Don’t Take The Wand!

I recently volunteered at the Fall Fest at my kids’ school.  It’s an evening of carnival games, food trucks, and costumes for the kids.  I was assigned the “Zap a Mole” station, which was an inflatable version of whack-a-mole where two contestants would compete for 45 seconds to see who could “zap” the most targets when they lit up with the corresponding color of their wand.

The kids loved swatting the little inflatable targets and challenging each other to see who could get the highest score.  I noticed something interesting though when the smaller kids would come up to play.  Parents would sometimes lift them up to help them hit more targets or point out which targets to hit.  But more often than not, the parents eventually started hitting the targets themselves, taking over the game.  

At first I thought the parents were just getting caught up in the fun, and I'm sure some of them were. But as I watched some of them get competitive in trying to beat the child on the other side, I started to think about how often we do the same thing as leaders.

Fall Fest 2026 | Anthony Officiating the Zap-A-Mole Station!

Someone on our team is struggling, so we jump in to help. We have more experience. We can probably do it faster. And sometimes we're convinced we're helping them by taking something off their plate. But there's a difference between giving someone the support they need to succeed and taking over the task and doing it for them.

These situations start with good intentions. We want the company to succeed, we want to be helpful, we want someone to win. At some point though helping can start to stunt someone else’s growth.

Seeing someone struggle is never easy, but sometimes it’s necessary. Most growth I’ve experienced came because I wasn’t very good the first time. I struggled to figure out how to do something, how to communicate, or how to make a decision in uncharted territory. But I kept going, trying things, seeing what worked, what didn’t and ultimately getting better along the way.

Leadership is about helping others grow, not doing the work for them. The problem is that the process is extremely inefficient! It takes a lot of patience, which means being willing to watch someone do something differently, slower, or maybe even worse than you would have done it while they figure it out for themselves. It also takes trust that you are investing in the right person, and it takes the ability to know when helping becomes enabling.

Those younger kids needed a boost so they could reach the targets. They might have needed someone to point them in the right direction. What they didn't need was someone else holding the wand.

I encourage you to reflect on how often you take the wand from someone on your team.