Last week I came home to be met by this view:
My daughter and her friends had decided to bake a cake and things went, well, out of hand. We spent almost two hours cleaning up the kitchen afterwards. And they threw away the cake.
I could have done that cake in 30 minutes. That would have saved me 1,5 hours, and the kids would have eaten cake. But it’s ok. They are just kids, and they need to be given autonomy and try things out their own way in order to grow. The long-term benefit for me is clear – waking up late on a Sunday morning to the smell of a fresh cake straight from the oven.
I hope all parents agree with me so far. But what if we were having people over for dinner that evening? Would it still be ok? And does it matter who were coming over – is it a difference between the parents-in-law or your new colleague?
In work-life, we have an instinct to avoid failure at any cost. Many leaders take care of this by baking the cake themselves. By doing so, however, they never allow for others to learn, to take lead and try things out. If you want to build leaders, if you want to build autonomy, you have to start with trust. You have to learn to live with a little failure now and then.
The key then, is understanding who comes to dinner. When can you allow for growth (and potential failure), and when do you need to bake the cake yourself?
kombine.blog 
Oh boy… I was 8 years old and I took this receipt which included 1/3 cup of sugar. For me it read like 1 to 3 cups. So, why not go with 3, it’s gonna be awesome! Keeping in mind how precious sugar was back then in communism I still don’t quite get why my mother did not decide to dismiss me 😀
In theory it feels so easy. Let others fail to earn their own learning. They won’t repeat it (yeah….). But when the stakes are high and your own reputation is on the table, it’s much more difficult to let it go. Then the question is: how to find the right balance between letting others fail and protecting them? What measures do you take?