Suddenly, and for one person only, a workaround the whole team has relied on for years is recast as deliberate misconduct, giving management a pretext to discipline someone it wants gone.
An example
At a commercial insurer, new adjusters waited up to six weeks for their own access to the claims reserving system, so the team in one regional office had used a shared supervisor login for years. Everyone knew, including the regional director. In February a claims supervisor in that office emailed the chief risk officer questioning several large reserve releases the regional director had signed. Three weeks later she was called to a meeting with HR and the information security manager, who described the shared login as a "serious access-control violation" under the written security policy and put her on a final warning. Eleven colleagues used the same login that afternoon. The provisioning backlog still stood at six weeks. Her email to the chief risk officer did not come up.
Why it works
On paper the rule existed all along; what changes is its meaning. Calling the workaround misconduct strips it of legitimacy, so even good work done with it reads as the product of a breach, and the target's ordinary practice suddenly carries warnings, an improvement plan, and a path to dismissal, while peers carry on at no cost. Four conditions make the reclassification stick: discretionary enforcement, a workaround that sits outside policy and was never formally sanctioned, a target who cannot document the history of tolerance, and an HR team that accepts the framing without asking why peers are untouched.
The thinking behind it
Michel Foucault Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) argues that records, examination, and the possibility of being watched discipline people because everyone knows the record could be used. A rulebook full of dormant rules works that way. Nobody complies with all of it, so standing more than conduct sets each employee's exposure. Documenting tolerance and peer practice shows that the rule was activated against one person, and leaders who prune dormant rules remove the reserve.
Warning signs
One person is written up for a practice the whole team relies on, usually because the official process is slow or broken, while peers continue openly. The write-up uses strong language (serious, intentional, violation) for something nobody treated as serious last month. The person written up recently raised a concern, challenged a senior colleague, or resisted a decision.
How to defend yourself
Almost nobody fully complies with every rule, so the question that matters is whether your deviation is being treated like everyone else's. Build that case quickly:
- document how long the workaround has been used, by whom, and with whose knowledge
- record why it exists, such as a provisioning backlog or a broken system, with dates
- line up colleagues who will confirm in writing that they use it too
Ask HR in writing why the same standard is not being applied to peers, and ask for the policy's enforcement history. If you raised a concern before the write-up, set the dates side by side. A regulator or a union can force the question of unequal treatment.
How a leader shuts it down
Keep the rulebook clean: enforce a rule consistently or remove it. When a workaround becomes routine, fix the process that made it necessary or sanction the workaround in writing. When a long-tolerated practice is suddenly written up for one person, ask who else does it and what that person recently said.