Summary: This article from Mark S. Kenny explores how leaders can give grace without lowering standards, avoiding accountability, or immediately restoring trust. It offers three distinctions and three practical questions to help leaders keep the past from unnecessarily determining the future.
In my last article, I wrote about what I call the Grace Toll: the cost teams and organizations keep paying for something that has already happened.
But there is an obvious question: what if what happened actually matters?
What if someone made a decision that hurt the team? What if a leader handled something poorly? What if a department repeatedly failed to follow through?
Are we supposed to simply give grace and move on?
No. Grace is not a free pass.
Over the past week, I’ve wrestled more with this idea. Because I naturally lean towards giving grace. But I’ve also experienced plenty of times when guardrails, boundaries, and accountability were appropriate and needed.
So how should we think about this?
Here are three distinctions I’ve come up with to help:
- Grace doesn’t eliminate accountability. It eliminates punishment beyond accountability.
We have to address the behavior: someone didn’t follow-through, a person acted inappropriately, or they didn’t meet the standard. We need to have the conversation, clarify the expectation, and establish consequences if necessary.
But once we’ve appropriately dealt with it, there is a difference between holding someone accountable and making them keep paying.
- Grace does not require you to restore trust immediately. It allows someone the opportunity to rebuild it.
Someone who has repeatedly broken commitments may need to demonstrate reliability over time.
Grace says that I won’t pretend it didn’t happen or take appropriate measures, but I also won’t decide that what happened is all this person will ever be.
- Grace doesn’t mean ignoring patterns. It means making sure we’re responding to new patterns instead of old ones.
An old story can become the lens through which everything someone does gets interpreted. They ask a question and we think “There they go again.” They disagree and we think “Typical.” They make a mistake and we think “See? I knew we couldn’t trust them.”
In this case, the past isn’t informing the future, it’s determining it.
With those distinctions in mind, here’s a simple three-question test to help us discern a situation:
- Has this been appropriately addressed?
- Is there a current pattern that requires accountability, or am I responding to an old one?
- What would I do differently right now if I weren’t thinking about this person’s past?
Grace doesn’t ask us to lower the standard. It asks us to address what needs to be addressed without letting the past run the future.
We need to hold people accountable. Set appropriate boundaries. And require trust to be rebuilt when necessary.
But somewhere along the way, we also have to give people the opportunity for tomorrow to be different from yesterday.
And someday, we’ll need someone to give us that opportunity too.
