Are You Giving Them Responsibility or Helping Them Grow Into It?

What teaching children, training apprentices, and learning to lead taught me about stewardship.

Think back to the first time someone handed you a responsibility you weren’t sure you could carry.

Maybe your boss promoted you. Maybe you were asked to lead a team. Maybe you became a parent. Or maybe someone you admired looked at you and said, “I think you’re ready.”

You felt honored. Excited. Maybe a little proud.

And then the reality of what you’d agreed to started to sink in, and a quieter thought showed up right behind it.

What the hell have I gotten myself into?

Now think about what happened next.

Did someone help you learn what the job actually required? Show you how the work was done, let you practice, point out your mistakes without making you feel stupid about them? Or did they hand it over, pat you on the shoulder, and leave you to figure it all out alone?

I’ve lived both. And one of the most important lessons I ever learned about developing people started in 1995, when my Hapkido teacher asked me to do something I was absolutely certain I wasn’t ready for.

A Blue Belt and Twenty Kids

It was 1995, and I was a blue belt at Grandmaster Bong Soo Han’s school.

Still in the intermediate class. Still not even in the same room as the brown and red belts.

And one day, Grandmaster Han asked me to take over the children’s program.

I was stunned. Here was one of the most accomplished martial artists I’ve ever known, asking me to teach his students. A dozen of them on a good day, sometimes twenty. Some of them four years old.

At the time, I was also a relatively new journeyman electrician, and I was still learning how to pass on what little I knew to the apprentices on my jobsite. One apprentice at a time. One set of questions. That was already hard enough.

Now he wanted me in charge of a room full of small children.

If “humbled, overwhelmed, and a little scared” doesn’t quite cover it, I don’t know what would.

But I said yes.

And quietly, to myself, I made a promise.

Unless I was asked to leave, I’d give it three years. Because I figured the first year I was going to be bad at it. The second year, if I got lucky, I’d start to find my feet. By the third, maybe I’d be halfway decent.

That was my whole strategy. Three years to become competent enough that I might have some idea what I was doing.

Before you laugh, think about something you’ve taken on lately. How long did it actually take before you felt genuinely capable of it? And how much of it did you have to learn on your own, because nobody told you it was part of the job?

Try Teaching a Four-Year-Old to Punch

The first surprise came fast.

The simplest techniques were often the hardest to teach.

Take a basic drill. Step to the side and punch. That’s all it is. Step, punch. Later you might add a second punch, then a third.

To an adult who’s done martial arts for years, it looks like one simple movement. You demonstrate it, you explain it, everyone follows along.

Now do it with a room full of four-year-olds.

“Okay, everybody, raise your right hand.”

Half the class raises the left.

“No, your other right hand.”

They’re not being difficult. They’re looking at me and mirroring what I do, which is exactly what kids do. So now we’re working on which side is right. Then which foot moves, how far it goes, which way the body turns, when the punch lands, what the other hand does, where everyone should be looking, and how to do all of that without walking into the kid next to you.

Before I knew it, one “simple” movement had turned into more than a dozen separate little things, each of which had to happen in the right order.

And that was just stepping and punching. We hadn’t gotten to kicks yet. Or joint locks, partner drills, breakfalls, rolls, or sparring with its special brand of chaos.

It was hilarious sometimes. Frustrating other times. Educational all the time.

Because those kids forced me to face something I’d never really noticed before.

When you’ve known how to do something for years, you forget how much is actually in it.

You see one movement. The beginner sees a dozen unfamiliar instructions.

Now think about the grown person you’re trying to teach at work. Or your kid who can’t seem to get something you think is easy. Or the new hire who keeps asking questions you’ve already answered twice.

Are they being difficult? Are they not paying attention?

Or are you the one assuming they understand a dozen small steps you stopped noticing decades ago?

That one question changed how I taught, and it changed how I led.

The People Who Helped Me Become an Instructor

I knew I didn’t know how to teach children. So I went looking for people who did.

I talked to as many senior instructors as I could, especially the ones who’d actually taught kids.

One of them helped me more than most. Steve Barnett had taught children’s gymnastics back in Texas, and he taught me something simple that stuck.

Kids need to move.

They need activities, games, variety. You can’t stand a room full of small children in place for fifteen minutes while you explain the finer points of a technique. You keep them moving, and the movement itself is where the teaching happens.

That was a genuine eye-opener for me.

So I started studying teaching itself. One of the people I read was John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, famous for the almost obsessive care he put into planning practice. He used cards to organize the drills and lessons he wanted each session to cover.

I loved that idea, so I made my own deck.

Every card was a game, a drill, or an activity. And on each card, I wrote down what that activity was meant to build. Balance. Coordination. Timing. Movement. A specific Hapkido skill.

Suddenly I had a library I could shuffle and combine. I could build a class around one skill, change the games, adjust the difficulty, and keep the whole room moving while they actually got better.

And when something flopped, twenty bored children let me know about it immediately. They were the best feedback system I ever had.

Those three years were some of the busiest of my life on the mat (getting to the dojang around 3 and leaving around 8 or 9), and some of the happiest.

I was learning constantly, from senior instructors, from books, from my own mistakes, and from the kids themselves.

