Early in my career, I watched a leader chase a prestigious quality award by putting governance across an entire business unit over a single weekend. No diagnosis. No instruction manual. Just a new set of rules, dropped on fifty or sixty people on a Monday morning who had been doing something else entirely on Friday.
What happens when governance is imposed without diagnosis?
Within two months, the damage was visible on a spreadsheet: sick leave had escalated sharply, and complaints had quadrupled. Burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take a sick day, according to Gallup’s own research, and nearly three times as likely to be actively looking for another job. The numbers on that spreadsheet were not a mystery. They were exactly what the research predicts happens when people are handed rules they never asked for and do not understand.
People who knew the leader’s boss personally started going to him privately. The program was stopped.
Why did nothing change for the leader who caused it?
Her reaction was, “Oh, okay.” That was it. Not upset. Not disappointed about missing the award. She never lived by the rules she imposed on everyone else, and she never had to live with the cost of imposing them. The fifty or sixty people underneath her paid for that decision in sick days and quiet resignations. She paid nothing.
That asymmetry is the actual mechanism behind most bad governance, not stupidity, not malice. The person who decides rarely feels the consequence. The people who did not get a vote feel all of it.
What does good governance actually feel like?
It does not feel like governance at all. When it is done right, nobody experiences a system of rules. They experience a good place to work, where the limits make sense, the responsibility feels earned, and everyone is pulling toward the same outcome without being told to.
I think about this every time a leadership team reaches for AI governance before they have asked a single question about the people it will land on. The award, the audit, the compliance milestone, none of it protects you from this pattern. Only checking who actually has to live inside the rules does.