Every team has a person who gets results by going around the process. They skip the approval step, contact the executive directly, or start work before the decision is made. Often they are right about the outcome. The cost shows up elsewhere: other people notice, and quietly adjust.
Jim Marsh, author of Culture OS and Managing Principal of JEM Premier Coaching, describes his work as attending to what leaders reinforce, ignore, and tolerate, according to his public LinkedIn profile. This article takes the third verb, tolerate, and applies it to workarounds. The scenarios and steps are illustrations and suggestions written for this article, not material from the book.
How one exception spreads
Imagine a leadership team that agrees any change to a customer commitment goes through a named decision owner. A high-performing manager bypasses it to save a deal and succeeds. The leader is pleased with the result and says nothing about the route. (This is a hypothetical scenario.)
What did the rest of the team learn? That the rule applies when the stakes are low and bends when the outcome is good. That being a strong performer earns exceptions. That the decision owner's role is advisory. None of this was stated. All of it was observed.
Within a few weeks, more people use workarounds, the decision owner is overloaded with after-the-fact explanations, and the leader has to enforce a rule that is now harder to defend.
Why leaders tolerate it
The reasons are usually reasonable:
- The person is valuable and the leader does not want to lose them.
- The outcome was good, so a conversation feels petty.
- The leader sees the process as imperfect and partly agrees with the workaround.
- The conversation is uncomfortable and the week is busy.
The third reason deserves attention. A workaround is sometimes a signal that the process is too slow or poorly designed. That is a legitimate discovery. The response is to fix the process openly, not to let one person quietly operate outside it.
Separate the result from the route
A conversation with the person who used the workaround can acknowledge two things at once. The result may have been good. The route created a cost for others. A direct version might sound like this: "The deal outcome helped us. Going around the decision owner meant finance learned about the terms after they were committed. I want to keep what worked and change how we get there. What would have made the standard route workable that week?"
This keeps the conversation about the system and the next action, not about character. It also surfaces information about where the process creates friction.
Decide what is an exception and what is a pattern
A true exception is rare, deliberate, and approved by someone with the authority to approve it. A pattern is repeated and unapproved. To keep the two separate, write a simple rule: exceptions to a named decision process need an approver and are logged with a short reason. This lets the team handle real urgency without turning shortcuts into habits. Review the log monthly. If the same exception appears three times, either the rule or the process needs to change.
Check the leader's own exceptions
Teams watch leaders more closely than leaders expect. If you override your own agreed process when it is inconvenient, the team notes it. Before correcting someone else, ask whether you have modeled the standard in the last month. If not, begin by naming your own exception and what you will do differently.
A short reset sequence
- List workarounds you currently know about and have not addressed.
- For each, decide whether the issue is the person's choice or a flaw in the process.
- Have the direct conversation with the person, using the result-and-route structure.
- Fix any process flaw, and tell the team what changed and why.
- Name the standard once, plainly, to the whole team.
If you would like private space to prepare for one of these conversations, one-on-one leadership coaching is built for the leadership situations that call for it. For intact teams, the Culture-to-Execution Sprint focuses on agreements the team sets and keeps together.