And here’s the part I want you to catch, because it’s the center of this whole thing.

I took initiative.

Nobody handed me my deck of cards.

Nobody made me study Wooden.

The three-year promise was mine and mine alone.

But I also had something to lean on. A school where I’d watched instructors assist, learn, and take on responsibility little by little. People I could ask. Examples I could follow.

That combination, my own drive plus a place that helped me grow into the work, is what development actually looks like.

Here’s Your Promotion. Figure It Out.

Now imagine the other version of that story.

Grandmaster Han asks me to take over the program. I say yes. Someone points me toward the empty room.

No guidance. No experienced people to learn from. No feedback. No gradual preparation. Just responsibility, alone.

I’ve heard that phrase my whole working life and at some other martial art gyms, and it makes me cringe.

Because I saw it constantly during my thirty-five years in electrical construction and less-organized martial arts schools.

Someone is a genuinely good electrician. They work hard, solve problems, show up, get the job done. Management notices. Congratulations, you’re a foreman. Here’s your crew, here are the prints, here’s the schedule. Figure it out.

But nobody necessarily taught that person how to run a crew. How to plan and sequence the work. How to coordinate with the other trades. How to estimate labor or develop an apprentice or talk to management when something goes sideways.

Being a great electrician and being a great foreman are different jobs. They use different skills.

And here’s the thing most of us already know but seldom say out loud: the jump from doing to leading is one of the most under-taught moves in any trade.

The same is true on the mat. Performing a beautiful technique doesn’t mean you can teach it. Winning a tournament doesn’t mean you can coach somebody else. A black belt doesn’t come with a hidden lecture on classroom management woven into the fabric.

Yet time and again, we take someone who’s proven good at one thing and hand them a totally different thing, then act surprised when they stumble.

Did anybody actually prepare them for it?

The Bigger Puddle

Here’s a pattern I watched play out over and over.

Someone gets promoted with almost no preparation. They struggle. But they’re resourceful, or they find a mentor on their own, or they just work twice as hard and out-grind the problem.

And they survive.

Management sees a person who survived. So they hand that person a bigger job. More people. More complexity. More at stake.

They survived the puddle, so let’s see how they do in the pond. And if the pond doesn’t drown them, let’s try the ocean.

Eventually you reach a job where grit and the tricks that used to work aren’t enough anymore.

This is close to what’s called the Peter Principle: the idea that people tend to be promoted for how well they did their previous job, until they reach a role that exceeds them.

But before we decide someone “wasn’t cut out for it,” I think there’s a fairer question to ask.

Did anybody actually prepare them?

Sometimes the answer is that the person genuinely lacks the aptitude, or the interest, and no amount of training will necessarily change that. That happens. Not everyone wants to manage or teach, and they shouldn’t have to.

But sometimes a capable person is drowning for a much simpler reason.

They were never taught.

We confuse a lack of preparation with a lack of potential all the time. And here’s the corollary, the one that stung me the most: surviving a hard assignment doesn’t prove someone was led well.

Survival isn’t the same as development.

Stewardship Means Building Capability, Not Just Handing It Over

This is where Stephen Covey’s writing about what he called stewardship delegation finally made sense to me.

The idea, boiled way down, is that you don’t just hand someone a job and walk away.

You give them a clear picture: what result you’re actually after, what guidelines matter, what resources they’ve got, how accountability will work, and what the consequences are.

That doesn’t mean dictating every little action. It means creating the conditions where someone can take real responsibility and actually use their own judgment.

And it lines up exactly with what I’d already learned on the mat and on the jobsite.

Think about the path a beginner instructor actually travels.

At first they watch a more experienced teacher. Then they assist with demonstrations. Then they supervise a small group. Then they lead a short piece of class. Then, eventually, the whole lesson is theirs.

Each stage widens their capability. And as the competence grows, the authority and the independence grow right along with it.

That’s stewardship. Helping someone become capable of carrying a responsibility, rather than handing it over without preparing them.

But here’s the counterweight, and both sides of it matter.

The amount of support can’t stay the same forever. A brand-new hire needs detailed instruction and close supervision. An experienced person might need little more than the objective, the boundaries, and an occasional check-in.

Treat them both the same way and one of them drowns while the other one is being smothered.

A brand-new person given too much freedom feels abandoned. A veteran given too much direction feels micromanaged. The skill is knowing which is which, and adjusting as the person grows.

Give people enough support to succeed, and enough freedom to grow.

The Simple Sequence I Learned as an Apprentice

There’s a teaching progression I picked up during my own apprenticeship that I wish I’d seen used ten times more often than I did.

It goes like this.

I do it, and you watch. I demonstrate, you observe, you ask questions, I explain what I’m doing and why.

We do it together. Now you’re in it, and I’m guiding. I help you catch the mistakes while they’re cheap.

You do it, and I watch. Now you’re doing the work, I’m observing, and I give feedback until it’s solid.

Then, when you’ve shown you can, you do it on your own within the boundaries we’ve agreed on.

Simple. So simple it’s almost embarrassing to write down. But watch how often people skip steps two and three altogether.

