Napoleon said: never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.
But in the workplace — be honest — most of the time the ’enemy’ is just a colleague having a rough morning, a project that quietly went off the rails, or your laptop that simply decided today wasn’t its day.
And yet the lesson still holds, provided you apply it on ethical grounds.
I’ve noticed that leadership, more often than not, isn’t about immediately correcting what you perceive as a mistake — it’s about giving situations room to breathe and develop.
Sometimes you discover that a team member needed the space to experiment and learn something new.
Other times you find that a system had to break down completely before the organisation could finally accept it was long overdue for replacement.
Always stepping in might look like efficiency. It rarely builds autonomy. And it quietly kills the sense of delegation and trust that allows the people around you to grow — and your business to scale.