Correct without wounding

A stockroom clerk shelves it wrong for the third time. A driver logs the stop in the wrong column again. The junior on your shift hands you a report with the same error you flagged last week. Something in you wants to make them feel it — to let the sigh land, to say it in front of others so it sticks. The mistake is real. The urge to punish it is a separate thing, and it's the one that does the damage.

The good colleague corrects. They just don't wound while they do it. Cicero, who had no illusions about difficult people, drew the line exactly: "nothing more becoming in a pre-eminently great man than courtesy and forbearance," and if correction must be given, "it need not be insulting" (De Officiis 1.88, Miller). Fix the work without bruising the person. Both can be done in the same breath; it only takes deciding to.

This is justice at close range — the calibration the whole week turns on. You will be the one who has to point out the error a hundred times in a working life. Each time you get to choose whether the person walks away corrected or just smaller.