The mistake that taught me to speak the rules

I don’t often revisit this memory,  it sits in that corner of my past where shame and growth quietly coexist. But today, I’m choosing to honour it, because it taught me something that still shapes how I lead and parent.

It was over twenty years ago. I was in university, mid-journey, with four group assignments on the table and four of us to tackle them: Camila, Patricia, Verona and me. Like many student groups, we naturally split into pairs. Camila and I took two projects; Patricia and Verona took the other two.

One of our assignments, the one Camila and I were responsible for,  involved the topic of reinsurance. It was dense, complex, and, to be honest, we let it slide too long. As the deadline loomed, panic set in. My cpusing worked in insurance and had access to a thesis on the topic. In a moment of desperation, we made a decision: we’d copy that thesis. We designed a front page, added an index, formatted it to look like ours, and submitted it.

I still remember the wave of tension in the classroom a week later, when whispers began circling about one submission being flagged for plagiarism. I knew. Before anything official, I knew it was ours. That guilt sat so heavily in me, I memorised every page of the thesis ( back to front) in case we were questioned.

We were.

Our teacher called us into his office and quizzed us on random sections of the work. Because I had studied it obsessively (out of fear, out of responsibility) I answered every question. In the end, we weren’t expelled, perhaps because it was a first offence, perhaps because of our grades, or maybe because I showed up ready to defend it like it was mine. But we got a zero.

What stayed with me most wasn’t just the mistake, it was what happened around it. Patricia and Verona, despite having no involvement, stood by us. They never turned on us, never blamed us. They showed up with integrity and solidarity, and I’ve carried that lesson into every team I’ve built since.

But deeper still, I realised how little we’d been taught about what plagiarism actually meant. No one had ever spoken to us about academic integrity. No conversations, no cultural reinforcement, just silent expectations buried in a code of conduct no one read. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was a real gap.

That experience embedded something I now carry into every space I lead, whether it's a company or my own home: if we don’t speak about what’s right, how can we expect others to know?

Values need to be lived out loud. Not assumed. Not tucked into handbooks or policies. They need to be talked about, modelled, repeated. Because even good people; your best employee, your principled daughter, your younger self, can make a bad call if they’ve never been shown what right looks like.

Where in your life or leadership do you need to speak the rules out loud? not because people are bad, but because even the best of us need clarity to do things right.

________

Note: Names in this entry have been changed to respect the privacy of everyone involved.

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