That's Above My Pay Grade: Respectable Excuses for Bad Outcomes

By Guli-Sanam Karimova and Stephen A. LeMay

You have just taken the job you wanted for years. Chief Sustainability Officer at a major manufacturer. The CEO recruited you herself. “We need to do better,” she said.

Day three. You are in a meeting about community relations and someone mentions “the closures.” Last year the company shut three factories and displaced 3,000 workers in towns where those factories were the economy. You ask a simple question: Who decided?

The CEO points to the restructuring committee. The committee points to the consultants’ efficiency analysis. The consultants point to the board’s cost-reduction mandate. The board points to fiduciary duty. Shareholders point to overseas competition.

Every person followed the rules. Every decision was documented and approved. Nobody violated policy. And nobody is responsible.

That is not a story about weak character. It is a story about structure. Boeing’s 737 MAX, Wells Fargo’s fake accounts, the opioid crisis — all share the same feature. Processes were followed. Compliance was achieved. Accountability was absent.

We call this pattern accountability decoupling: responsibility for actions gets distributed across people, procedures, and technologies, while accountability for outcomes becomes impossible to assign. The question for leaders is not whether you want to be accountable. It is whether the organization you lead permits accountability to exist at all. 

FOUR WAYS ACCOUNTABILITY GOES MISSING

Accountability rarely vanishes in a single dramatic failure. It leaks away through four mechanisms that show up across industries.

Organized diffusion. Responsibility is spread so thin across teams that nobody feels it. Think of the pharmaceutical company that developed, marketed, and distributed an addictive painkiller. Researchers knew the addiction risks. Marketing emphasized benefits. Sales hit targets. Legal approved the messaging. Regulatory filed the paperwork. Every unit did its job well, judged by its own metrics. The consequences of the collective decision belonged to no one.

You’ll know it when something goes badly wrong, and every department can name a different group that “owned the decision.”

Procedural shielding. Rules become hiding places. “I was following policy.” “My hands are tied.” A bank forecloses on a family’s home in error: the loan officer says the system flagged the account, the system follows the risk model, the model implements company policy, the policy reflects regulation. At every step, someone followed a procedure. At no step did anyone decide. Procedures exist to reduce risk and create consistency, and they do — but they also manufacture respectable excuses for bad outcomes.

You’ll know it when harm gets explained by pointing at policies and rules rather than at human choices.

Technological delegation. A hiring algorithm screens out qualified candidates from certain zip codes. The HR director didn’t write the code. The data scientists didn’t pick the training data. The engineers didn’t set the business rules. The executives never reviewed a single case. Discrimination occurred — but who discriminated? Automated systems don’t eliminate the human choices inside them; they bury those choices under a layer that looks neutral.

You’ll know it when someone answers a hard question with “the algorithm made that call.”

Accountability fatigue. This one looks different from the other three. In hospitals, schools, and public agencies, leaders face relentless ethical demands with no structural support. A hospital administrator wants to put patient care first while being measured on financial targets. A teacher advocates for struggling students under a crushing workload. When doing the right thing takes heroic effort every single day, people eventually stop fighting the system and start adapting to it. Responsibility erodes not through indifference but through exhaustion.

You’ll know it when ethical concerns are acknowledged sincerely and then deferred, because “there isn’t time or capacity right now.”

Fatigue belongs on this list for practical reasons, but it is better understood as a downstream symptom. When you see it, treat it as a signal that something structural has gone unaddressed for too long.

WHY GOOD LEADERS CAN’T FIX IT BY TRYING HARDER

Most leadership advice assumes the organization is neutral — that a leader who wants to act responsibly can simply do so. Several conditions make that assumption wrong.

Incentives reward outcomes and ignore means. Bonuses, reviews, and KPIs are built around revenue, throughput, cost, and patient volume. They rarely say anything about how those numbers get made. When evaluation is silent on means, accountability for means becomes nobody’s job — and diffusion becomes the rational response rather than the deviant one.

