I was picking my battles.

A few years ago my then team went on a group outing. It was one of those team building events you do a couple times a year. We went to one of those places that has a lot of games under one roof. There was an incident there that I will not forget.

I was standing at the mini golf course when it started. Somebody who worked a level below one of my peers questioned something small. I think it had to do with the score. Whatever it was, it did not warrant what happened next. My peer went off on them right in front of all of us. They kept at it until the person started to cry. We all stood there in shock.

I did not do anything. I just stood there and watched.

One senior leader finally stepped in and pulled my peer away from the rest of us.

Here is what you need to know about this peer. On paper, they were great. They hit their numbers every year, and some years they beat them by a lot. If you were making the case to keep somebody around solely on metrics, they were an easy yes.

However, they were not good with people. They steamrolled meetings. They were quick to throw someone under the bus and used their title as a weapon to make others feel small. The folks who worked for them were early in their careers. They needed someone to actually teach and mentor. Instead they got no direction and were basically being mentored by me and another manager. I sat in more than a few coaching sessions with this peer trying to help them get better at the people part. It never worked.

Every time their behavior came up, somebody had a reason it was fine. The leader above both of us said some version of it over and over. Somebody would complain about an outburst, and it would come back as, don't worry about it, that’s just how they are.

I would love to tell you I was different. I was not. I told myself I understood how things worked around there, so I kept my head down and stayed out of it. On that day I told myself the same thing. Be strategic and stay out of the way. So I was standing there waiting for somebody else to step in. But I knew the real reason was I did not want to go up against the person who kept protecting them.

I called it picking my battles. It wasn't.

Letting someone slide like that always comes with a price. And it is never the person everyone keeps making excuses for. It is everybody around them.

I’ve thought a lot about why not one of us moved that day. When a whole group sees something wrong, everybody figures somebody else is going to handle it. So nobody does. Every person standing on the mini golf course that day was waiting for the person next to them. I was one of them.

Let me tell you what it cost us. There was a woman on that team who was one of the sharpest people I have ever worked with. She was the glue. She was the one holding that whole team together, even while the person leading the team made it difficult.

One day she got fed up and left.

She had watched that same scene play out a hundred times, and she finally realized nothing was ever going to change. So she stopped waiting.

After she left, the team fell apart. One by one, the other good people underneath them left too. I left the team as well. About a year later my peer finally got fired. But the damage was already done.

None of this is really about work.

Every one of us has somebody we keep making excuses for. The friend we all forgive because they are so generous, even though we leave every dinner feeling a little smaller. The family member who gets to say the cruel thing at the table because pushing back is more trouble than it is worth. The good part of them is real, so we keep covering the cost of the bad part. The excuse always comes wrapped in something we genuinely believe about them. That is what makes it so easy to keep making.

I think about that day every now and then. I don't really think about my peer, they were exactly who they had always been. I think about the person who was humiliated in public. I think about myself. Standing there running my own little cost-benefit in my head, deciding that a person crying right in front of me was not worth the cost of crossing the wrong leader.

Here's what I want you to reflect on this week. Who is the person you keep making excuses for right now? The one whose good part you let overshadow all the damage? What room are you standing in, saying nothing, waiting on somebody else to finally be the one who does something?

You already know who they are. That is the part that makes it uncomfortable.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh