The Stuck Elevator

The hotel elevator was stuck, and it was almost time for the pregame meal.

Trapped inside was a guard from Wilmington, N.C., who played a pivotal role on his college team.

Surely his coach would understand, right?

But North Carolina Coach Dean Smith had little sympathy for Michael Jordan’s lateness and still benched him for the beginning of that night’s game at Madison Square Garden.

“No one was more of a stickler (for being on time) than Dean Smith,” author John Feinstein writes in his book The Back Roads to March. “Late was late.”

One of the hardest dilemmas we as leaders face is whether to discipline team members for rule infractions when the violator has a pretty legitimate excuse.

We want to hold our teams accountable, but we also want to empathize. We want to set a strict standard, but we’d like to show a little compassion.

It can be a very tight rope to walk.

The problem is that too often, we fail to make our policies abundantly clear from the onset. We’ll say something like “Always be on time” and expect this to be followed or else, not considering any ambiguity.

Then, when a scenario such as the one with Smith and Jordan occurs in which no one's really at fault, we grow annoyed at the team member, while he/she thinks it’s ridiculous we aren’t more sympathetic to their bad fortune.

Buy in from those we lead can dissolve incredibly quickly in the face of punishment that could be perceived as unjust.

There isn’t one hard rule that’s relevant for the Smith-Jordan case — leaders must decide on their own whether to have a zero-tolerance policy for infractions or whether certain situations allow for leniency.

But it’s pivotal to be transparent with our teams from the very beginning about our standards and expectations.

Are rules always rules or can exceptions ever be made?

If we’re waiting until the elevator is stuck to consider this question, then we as leaders are really the ones running late.