What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from Would You Do That to Your Mother?

Managers inherit far more policies than they write, and the temptation is to treat enforcement as a given rather than a choice. Before applying a rule strictly, a leader can ask whether it would be acceptable if the person facing it were someone they deeply respected rather than an anonymous employee. This shift often reveals that a policy reads reasonably in a handbook but lands as punitive in practice, especially rules built around worst-case abuse scenarios that end up punishing the majority who would never abuse anything.

Managers assume that because a rule came from above, they have no room to interpret or soften its application.

Before enforcing a borderline case, ask what you would want a manager to do if the person in front of you were someone you loved.

Some policies exist to prevent genuine harm; others exist because they make scheduling or liability easier. A rigid attendance policy might exist mainly to simplify payroll, not to ensure fairness. Leaders need to interrogate their policy stack honestly and ask which rules would survive if someone they cared about pushed back directly, and which only survive because no one has challenged them yet.

Leaders conflate long-standing policies with correct ones, assuming age and inertia are evidence of soundness.

Pick one unreviewed policy each month and ask your team plainly whether it feels respectful or merely convenient.

Once a policy is flagged as convenience dressed up as fairness, leaders must rebuild it so real protections survive while punitive edges are removed. This often means a documented exception path, training supervisors to use judgment, or replacing blanket rules with tiered responses. Structure and dignity are not opposites; redesigned policies are often easier to administer because they stop generating appeals and quiet resentment that cost more than flexibility would have.

Leaders add an exception process on paper but never train or empower supervisors to use it.

Run every redesigned policy past a frontline supervisor and ask them to describe how a real employee would experience it.

A single rewrite fades fast once the leader who championed it moves on. Durable organizations build the human test into recurring habits: a standing question in policy reviews, a line in manager training, a norm that any rule generating repeated complaints gets revisited rather than defended. Leaders who succeed treat the test as an ongoing discipline, not a one-time initiative, so it outlives any single person's attention and becomes part of how the organization operates day to day.