Do As I Say, Not As I Do
The Leadership Credibility Killer
The CEO sent a company-wide email every quarter about the importance of work-life balance. He wrote passionately about protecting family time, about leaving work at the office, about the danger of burnout and the wisdom of rest. The words were excellent. They were sincere. They were also contradicted by every observable fact about how he operated. He sent emails at midnight. He replied to Slack messages on Saturday afternoons. He expected proposal drafts within hours of asking for them, regardless of what time the request landed. He once called a director on Christmas Eve to ask about a Q1 forecast and seemed genuinely confused that the director was annoyed. The CEO meant every word of the work-life balance email. However, he had never considered the possibility that his own behavior had already taught his team the opposite of what his policy said. His team learned something he never intended to teach. They learned that what the CEO said was not what the CEO meant. They learned that the policies applied to them but not to him. They learned that leadership was a set of exceptions disguised as rules.
Let me name the pattern. I call it the Rule-Maker. The Rule-Maker is the leader who writes policies for his team and exemptions for himself. He does not intend to be a hypocrite. He believes the policies are good and necessary. He believes his own exceptions are justified by his context, his experience, or the pressure of his role. He does not realize that his team does not hear his policies. They watch his exceptions. Every time he violates a rule he has imposed on others, he teaches them that the rule is optional. He teaches them that compliance is for people without authority. He teaches them that leadership is not accountability. It is the freedom to decide which rules matter and for whom.
The Rule-Maker is a close relative of the Absentee King we saw yesterday. The Absentee King is absent in location. The Rule-Maker is absent in integrity. Both communicate the same thing to their teams. The rules apply to you, not to me. The difference is that the Rule-Maker is present enough to be watched. His contradictions are visible in real time. His team sees him arrive late and enforce punctuality. They see him take credit for their work and demand humility from them. They see him cut corners on quality and preach excellence in the next all-hands meeting. They adjust. Not by confronting him, because who confronts the person who controls their career. They adjust by learning the signal behind the noise. They learn that the policy is for show. They learn that what actually matters is being on the right side of the person making the exceptions.
The cost of the Rule-Maker runs deeper than most leaders realize. The immediate cost is credibility. When a leader says one thing and does another, his words lose their weight. His team stops believing what he says in meetings. They stop treating his announcements as commitments. They start reading between the lines for the real message, which is whatever the leader actually does, not what he says. The deeper cost is culture. The Rule-Maker does not just damage his own credibility. He teaches his team that policy is aspirational rather than binding. He teaches them that the organization runs on exceptions, not rules. Once that lesson takes hold, it spreads. The manager who watches the CEO cut the expense reporting process will start fudging his own numbers. The director who watches the VP bypass the hiring freeze for a personal hire will start making her own quiet exceptions. The Rule-Maker creates a culture where everyone makes their own rules, and the only people who still follow the published policy are the ones too naive or too powerless to break them.
The Scriptural anchor for this pattern is direct. Paul confronts the exact same dynamic in Romans 2:21. The New Living Translation renders it as a question that cuts to the bone. “Well then, if you teach others, why don’t you teach yourself? You tell others not to steal, but do you steal?” Paul is addressing religious leaders who knew the law and taught it faithfully but did not live by it themselves. The principle translates directly to leadership in any context. If you set the standard and do not meet it, you have not set a standard. You have created a loophole that only you are allowed to use.
Jesus addressed the same pattern even more bluntly. In Matthew 23:4 (NLT), he describes the religious leaders of his day with a devastating observation. “They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden.” The Greek construction implies a specific kind of cruelty. It is the cruelty of someone who knows exactly how heavy the burden is because they designed it, and they have decided that it does not apply to them. The Rule-Maker is not merely inconsistent. He is unjust. He demands from others what he will not give himself, and he calls it leadership.
Peter offers the positive counterpart to this pattern. In 1 Peter 5:2-3 (NLT), he writes to church leaders about how to exercise authority. “Care for the flock that God has entrusted to you. Watch over it willingly, not grudgingly, not for what you will get out of it, but because you are eager to serve God. Don’t lord it over the people assigned to your care, but lead them by your own good example.” The contrast is unmistakable. There are two ways to lead. You can lord it over people by making rules you do not follow. You can lead by example instead, doing what you ask of others before you ask it of them. Peter does not leave room for a third option.
Jesus modeled this approach in the most literal way possible. In John 13:15 (NLT), after washing his disciples’ feet, he says this. “I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you.” He did not tell them to wash each other’s feet and then walk away with his sandals still on. He did it first. He demonstrated the behavior before he asked for it. That is the difference between a leader who teaches by policy and a leader who teaches by presence. One declares. The other demonstrates.
The recovery from the Rule-Maker pattern is uncomfortable because it requires the leader to stop treating himself as an exception. The Tuesday-afternoon move is specific. Identify one rule you have imposed on your team that you have not followed yourself this week. It could be a punctuality expectation you violated. A communication standard you ignored. A quality bar you lowered for your own work. A deadline you expected others to hit while giving yourself grace. Name it. Then do not explain why your exception was justified. Just close the gap. Follow the rule for the rest of the week and see what happens to the temperature in the room.
July is examining what your leadership reveals about you. This week we have looked at trust, friendship, pride, presence, and now integrity of example. The Rule-Maker leads from above, untouchable, watching his team carry a burden he would never carry himself. Tomorrow we look at the opposite. We look at what it means for your word to be your bond. We look at Matthew 5:37. Let your yes be yes.
The Character Audit at month’s end is designed to catch the Rule-Maker pattern before it becomes the culture of your organization. It is not a judgment against the leader who has made exceptions for himself. It is a mirror that shows what those exceptions have cost, so the leader can decide whether the cost is worth continuing to pay.
Leadership Challenge: What is one policy you enforce for your team that you have not applied to yourself this week? Not a policy you disagree with or one you think is unnecessary for someone at your level. A rule you expect from others and exempt yourself from. What would it cost you to follow it for the rest of this week?
I write about leadership at the intersection of timeless principles and modern workplaces. Follow for weekly insights on building teams that actually work. For more articles like this consider subscribing or sharing.