Many of us show up to work with clear ideas about what success looks like. For most of us, unfortunately, we do not articulate our definitions of “quality” and “success” explicitly to our teams, and most importantly, to ourselves. And our teams do not have a secret decoder ring that they can use to decode what we are thinking. This secret decoder ring is really a metaphor to describe the ways knowledge, meaning, and we would argue, power, is hidden in the workplace. Having a secret decoder ring means you have the “tool” to decode the information and power that is being transmitted throughout a variety of professional interactions. So why do we share with some colleagues/direct reports and not others? What should leaders do instead?

I had the opportunity to talk with a senior executive struggling with her relationship with her leader who was constantly correcting minor errors, spending inordinate amounts of time on small details in her project plans, and most recently, her leader took over a cross-functional meeting she was delegated to lead. The reasons for this “hostile takeover” (my words, not hers) were that the materials were not strong and the meeting was high stakes. In short, her leader was engaging in overcorrection.

When a leader responds to a mistake, problem, imbalance, or concern by taking a bold action, seen by many as excessive, and resulting in the creation of new problems, complexities, and issues, we call this an overcorrection.

Like many of you, my leadership training reinforced the idea that change could be planned, managed, and measured—that if I built a thoughtful plan, people would move through each stage in sequence and success was more likely. Buy-in and momentum would build over time.

But organizations today require something different. And while systems are shifting, people are too. Employees are navigating the same uncertainty—grappling with exhaustion, rising costs of living, job insecurity, and questions of purpose and belonging. The ground keeps shifting beneath individuals and institutions, making the old playbooks feel obsolete.

Managing isn’t just for managers. Matter of fact, at some point in your career, you have come across managers who manage, managers who lead, some who balance both, and likely some who do neither. While you’ve been honing your skills, preparing for the next steps on your career journey, and growing your capacity, you keep running into people who seem to have skipped the honing, preparing, and growing and seemingly out of nowhere, just became a manager. And now, they’re your manager.

So, what do you do? Stay out of the way? Focus on your own work? Vent to colleagues? Manage up?