The Same When No One's Checking
On power, accountability, and the leadership test no policy can enforce
What does it actually mean to hold authority in a world handing more of it to people who feel less and less of its weight?
That tension, between the internal choice a person makes and the external influence pressing on them, never really turns down in volume as we move through life. What separates a good leader from a dangerous one isn’t whether they feel that tension, everyone does.
It’s how they evaluate it, sort it, and decide who they’re accountable to when no one’s checking.
Here’s the problem.
That spectrum of authority and accountability doesn’t run flat. It runs top-down. The higher up you go, the more liberty gets quietly absorbed into the job description: building culture, setting the tone for a room, deciding what “the standard” even means.
The research backs up what that liberty tends to do to a person once they’re standing inside it. Studies out of the University of Amsterdam found that people made to feel powerful were both more likely to cheat when given the chance, and quicker to hand down harsh judgment on someone else caught doing the exact same thing.
The higher a person sits in an organization, the less that person tends to think about whether the process is even fair.
Power doesn’t just grant liberty. It quietly convinces the person holding it that fairness was always somebody else’s job to worry about.
Watch what that looks like in the wild.
Take elected officials, people whose decisions directly shape the lives of the constituents they serve. When that decision-making stops matching what those constituents actually need, and the response is a vacation timed in a way that reads as tone-deaf at best, it raises an eyebrow.
When it happens once, it’s a lapse. When it happens again and again while the accountability never follows, that’s not eyebrow-raising anymore. That’s infuriating.
Why does it happen there?
Behavioral research out of Newcastle University found something almost absurdly simple: the mere sense of being watched, even a pair of eyespots printed above an honesty-box payment system, is enough to make people act less greedy and less entitled with the resources in front of them.
This is the same pattern the research describes, just easier to see.
Elected officials hold enormous authority, but their accountability isn’t constant. It’s concentrated into a single moment every few years, and nearly absent in between. When that felt scrutiny disappears, the liberty that authority grants doesn’t shrink to match it.
It expands to fill the space accountability left behind, exactly the trade-off the earlier research predicts. The vacation isn’t a separate problem; it’s what that trade-off looks like when you can see it happen.
What compounds it?
The selectiveness.
A person working a blue-collar job on a fixed schedule doesn’t get the luxury of “the timing was unfortunate.”
Do the same maneuvering (the same bending of “when I show up” or “what I owe the people counting on me”) and the outcome is reprimand, discipline, sometimes a loss of the opportunity. No committee hearing. No news cycle debating intent. Just a consequence, immediate and often unglamorous.
Is that cynicism?
No. It’s a broken window.
Research out of the University of Groningen on rule-breaking inside public spaces found that when people observe a rule get violated without consequence, it doesn’t just excuse that one violation. It signals to everyone watching that rules in general are optional, which quietly lowers their own willingness to follow the ones that have nothing to do with it. Every unaccountable vacation, every excused liberty at the top, isn’t just an isolated incident.
It’s a window left broken in public, teaching everyone downstream that the real rule was never the stated one.
The real rule: rules apply in proportion to what you stand to lose.
So how do we fix a window that’s already broken at the top? We don’t fix it up there. We come home to ourselves.
We hold ourselves accountable to what it actually means to lead with discernment (empathy in one hand, authority in the other), and we hold that line by staying accountable to our intention, not to whoever happens to be watching.
Every room I’ve ever led in, and every room I’ve ever openly questioned leadership in, came back to the same test: was the discernment empathetic, and was the accountability aimed at the intention instead of the audience?
That’s the fix.
It’s not a policy fix. It’s not a hierarchy fix. It’s a person, in a room, choosing to be the same when no one’s checking as when everyone is.
Because that was always the only kind of authority worth trusting: the kind that never needed eyespots on the wall to behave like it was being watched.