Most people become nervous when auditors show up. It is not because they have hidden crimes, but simply because everyone makes mistakes.
When I was the manager of the General Affairs Department, our team went through an intense audit that lasted nearly two weeks. Since our department handled contracts, vendor relationships, and substantial corporate expenses, the auditors examined everything—from invoices and approval documents to the accounting records of our major business partners.
After ten days of deep digging, they finally found something.
Fortunately, it was neither fraud nor misconduct. It was a simple, administrative oversight in a single approval document.
I accepted the finding immediately. The error was real. What I disagreed with, however, was who should be held accountable.
The auditor assumed the blame fell on the working-level employee. I stopped him right there.
“The employee made the mistake,” I said. “But I failed to train them properly, and I failed to catch it during the approval process. If someone needs to take responsibility for this oversight, that responsibility belongs to me.”
The auditors noted my response, and the two-week ordeal eventually came to an end.
An Unexpected Confession in the Lounge
A few days later, I ran into one of the lead auditors in the company lounge. As we waited for our coffee, what he said took me by surprise.
“I’ve conducted countless audits throughout my career,” he told me quietly. “Most managers try everything they can to push responsibility downward to their staff—even for major mistakes they should have caught themselves. I have rarely seen a manager do the exact opposite.”
His comment stayed with me long after the audit was officially closed.
It made me wonder: When did it become normal for success to move upward while responsibility moves downward? Somewhere along the way, this upside-down pattern seems to have become accepted as an unwritten rule of organizational life.
Mencius and the Lost Sense of Shame
This encounter reminded me of an ancient philosophical concept from Mencius: The sense of shame and dislike (羞惡之心, Su-O-Ji-Shim)—the inherent human capacity to feel ashamed of one’s own lack of righteousness.
Mencius wasn’t talking about the fear of being caught. He wasn’t talking about the fear of corporate punishment or a damaged reputation. He was talking about accountability to one’s own conscience.
Looking back, perhaps that is why the veteran auditor seemed so taken aback.
In a healthy environment, taking responsibility should not be remarkable. It should be ordinary. Yet, in the modern corporate world, ordinary virtues have somehow become endangered species.
The True Weight of Leadership
Even now, I occasionally remember the look of genuine surprise on that auditor’s face.
What stays with me all these years later is not pride in my own actions. Rather, it is a lingering sadness that doing the bare minimum as a leader—shielding your team and owning the final approval—was unusual enough to astonish a professional investigator.
True leadership isn’t about standing in the spotlight when things go well. It is about being the shield when the storm hits.