Are you clarifying or correcting?

I used to think I was holding a high standard. I was actually just correcting everything before anyone else got the chance to. This week I'm looking at the flip side of last week's rescuing trap: the critical, controlling default that feels like leadership but is really about control, and what it costs your team when you rewrite instead of ask.

Key takeaways:

Correcting everyone's work feels good because it feels like being right, but it's the same default as rescuing, just wearing a different disguise This trap is harder to spot than rescuing because it doesn't feel like control, it feels like protecting the standard

Three signs you're in it: you rewrite instead of ask, feedback turns into a redo instead of a conversation, and people check with you before they act on things they shouldn't need to check The real cost isn't your time, it's your team's confidence, and you end up doing everyone's job behind them as well

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/GYNwgk_zZJ0 

Read the blog: https://www.edgeofpossibilities.com.au/blog/how-to-hold-high-standards-without-micromanaging-your-team 

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Transcript: Are you clarifying or correcting?

I used to think that I was holding a high standard, really. I was just correcting everything before anyone else got the chance to. A report would land on my desk and I'd rewrite half of it before it even went out. Or we'd be in a meeting and someone would make a call, and then I'd quietly override it ten minutes later.

I told myself it was about quality, and maintaining high quality and high standards, about doing things properly. But here's what I didn't want to admit: it wasn't about the standard. It was all about control. And that's the trap I want to talk about today, because it's the flip side of what we covered last week.

Last week was about rescuing, answering everyone's questions for them because it just felt good to have all the answers, and I felt like as a leader that was what was required. This week it's the other side of that coin: correcting everyone's work for them because it feels good to be right, and it feels like as a leader we should be right.

Psychologically they're both the same default. Last week was the soft, rescuing parent. This week is the critical, controlling parent. Sometimes we can be a bit of both. And this is a much harder trap to see yourself in, because it doesn't feel like control, it feels like leadership.

You tell yourself that you're protecting the standard. You tell yourself this team just doesn't see the detail that you see. Meanwhile, what's actually happening is your team stops bringing you their best thinking. They start bringing you the safest version of the work instead, the version least likely to get picked apart. They stop taking initiative, because initiative gets corrected, and correction, even well meant, feels like failure.

So here's three signs that you're in it. See if any of these land with you. You rewrite instead of ask. Feedback turns into a redo, not a conversation. And people check with you before they act on things they shouldn't need to check.

Over time you end up with a team that waits. Waits for your sign off, waits for your version, waits to be told exactly how instead of being trusted with what. And you end up exhausted, because now you're not just leading, you're doing everyone's job behind them as well. That's the real cost, not just your time. Their confidence.

So what does it look like to hold genuinely high standards without controlling every single step? It starts with a shift in what you're actually correcting. Stop correcting the method. Start clarifying the outcome. Tell your team exactly what good looks like, the actual standard, in plain language, before the work starts, not after, when it's already done and it feels like a personal failure to fix it. Then let them find their own way there.

If the outcome is wrong, it's a real coaching conversation. If the method's just different to yours, that's not a mistake, that's someone else's way of getting to the same place. Ask yourself, before you touch someone's work: is this actually wrong, or is it just not how I would have done it? Those are two very different problems, and only one of them is yours to fix.

You know, the leaders I respect most hold an incredibly high bar. But they hold it on the outcome, not on the method, and their teams know exactly where that bar is, because it's being said out loud, not just corrected into existence way after the fact.

So have you been getting caught in this one too? Not rescuing this time, but correcting, holding the standard so tightly that no one else ever gets a chance to meet it their own way.