This article brings together historical lessons and proverbs which can be used to build leaders.

  1. Give someone enough rope, and they will hang themselves
  2. Trust, But Verify
  3. Cracking the Enigma cipher and deciding when to act

Give someone enough rope, and they will hang themselves

We should provide people with freedom to learn and experience, to make mistakes which teach valuable lessons. We must avoid micro-management and instill a sense of belonging and ownership.

But beware, being too loose and liberal may tip the scales towards failure. To avoid that:

доверяй, но проверяй: Trust, but verify

Trust, but verify - or more accurately trust, but check - is a rhyming Russian proverb made popular in English from Ronald Reagan who used it on multiple occasions during conversations with the Soviet Union on nuclear disarmament.

One of the first steps in leadership is trusting your people; serving and aiding them in getting things done. That said, trust should be balanced with the above proverb. We should indeed trust, but verify people have the right information and knowledge to make decisions or complete significant tasks; the higher the risk and or more disastrous the impact, the more we should verify.

Cracking Enigma

Enigma is a cypher device used by the German military before and during World War II, to encode sensitive messages being sent. This is one of the world’s most prominent uses of encryption to secure communications between forces.

It wasn’t until January 1944 that Colossus was devised, a code breaking machine which could decrypt the messages from Enigma revealing the secrets within.

Next came a game of information theory, if the UK acted on every piece of intelligence received, the Axis forces would know Enigma had been broken and would set about using other encryption devices and the Allied forces would lose their secret weapon - information. The UK forces had to decide which information should be acted on without raising suspicion from Germany. This become a powerful too which significantly changed the course of the war and was a closely guarded secret until the late 70s.

When we are building leaders, we want them to be equipped to handle situations and have enough experience to adapt to unfamiliar territory. Having already trodden the path we can share our experiences, our playbooks or what to expect in a given situation - but we should leave room for discovery.

A new leader may cope well with direct support, but over time it is preferable to attenuate the amount of support provided so the new leader can experience automomy as if there are no senior figures to lean on. This is a valuable lesson building resilliance, dealing with uncertainty and becoming comfortable being uncomfortable. This cannot be taught directly and staying too close to the new leader for too long can prevent them from reaching this new level of independence and self reliance.

Do not let the project fail. Do not watch whilst someone struggles to failure. Decide when intervention is required but do it privately, to maintain the new leader’s reputation.

Decide within the bounds of risk the lessons the new leader can be afforded, for them to live with their decisions and build trust in themselves.