Holding Principles Without Crushing Young People: The Cost of Standing in the Middle

There is a contradiction I had to live inside for years: hold the principles too tightly and the young people cannot breathe. Loosen them too far and the company turns into an unlimited playground for experiments. And I stood in the middle, with nowhere to duck.

Back when I was leading a team it often felt like guiding a group up a mountain in fog. They were young and strong, they wanted to run, to take a side path, to find a new trail. And I was not allowed to forget one very ordinary thing: I was the one holding the map and the compass, and I was responsible if the whole group got lost.

They saw a beautiful slope and wanted to charge up it. I saw the drop behind it. They saw an experience. I saw the numbers in the spreadsheet, the cash leaving every month, the termination emails if it went wrong, the faces that would have to walk out of the office with a cardboard box in their arms.

Principles are the frame that keeps the company from collapsing. But if all that is left is the frame, with no life in it, the company dies another way: slowly, short of air, until nobody wants to stay. Too rigid and it snaps. Too soft and it caves.

Young people need to try, to be wrong, to do things that look insane from outside. I know that, because I was once the one demanding to break every rule. The difference is that back then I was burning someone else's money. In that seat, if I let go completely, other people would pay the price with me.

The hard part was never setting the principles. The hard part is saying no without killing a spark. The hard part is pulling the brake at the right moment, not so early the car never gets up to speed, not so late it goes over the edge.

This is exactly where the person leading gets misread. When I said stop, the young ones usually thought I was afraid. Most of the time I was not afraid for me. I was afraid for them. I was afraid of having to say each of their names out loud and explain why there was no longer room for them after one magnificent failed experiment. That is the real price, paid in real people, not a few numbers on a slide.

There were stretches where I let them try. But I always kept a few very cold rules for myself.

I let people experiment at the edges, never at the core. Side products, new channels, sub-processes, all of that can be shaken and reversed. The thing that feeds the whole system I only changed once there was data and a way back. I let people experiment inside a limited budget, with a loss ceiling and a clear stopping point. And I let them experiment with responsibility attached: whoever demanded the right to try had to stand at the front and take the result, including a bad one. Freedom to experiment, no exemption from consequences.

Some of those conversations were tense. Ten at night in a small meeting room, the corridor lights already half off, nothing but cold white light on the table. A young colleague looking at me, asking: if you never dare to play big, how do you ever break through?

I looked back and asked the other way: if the breakthrough is paid for with the salaries of hundreds of people, would you sign the redundancy paperwork?

The question was not there to frighten anyone. It only pulled the conversation down from excitement to ground level. From the dream back to the spreadsheet. From a personal career back to a collective livelihood.

The loneliness of leading often comes from seeing a little further and having to accept being called conservative for a while longer. Young people need a win this week, this month. Back then I needed a company still standing in five years, in ten. They needed a chance to prove themselves. I needed an organisation that would not become an endless test site, where everyone rushes in to build something and leaves before they have to live with the consequences.

The price of holding the line is that sometimes you lose a few very good, very distinctive people. They want their own road, their own speed, their own level of risk. I respected that and let them go, knowing I had just traded away part of the organisation's capability.

The price of letting people try is accepting real scratches on the company's skin: a few projects on fire, a few ugly numbers, a few sleepless nights. I will not sweeten either side. Losing people hurts. Losing money hurts. Every road costs something. The only difference is whether you were conscious of the price before you signed.

But after enough years I noticed something: the people who stayed with me longest were usually the ones I had let try, who had stumbled, whom I had stopped at exactly the right moment. At first they were angry. Later, once they had to lead a group of their own, they understood what it feels like to count every unit of currency, to defuse one risk at a time, to carry a pile of expectations while keeping the structure from falling over.

They came back, not to thank me, but to talk with a different look in their eyes: less impulsive, more responsible. They started to see why some decisions get no applause and still have to be made.

I do not believe in a place where every idea gets cheered. I also do not believe in an organisation where everything is choked to death by an endless deck of process slides. When I was holding an organisation I chose the middle: firm enough not to cave, soft enough not to snap. Enough principle that I could still sleep at night. Enough room that a young person would still want to stay up late for something bigger than themselves. I work alone now, no meetings, no team, and that lesson is still with me.

If you are young you may find me slow, fussy, sometimes annoying. If you are leading, you may recognise part of that feeling of opening the door while keeping a hand on the handle.

And if one day you find yourself in the seat where you have to say yes or no to the next experiment, you may have to learn the same thing: how to hold your principles without choking the people behind you.

And if along the way you feel alone because you are always the one on the brake while everyone else wants the accelerator, it may simply be that you are playing your part correctly. It is the part that accepts the quiet costs, so that other people still have somewhere to stand and an organisation to come back to.