I’m not going to hand somebody a major decision on day one and hope they get it right. You start with smaller decisions—things that have less impact, can be corrected if they go wrong, and aren’t going to create a safety issue.

But I’m not just watching whether they made the right call. I’m watching what they do after they make it.

You can’t make a decision and walk away from it. You have to watch it unfold. What happened because of that decision? What’s happening two or three steps down the line? Is it still working the way you thought it would? If it starts going sideways, do you recognize it and make an adjustment, or do you just keep going because that was the original decision?

That’s how I find out how somebody thinks.

As they consistently demonstrate good judgment, follow their decisions through, and understand the bigger picture, I’ll give them more room to make bigger decisions.

And sometimes they’re going to be wrong. That alone doesn’t bother me. If you’re developing people who make decisions, eventually somebody is going to make the wrong one. Own it. Tell me what happened. Tell me what you learned. Then we fix it and move forward.

Where you lose that freedom with me is when you lie about it, hide something, blame somebody else, or refuse to own the decision you made. A bad decision can usually be corrected. Once I can’t trust you to tell me the truth about it, we’ve got a much bigger problem.

And there’s nothing wrong with saying, “Before you make this one, call me.” Sometimes the next step in developing somebody isn’t taking the decision away from them. It’s talking through it with them until they’re ready to make that call on their own.