Work is collective; evaluation is individual. Five people share a decision, and one person gets reviewed for the result. Or the reverse: an individual acts and the group absorbs the consequences. Either way, accountability is structurally mismatched to the work. Most organizations have been individualizing accountability while distributing the underlying work more widely — moving the two further apart.

Escalation fails quietly. When a frontline employee spots a conflict between a financial target and an ethical concern, the concern has to survive several handoffs to reach anyone with authority. Rarely does one person kill it. It gets deferred here, reframed there, routed somewhere else, and weakens at each layer until it disappears.

Competition punishes unilateral restraint. Some failures aren’t produced by any single company’s structure but by industry conditions where doing the right thing costs market share. The 2008 credit crisis is the standing example: practices that severed accountability from outcomes were normal, and firms that opted out simply lost. No internal fix reaches this.

Language does the work of avoidance. “That’s a compliance matter.” “The system flagged it.” “That’s above my pay grade.” These phrases don’t just describe avoidance — they perform it. Left unchallenged long enough, they become common sense, and questioning them starts to feel like a breach of etiquette.

THREE PRACTICES THAT RESTORE ACCOUNTABILITY

System mapping - see where accountability disappears. Leaders who succeeded inside a system did so by internalizing its assumptions, which means those assumptions are now invisible to them. Mapping makes them visible again. Take one consequential decision in your area —hiring, resource allocation, safety, customer complaints —and trace it from initiation to outcome. Draw it. Mark every handoff. At each handoff, ask: if something goes wrong here, who is accountable? Any unclear answer is a gap.

Then share the map with your team. The conversation that follows is itself a diagnostic. Resistance — “we already know this” — tells you the system has normalized its own opacity.

Disruptive intervention — break the routines that normalize avoidance. Some rules exist to protect the system from accountability, and restoring accountability means challenging them. This is not rule-breaking for its own sake. It is asking questions the organization would rather not field, and inserting human judgment where a process has quietly replaced it. A manager who declines to deploy a hiring system that improves efficiency 40 percent while systematically disadvantaging certain candidates is doing this work. The discomfort it creates in the room is information about the system, not about the manager.

Stakeholder integration — close the distance between decisions and their consequences. When supply chain managers have never met the workers in the factories they source from, and administrators have never sat with the patients their policies affect, harm stays abstract — and abstraction is what makes avoidance comfortable. That distance is engineered through geography, layers, and the habit of turning people into categories and metrics.

Note what this practice is not: adding more decision-makers, which would only deepen diffusion. It adds witnesses, perspectives, and feedback channels. It disciplines existing decision authority rather than redistributing it.

The three reinforce each other. Mapping shows you where to intervene — you can’t challenge what you can’t see. Intervention creates openings for stakeholder integration by breaking the norms that kept people at a distance. Integration surfaces what mapping missed, because the people affected by decisions know things the designers never did. Run in isolation, each practice tends toward theater. Run together and iteratively, they compound.

IF YOU RUN A SMALLER OPERATION

Everything above assumes a large organization. Decoupling scales down, though. It just wears different clothes.

In a thirty-person firm, nobody hides behind a committee. Responsibility leaks out the side instead — to vendors and contractors. The payroll service. The staffing agency. The off-the-shelf scheduling software. The outside accountant. The marketing agency. Each holds a piece of a decision that affects your people or your customers, and none of them answers to anyone your employees can actually reach. That is organized diffusion with a smaller cast.

Three patterns are specific to small operations:

• Everyone wears five hats, so nothing is anyone’s actual job. Safety, data handling, customer complaints, contractor oversight — the work that belongs to everyone in principle belongs to no one Monday morning. Assign it to a person by name, or it will not happen.
• Informality is not the same as clarity. Small firms often document nothing, which feels like agility and works fine until there is turnover or a dispute. Then accountability rests entirely on who remembers what. You do not need a policy manual; you need one line in writing about who decides what.
• You buy your algorithms rather than build them. You cannot inspect a model you did not build, so the vendor’s defaults quietly become your policy. Ask what the tool screens out and who it disadvantages, and ask in writing. If the vendor will not answer, that is the answer.

