.
From Nothing Comes Nothing
