You can look at leadership from two perspectives. You’re either accountable for the things that the employees who work in a lower echelon of a company you work for do or you’re not accountable for their actions. Would you hold a manager responsible for something their employee does? I would more than likely. Would you hold a ceo who’s never going to see a large majority of the employees in their company responsible for their actions while working for them? Hopefully you’re starting to see the line start to blur. The line get’s fuzzy.

We’re questioning legal accountability versus I take responsibly for this. Ask yourself, in what court can I take a manager to court over an employees actions? How does the chain of responsibility play out when a large number of people are involved in the management of a human? The variability of their actions will be so large we couldn’t include all the things people do on a day to day basis. Of course some consistency comes into play when they are assigned certain tasks. Likely, they will have a wide array of decision making processes, actions, and habits that make many of them unique.

Of course, based on the title I’m not here to argue that each of those people can’t be controlled. I’m not arguing the legal freedom high level employees hold while maintaining the ability to completely control large groups of people. I want to argue that we can affect people to a high degree, and at some point you are responsible for simple affiliations. If you’re in a position to have an affect on the individuals in your company positively or negatively. If you can do something to individuals to improve or worsen someone’s life you should in some way be held accountable.

When we’re talking about at what point do we enforce punishment for certain questionable behaviors you really have to think about what point you would hope to be punished in a similar situation. Look introspectively and determine your line. Where do you hold yourself accountable? How much change can you enact?

Please don’t let your drive for perfection push you to insanity. More likely, you should expect of yourself a humble approach to leadership. If you oversee people, know that you may have been able to do more, do something differently. Know that people viewing a situation externally won’t see each unique person. They won’t see the things that make us unique. You’ll be an extension of that company, and there isn’t a business or company that hasn’t made some kind of mistake at some level.

I’m going to suggest to all the leaders out there that they be humble. Let’s look at ways we can improve ourselves and take the steps we need to. At the end of the day, we do need some legal accountability for everyone. A sense of legal equality. The abstractness of decision making and action blurs the lines when trying to make accountability clear.