Why Is It So Hard to Do the Right Thing?

Earlier this year, I found myself on the receiving end of an error that was never mine to fix. I chased a former employer for the better part of a month to correct a tax matter they had gotten wrong. Not a small administrative slip — a matter with real financial consequence, accruing penalties with every week that passed, tied directly to their mistake and nobody else's.

I won't name the organisation. I won't name the individuals involved. That's not the point of this piece, and it was never the point of the emails I sent them. The point is what this experience revealed, and what it says about a pattern I've now seen enough times, in enough businesses, to know it isn't unique to one company or one industry.

The Pattern

It went like this. I raised the issue. I got a response acknowledging the error — an admission, in writing, that the mistake was theirs. Then silence. I followed up. Silence again. I followed up a third time, more formally, copying more senior people, and only then did I get a reply. One that quietly relitigated the timeline, downplayed the delay, and shifted focus onto how complicated the fix apparently was — rather than addressing why acknowledging a simple email had become so hard.

A date was committed to. That date passed. No update was volunteered. I had to ask again.

Three weeks of consistent, professional, documented follow-up, met with silence, deflection and missed commitments — for an error that was theirs from the outset, and one that left me financially exposed through SARS penalties.

Calling It What It Is

I want to use precise language here, because vague language lets organisations like this off the hook.

This was disingenuous. Not that the organisation lied outright, but acknowledging fault while quietly avoiding accountability for the consequences of that fault is its own form of dishonesty. It's the corporate equivalent of saying "you're right" and then doing nothing that reflects it.

And for those of us who've worked inside organisations like this, there's a more personal word for what it does to you over time: it gaslights you. You start to wonder if you're overreacting. If three follow-ups really is "too many." If your own sense of what's reasonable has become distorted.

The moment an organisation starts managing the person instead of the problem, it has already lost the plot.

That self-doubt isn't an accident. It's what happens inside unhealthy organisational cultures, where the people at the top are more inclined to manage perception than manage consequence — where the person raising a legitimate issue slowly becomes framed, implicitly, as the problem.

I've sat in rooms inside organisations exactly like this. I know the texture of it. The technically competent people at the top, the polished responses, the reasonable-sounding explanations, and underneath it, an absence of the one thing that actually matters: a leader willing to say "we got this wrong, here is exactly how and when we're fixing it," and then do it.

The Question Worth Sitting With

So here's the question I keep returning to, and the one I think every leader reading this should sit with honestly: why is it so hard for people, and the organisations they lead, to simply do the right thing?

Not the complicated thing. Not the heroic thing. The simple thing: acknowledge an error promptly, communicate proactively while it's being fixed, and honour the dates you commit to.

None of that requires legal counsel, a crisis team, or courage in any dramatic sense. It requires ownership. And ownership is precisely where so many otherwise capable, technically skilled leaders fall short. Not because they lack the intelligence to do it, but because they lack the self-leadership to sit in the discomfort of being wrong in front of someone they've wronged.

This is the gap I built my consultancy around. Businesses don't fail their people because their leaders are unintelligent. They fail them because leaders who are excellent at the technical and commercial side of the business have never been required to develop the relational and accountability muscles that this exact situation calls for. And when that muscle is missing, what fills the space is exactly what I experienced: deflection dressed up as diplomacy.

What to Do Instead

If you're a leader reading this and recognising, uncomfortably, a version of your own organisation, here's what doing it right actually looks like:

• Acknowledge the error immediately, without qualification. Not "we understand your concern," but "this was our mistake."
• Give a real timeline, and treat it as a commitment, not an estimate. If you can't meet it, say so before the date passes, not after someone has to ask.
• Communicate proactively. The person you've wronged should never have to be the one chasing updates on your error.
• Own the consequence, not just the cause. If your mistake is costing someone money, time or peace of mind, that cost is yours to acknowledge and address — not something to quietly reframe as timing or complexity.
• Treat the person raising the issue with respect, not suspicion. The moment you start managing the person instead of the problem, you've already lost the plot.

None of this is complicated. That's exactly why there's no excuse for getting it wrong.