One boss told me to stop fixing people's mistakes, now I'm split on whether that's good advice

At my last job in Tulsa, my manager pulled me aside after a group project went sideways. She said 'you keep covering for Sarah and Mark, so they never learn. Let them fail.' I took that to heart and backed off. Next deadline, Sarah turned in a draft with the wrong client name in it, my name was on the cover email. I got an earful. So now I'm stuck: do I jump in and fix stuff so the team looks good, or do I let people own their mess and hope the boss notices who actually did the work? I've been doing the let-them-fail thing for 3 weeks and it's made things stressful, but she did say it would get worse before it got better. Has anyone else gotten this kind of feedback and actually stuck with it? Or did you end up going back to just quietly saving everyone's bacon?

2 comments

2 Comments

colegarcia12d agoMost Upvoted

Learned that lesson the hard way, now I just fix everything and take the blame like a champ.

the_drew12d ago

Read a piece about this a while back, a management blog or something. The gist was that if you always fix the mistake, you're training your coworkers to be careless because they know you'll catch it. But it also said that you should never put your name on something you didn't check, that's your own dumb move. So maybe the real lesson is different: stop covering for people, but also stop signing off on their work until it's actually done right.