When I asked my coaching client what they were most interested in talking about today during their coaching call, she immediately responded, “I need to give feedback to someone on my team and this team member does not take feedback well.” In my head I thought, “Do you give feedback well?” but I did not say that. Instead, I said, “This is a great topic to dig into because each time you give feedback, you learn a lot about the other person, but most importantly, you learn the most about yourself.”

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.