You’ve done everything the modern leadership books told you to do.

You stopped micromanaging.
You gave your team ownership.
You “empowered” them to find their own solutions.

So why does it feel like you're just watching them waste time?
Shouldn't “letting them fail” feel like progress?

It’s certainly not because your team isn’t smart. And it’s not because you’re a control freak.

It’s because you’ve been sold a false binary.

Most leaders bounce between Control (which burns you out) and Empowerment (which freaks you out).

Of the two, empowerment is often glorified:
​“Fail fast. Learn from mistakes. Create psychological safety.”

It sounds enlightened. It sounds brave.

But in practice, it tends to create chaos and frustration. Because not all mistakes are created equal. There is a massive difference between:

• A learning mistake: trying a bold new approach that might not work
• A guessing mistake: flying blind because you don‘t know the rules of the game

The first one builds expertise. While the second one just burns time.

But there is a third option. I call it “Lighting the Path.” Let’s compare it to the other two:

1. Control means “Don‘t make mistakes.”
   The result: Your team waits for orders. You become the bottleneck.
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2. Empowerment means “Make any mistake you want.”
   The result: Your team guesses blindly. You clean up the mess.
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3. Lighting the Path means “Don‘t make blind mistakes. Make brilliant ones.”
   The result: Your team acts with your intuition. You scale your impact.

When you “empower” your team without giving them context, you force them to repeat every mistake you‘ve already made. You make them re-solve problems you solved five years ago. You ask them to reinvent the wheel just to prove they‘re “independent thinkers.”

That isn‘t growth. That‘s waste.

Now, I’m obviously not arguing to protect your team from failure. The point is to protect them from boring failure.

Lighting the Path means exactly that. Giving your team the context, the criteria, and the mental models they need to make interesting mistakes on new problems rather than dumb mistakes on old ones.

It means saying: “Here‘s what I‘ve learned. Here‘s how I think about this. Now go further than I did.”

This is why communication sits at the center of modern leadership. It’s the best way to multiply your impact. By articulating – clearly, repeatedly, and memorably – the thinking behind your decisions.

Not the decisions themselves. The thinking.

When you do that, your team stops guessing what you want. They start seeing what you see. They stop wasting cognitive energy trying to read your mind, and they start using that energy to solve problems you haven‘t even thought of yet.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

If you’ve been wrestling with this for months … You’ve trusted your team. You’ve given them the benefit of the doubt. Let them fail. Communicated the strategy again and again and again … But you’re still doing your team’s job for them, maybe it’s time for the next step.
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I’ve opened up a few spots in “The Leader’s Path” coaching program. It’s for leaders who want to light the path, not just lead the way. Here’s more. Or simply reply to this mail.