Accountability fatigue also hits hardest here. Thin margins and no slack mean the owner or director who wants to do right by people is the same person covering shifts, chasing receivables, and answering the phone. There is no structural support to fall back on because there is no structure — just you.

The advantages are real, though, and larger organizations would trade for them. Mapping a decision takes an afternoon rather than a quarter. If you own the place, you can change the incentives yourself — no committee, no HR redesign cycle. And the moral distance that a multinational has to engineer away barely exists for you: you know your customers by name and your employees’ circumstances by heart.

Scaled version of the ninety days: try one week. Map your most consequential recurring decision on the back of an envelope. Name the one vendor-mediated decision nobody owns, and give it to a person. Then ask one customer or one employee what the last version of that decision looked like from their side. That is the whole program at small scale, and it is not a lesser version of the work.

RED FLAGS WORTH AUDITING AGAINST

• “That’s a compliance matter” — used to end a discussion rather than open one.
• Nobody can name who is ultimately responsible for an outcome.
• “The model recommended it.”
• People who raise ethical concerns get labeled “not strategic.”
• The CSR report is polished; the supply chain is opaque.
• Leadership development focuses on character, not structure.

Multiple flags aren’t cause for despair. They’re a map of where the work is.

HONEST LIMITS

This works where you have real discretion. It reaches poorly into three situations: markets where every competitor faces the same incentives and restraint costs you the business; regulated environments where compliance is specified so tightly there are no leverage points left; and jobs that carry responsibility without any authority to change what produces the outcome. Those need action above your level.

And say the hard part plainly: disruptive intervention carries career risk. The organizations most likely to punish you for challenging accountability structures are exactly the ones that need it most. Assess your context before you act.

None of this replaces character. It says character is necessary and not sufficient — that good people inside badly designed systems still produce bad outcomes. Accountability is a property of design. It is produced or destroyed by structural choices, governance decisions, and the willingness of leaders to look hard at systems they have learned to navigate without noticing.

Start with one decision. Draw the map. Ask who is accountable at every handoff. What you find will tell you where to go next.

NINETY DAYS

Days 1–30  Diagnose

Map one core decision flow end to end. Name your top three accountability gaps. Document every place where “the system” gets cited in place of judgment.

Success: A visual map completed and shared.

Watch For: Resistance to mapping.

Days 31–60 Disrupt 

Challenge one procedure that creates ethical friction. Insert a human judgment checkpoint into one automated process. Formally protect one person who raised an ethical concern.

Success: One structural barrier identified, challenged, and escalated.

Watch For: Pressure to drop it and stay in your lane.

Days 31–60  Integrate

Open direct dialogue with one affected group. Redesign one engagement process for genuine co-creation. Build one operational feedback loop.

Success: Stakeholder input shapes one real decision.

Watch For: Engagement drifting into performance.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Guli-Sanam Karimova joined the Institute for Ethics in Management at the Wirtschafts-universität Wien in 2022. Her research in business ethics includes sustainability, global supply chain governance, philosophy, intercultural ethics and digitalization in the economy. Dr. Karimova teaches responsible interactions. She is also a research fellow at the Kiel Centre for Globalization. She received her Ph.D. in practical philosophy from Christian Albrechts University of Kiel.

Stephen A. LeMay is a Professor at the University of West Florida. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee. Dr. LeMay has a deep background in transportation and logistics and has authored two books, a textbook and a research book on logistics and transportation topics. LeMay has examined supply chain design, truck driver job satisfaction, supply chain security, computer literacy among undergraduate business students, and other logistics and marketing topics.