We demonstrate once. Then we expect the person to have it. Or we don’t even demonstrate. We just assign the task and then wonder what’s wrong with them when it comes back wrong.

Maybe nothing’s wrong with them. Maybe they were never actually taught.

Remember my four-year-olds. “Raise your right hand.” “Your other right hand.”

If I couldn’t assume a room full of small children knew which hand was right when they were mirroring me, how can I assume an adult knows how to do a thing they’ve never done, just because I showed them once?

Adults have more experience, and better body awareness, and more tools to figure things out. But they still hit tasks they’ve never performed. They still need to be taught.

Handing someone a responsibility doesn’t install the skills to carry it.

That’s what teaching is for.

Knowing When to Step Back

Now the other side, because it’s easy to overcorrect.

You can give too much support.

If you keep telling someone exactly how to do every task long after they’ve shown they know how, you’ll stop them from ever developing judgment. Every decision runs back through you. They hesitate. They wait. They ask permission for things they should be deciding themselves. And before long, you’re the bottleneck.

That’s a failure too, just a quieter one.

When I was running crews, I didn’t want people depending on me for every small call. I wanted them to understand what we were trying to accomplish, see problems coming, think through options, and make sound decisions inside their authority. And I wanted them to know when something was big enough that it needed another set of eyes.

Same with the kids. The whole point was for them to walk out of that class more capable than they walked in, needing me a little less each week.

And one day, if I’d done my job, they could do it without me. Maybe even better than me.

That’s the most satisfying part of teaching there is. Watching something that once looked impossible become ordinary for somebody else.

Are You Helping Them Grow?

Bring it back to your own life for a second.

Maybe you’re a parent teaching your kid something new. Maybe you’re a manager developing someone for more. Maybe you’re a coach, or an instructor, or just the person everyone seems to come to for help.

Or maybe you’re the one who just got promoted, and you’re trying to figure out how not to drown.

Either way, give yourself an honest answer to one question.

What would real preparation and support actually look like here?

Not just encouragement, not “I believe in you,” though those are nice. The practical kind. Clear expectations. Chances to practice. Access to people who know more than you. Feedback that tells you the truth. Authority that matches whatever your current capability can be trusted with. And room to make a mistake without it becoming a disaster.

If you’re the leader, some of that responsibility sits with you. If you’re the learner, you may have to go out and find the support you need instead of waiting for it to arrive.

That’s what I did in 1995. I asked. I studied. I built tools. I practiced. I made mistakes. I kept showing up.

My own effort mattered enormously.

But so did the fact that there were experienced people around me I could learn from. Both sides have to show up. Development happens in the space between a teacher creating the conditions and a learner doing the work.

A Blue Belt, All These Years Later

I still think about 1995.

A blue belt. Still in the intermediate class. A fresh journeyman. And a room full of children who needed somebody to teach them Hapkido.

I remember how unprepared I felt. I remember the promise I made to myself about three years. The games, the index cards, the senior instructors who helped me along. And trying to explain to a four-year-old which hand was their right hand while they looked straight at me and got it beautifully wrong.

Those years were some of the busiest I’ve ever spent on a mat, and some of the most fun.

I learned a lot about martial arts in that room. I learned more about teaching, and about patience, and about myself.

But the lesson that’s stayed with me longest is this one.

Having faith in someone’s potential is the beginning. Helping them actually develop that potential is the work of leadership.

A new responsibility can be a gift. It stretches a person in ways nothing else does.

But handing over the opportunity is only half the job.

The rest is helping them grow into it.

⚔️ The Dojo Drill: Are You Growing People or Just Assigning Work?

Think of one person you’re responsible for teaching, coaching, or developing. Or a responsibility you’ve recently taken on yourself.

Then answer three questions.

1. What capability still needs to develop?

What does doing this well actually require? What knowledge, skill, or judgment is the person still missing?

2. What support would genuinely help?

A clearer demonstration? Shared practice? Honest feedback? A mentor? Better resources? A clearer picture of what “done” looks like?

3. What independence have they earned?

Where do they still need guidance? Where can they start deciding on their own? And where might it be time for you to step back?

Then pick one small action and do it this week. Teach a skill. Offer feedback. Set up a chance to practice. Or hand someone a small decision and let them carry it.

The goal isn’t just to get the work done.

It’s to leave someone behind who’s more capable of doing it without you.

That’s stewardship.

And sometimes it starts with nothing more complicated than helping a four-year-old find their other right hand.

📚 From the Leader’s Library

​Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders — L. David Marquet​

Why?

Most people spend their lives waiting for instructions, following expectations, or repeating habits they’ve never questioned. But Marquet challenges us to think differently: stop being a passive follower and start taking responsibility for the direction of our own lives.

Turn the Ship Around! tells the remarkable story of how a Navy captain transformed the culture of a struggling submarine by replacing blind obedience with initiative, competence, and shared responsibility. Through the simple but powerful phrase “I intend to…”, Marquet shows how leadership can develop at every level.

It’s a reminder that personal leadership isn’t about having all the answers or holding a position of authority. It’s about learning to think for yourself, making deliberate decisions, and developing the courage and competence to steer your own course.