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.