As leaders, we say we want our people to be empowered to go out and make decisions. We say we’re OK with them making mistakes, and we’ll still support them making decisions on their own. But not really.

I’m lucky to have a huge leadership lab in the form of the SmartBrief on Leadership weekly pulse poll. Every week I ask a leadership-related question, and thousands of people respond to those polls. Sometimes I get a little sneaky and conduct my own experiments for a few weeks. I conducted one of these experiments recently.

First I asked, “Would you rather have a team member make decisions and make mistakes, or make no decisions and leave that up to you?”

Unsurprisingly, all us empowering leaders were eager to give our team members the latitude to make decisions and make mistakes: 96% of respondents said they’d rather have a team member make a decision even if they make mistakes. A measly 4% of respondents wanted the team to leave all decisions up to them.

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