The Correction Reflex
One afternoon, Sage and I were working on a new exercise. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but it was unfamiliar to her, which meant she was in that wonderful stage of learning where she was trying things out. She watched me closely, offered a behavior, checked my reaction, and then tried something else. You could almost see her working through the problem in real time.
At one point, she made a choice that was close to what I wanted but not quite right. I recognized the mistake immediately. Years of training dogs and managing people have a way of sharpening your eye for those things. I could see exactly where she had gone off course and exactly how to correct it. The temptation to step in was strong. A quick correction would have saved time and moved us directly toward the right answer.
Instead, I stayed quiet.
Sage looked at me for a moment and then looked back at what she had done. When no correction came, she began working through the problem herself. She adjusted slightly, paused, and adjusted again. Within a minute, she arrived at the behavior I had been looking for all along. The difference was subtle but important. She hadn’t followed a correction. She had solved a problem.
That distinction stayed with me because I had seen the same thing happen throughout my career. Whether in factories, project teams, military organizations, or corporate offices, there always seems to be a moment when someone takes initiative and gets something slightly wrong. A supervisor notices. A manager notices. An experienced employee notices. The mistake is obvious, and so is the solution. The natural response is to step in immediately and fix it.
Most of us convince ourselves that we’re helping when we do that. In many cases, we are. The correction is usually accurate. The experienced person often knows a better way. The problem isn’t that the correction is wrong. The problem is that constant correction teaches an unintended lesson.
People begin learning that initiative carries risk.
When every decision is refined by someone else, people stop investing themselves in their own judgment. When every action is corrected before it can play out, they stop experimenting. Over time, they learn that the safest approach is not to think less but to show less. They wait for direction. They stay within proven boundaries. They become careful in ways that managers often mistake for discipline.
The same thing happens with dogs. A dog that receives correction for every imperfect attempt eventually stops offering new behaviors. It becomes cautious. It watches for clues. Instead of trying to solve the problem, it begins trying to avoid being wrong. From the outside, that can look like obedience, but something valuable has been lost. Curiosity has been replaced by caution.
People respond much the same way. They don’t stop caring. They don’t stop thinking. What they stop doing is taking ownership. Why would they? Every meaningful decision eventually gets pulled back into someone else’s hands.
The strongest employees I ever worked with were not necessarily the ones who made the fewest mistakes. More often, they were the people who had been allowed to recover from small mistakes. They had developed judgment by exercising it. They learned to recognize problems because they had experienced the consequences of their decisions and adjusted accordingly. The lesson became theirs, not something borrowed from a supervisor standing over their shoulder.
That realization eventually changed the way I viewed leadership. The question was no longer whether I could improve someone’s decision. In many cases, I could. The better question was whether improving it right now was worth the cost. Sometimes it was. Safety issues require intervention. Serious quality problems require intervention. Situations with significant consequences require intervention. But many small mistakes are simply tuition payments for learning.
A good handler learns to recognize the difference. So does a good leader.
When they see an imperfect decision, they ask themselves a simple question: Will this break something, or build something? If it will break something, they step in. If it will build something, they allow it to happen, even when doing so feels uncomfortable.
That restraint can be difficult. Leaders often pride themselves on having answers. Yet capability rarely develops because someone always has the answer. Capability develops because someone is given enough room to discover answers for themselves.
I still think about Sage standing there that afternoon, working through the problem without my help. Had I corrected her immediately, she would have complied. Instead, she learned. The behavior became hers because she owned the discovery.
That’s a lesson I’ve seen repeated countless times in both dogs and people. Confidence grows when individuals are trusted with enough space to try, miss, adjust, and succeed. The goal is not perfection. The goal is capability. And capability is rarely created.
Enter your text here...
0 comments