Last night, my daughter read me the Little Red Hen for the first time. Apparently, this is a well known children’s book, but I have never read it.

In this version, The Little Red Hen asks for help from her friends, the fox and the duck, to make lunch. However, no animal will volunteer to help her. At each further stage (making the dough, picking the tomatoes, and grating the cheese), the hen again asks for help from the fox and the duck, but again she gets no assistance. Finally, the hen has made the pizza. This time, the fox and duck eagerly volunteer. However, she declines their help, stating that because no one helped her during the preparation, “cluck, cluck, cluck, you’re out of luck!” The moral of this story is that those who show no willingness to contribute to an end product do not deserve to enjoy the end product.

So good moral, right? Not according to my five-year old. She was not a fan of the ending. Given a choice, she would re-write it and have the little red hen share the pizza with her friends because it’s the kind thing to do. I have discussions around accountability at work every day. When it comes to team projects, I suggest that managers set up project plans that include a clear end in mind, assign specific tasks to individuals with realistic deadlines, and hold people accountable when they don’t honor their commitments. Where does kindness come in?

There is a spectrum. At one end, there’s hard-core accountability with natural logic consequences, such as the little red hen not sharing the pizza with her friends because they wouldn’t help her. On the other end of the spectrum is enabling others to your detriment, such as if the little red hen were to feed her friends every day because she didn’t have the guts to say anything to them about their slacking behavior.

Of course, I give advice about how it’s a balance. You don’t have to be an enabler and let people get away with not following through on their commitments... You also don’t have to be so hard on people that you become unforgiving of unexpected circumstances that could de-rail the deadlines of a project.

If you had asked me, which is the better of the two, I would lean towards the unforgiving lest anyone thinks he or she can walk all over me. But, this is a situation in which mother does not know best. I like that my daughter would err on the side of kindness every time. There’s plenty of time for her to learn about the other side of the spectrum so I need to learn how to say, “cluck, cluck, cluck, you’re in luck!”