Every Team Has Someone the Rules Don't Apply To.

Every leadership team I have worked with has one. The person who arrives late to the meeting they called, misses the deadline everyone else hit, talks over their peers, or skips the process the rest of the team follows. And nothing happens. No conversation, no consequence, no mention of it the following week. When I ask the team privately to name this person, they hand me the same initials, every time. It is that silent, unanimous agreement I pay attention to. Not the behaviour.

It is rarely about performance, though that is how it gets explained to me. The reason nothing happens is power. The person brings the revenue, owns the client relationship, founded the thing, has the ear of the chief executive, or simply knows where everything is buried. Their power has bought them an exemption from the standards everyone else lives by. The team has been told, without a word being said, that the rules are negotiable for whoever holds enough leverage.

The moment a team sees that accountability can be bought with power, every standard in the building becomes a suggestion.

And the team always sees it. The damage was never the untouchable's behaviour itself. It is the lesson everyone else takes from watching it go unanswered, that the rules depend on leverage, and that holding the line is for people without the power to avoid it. The most principled people, the ones who meet the standard without being made to, notice first. They do not complain. They recalibrate. Some quietly match the lower bar. The best of them, the ones with options, leave, and that exit gets explained as a better offer rather than what it actually was.

The hardest version, and the one I am asked about least, is when the untouchable is the founder. Then the exemption is not earned, it is structural. They did not accumulate the power, they created the thing it rests on, and no performance conversation, no peer, and often no board can reach it. Ordinary accountability is simply not on the table, and pretending it is only adds dishonesty to the problem. But the cost does not waive itself because the person started the company. The team still watches, still recalibrates, still learns that the standard bends for whoever the organization believes it cannot do without. The one person who can close that gap is the founder, by holding themselves to a line no one else has the standing to impose. It is the rarest thing I see a founder do. It is also the most powerful.

When a leader brings this to me, I do not help them manage the person better. I put two questions to them, and I do not let them move past either one.

If the honest answer to the first is that anyone else would be confronted, corrected, or moved on, then there is no standard here. There is a favour being extended to power. They are allowed to keep extending it. I only insist they stop calling it a standard, and that they count the cost, which is being paid already, in the discretionary effort of every person not offered the same grace.

You cannot build a team and protect an exception to it at the same time. At some point the standard either applies to the most powerful person in the room, the founder included, or it applies to no one. The team worked out which it is a long time ago. The one who has not yet faced it is usually the person in charge.