Great Leaders are quiet
A good manager is an expert in the work their team does. An excellent manager knows that this expertise is often best kept in the background.
This is about giving people space to make mistakes, learn, and grow. It is also about recognizing that there is rarely a single “right” way to do something.
Before giving feedback, it helps to pause and ask: how important is this, really?
🛑 If it is important on a fundamental level — it affects core quality, ethics, safety, or key business outcomes — then it absolutely needs to be addressed.
🚏 If the comment is mostly about how you personally would have done it differently, it may be better left unsaid.
In that second scenario, feedback can easily generate more resistance and frustration than value. The employee has already invested time, effort, and emotional energy into the work — and then hears that “it’s all wrong.” Repeat that once or twice, and they quickly learn that whatever they do will be rejected and redone anyway. At that point, motivation and ownership drop sharply.
Allowing people to “mess up” a couple of times, within reasonable boundaries, creates powerful learning opportunities. Those missteps can then be debriefed together: what happened, what can be improved, and what should be done differently next time. The hardest part for many leaders is loosening their grip on control just enough to let that process happen — but that is often where real development, trust, and long-term performance begin.
