Policies are created for fairness and to prevent people from taking advantage of the company’s trust in them. What they are explicitly not designed to do is prevent sensible utilization of resources that the policy might seemingly disallow. This is why any good manager will approve exceptions to the policy-principle when you can clearly articulate the supplementary principle that warrants it.
Managers that tend to enforce policy without exception, only do so because they either do not understand the principles governing the policy (to understand where the policy helps and where it is likely to repeatedly fail to benefit teams it applies to) or feel a limited sense of autonomy. Of course another common failure state occurs within the multilayered dysfunctional org where the different layers between policy makers and policy enforcers can’t state the principles consistently.
