When Leadership Fails to Protect What Matters
By Sophie Makonnen
This reflection looks at situations where leadership choices made in complexity leave questions about fairness, values, and where we each stand when such situations arise. It comes from years of watching how teams respond when leaders face pressure and take decisions that are unpopular or misunderstood. While daily routines resume, these moments quietly reshape how we see the workplace and the people within it.
Many of us have encountered moments when organizational values and external pressures conflict. Sometimes as leaders, sometimes as team members and sometimes as a witness.
A leader makes a decision that seems misaligned with the organization's stated values, or a colleague raises a concern without support. A manager may act harshly to protect the organization, while a staff member refuses to compromise on principle. In each case, the people involved believe they're doing what's necessary. Actions that appear as betrayal to some are, to others, tough choices shaped by circumstance. These moments reveal how organizational pressures can make the right action feel impossible, and how the cost of that impossibility falls unevenly.
What makes these moments particularly difficult is that leaders are not only deciding under pressure, but they are also doing so under scrutiny, where perception and judgment shape how the decision is received.
Choosing the Least-Worst Option
It’s easy to judge from the outside, where the lines seem clear: what should have been done, what integrity required, what leadership demanded. Judgment flies in whispers or travels the corridors unsaid. While speculation swirls, the person responsible must still decide, knowing any choice will draw disagreement.
There are moments when leadership is not about choosing the best option but the least damaging one. The decision that protects something essential, even if it hurts in other ways. The one that may preserve the organization but leave someone disappointed, or that maintains stability while quietly compromising a value you hold. I remember saying to colleagues, “this is the least-worst decision” or asking, “which consequences are we willing to carry?” Decisions stop being purely logical and become negotiations between imperfect options.
For those on the outside, these decisions can look like betrayal or weakness. For those inside, the choice can feel narrowed to damage control. Both perceptions often hold part of the truth.
Accountability After the Choice
It is often the silence that follows that hurts the most. Institutions move forward, processes resume, and the individuals involved are left to make sense of what just happened. There may be no formal acknowledgment, or sometimes there is a meeting, a retreat, or an effort to address what occurred. But without the groundwork of trust, these gestures can feel procedural rather than genuine. In such cases, the gap between what an organization claims to stand for and how it behaves under pressure can leave one puzzled and disappointed.
Institutions, like people, operate within constraints, making choices that reflect priorities, pressures, and imperfect information. Recognizing this does not mean excusing harm; it only acknowledges that leadership decisions often unfold in shades of grey, not black and white.
What I've Learned From Hard Choices
What I know now is that courage and integrity often depend on conditions. There have been times when taking a visible stand would have meant serious risk, not just to me, but to others. In those moments, I had to recognize the limits, be honest about what I could and couldn't do, and focus on what happened next. Choosing an uncomfortable path didn't always mean I agreed with it. But I still had agency in how I responded and what I did going forward.
The goal was not forgiveness but clarity. I had to learn to hold more than one truth at once: to understand why I acted as I did and still carry disappointment about the outcome. That's not a contradiction. That's what leadership felt like.
I found that curiosity helped more than certainty in those moments. Instead of asking "Who was right?" I asked "What did this reveal?" and "What could have been handled differently?" Sometimes the answer pointed directly back at me. Could I have done something earlier to avoid this? Was my guidance clear, or did someone operate without enough feedback until their choices became a problem? These were uncomfortable questions, but, I think, they kept me honest with myself.
Reframing helped me move from judgment, of myself and others, to understanding.
Integrity isn't about never faltering. It's about how we engage when things get difficult, and whether we can return to our values consistently, even when the environment doesn't make that easy.
How it ends ?
These moments don't always resolve neatly. The organization moves on, but something has shifted. Some watch and learn. Trust is often the main collateral damage.
There is repairing to do. It will take longer to rebuild that trust than the time it took to damage it. The first step is taking the time and willingness to accept the role one played. One may not have had a choice in the course of action, but there is always choice in how one addresses it.
I will leave you with the following saying from Oscar Wilde : “The truth is rarely pure and never simple"
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