English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
What may be a less morbid equivalent of the idiom "Giving someone enough rope to hang himself"?
In other words, an idiom for empowering someone with a capability that they might, through ignorance, misuse to self-detrimental effect.
The motivation for an alternative is the professional setting, where it's not appropriate to allude to suicide!
More of a phrase than an idiom, but...
set someone up to fail / set someone up for failure
From Wikipedia (I know, I know... but it's the best source I could find):
Setting up to fail is a well-established workplace bullying tactic.[6][7][8] One technique is to overload with work, while denying the victim the authority to handle it and over-interfering;[9] another is the withholding of the information necessary to succeed.[10]
If a person puts another individual (usually a subordinate) in a stressful situation in which failure is almost certain, this may be an aspect of bullying wherein the outcome can then be used to discredit and blame the victim.[11] Sometimes, this may involve the bully covertly sabotaging and undermining an objective that may have otherwise been achievable. This type of bullying may be the result of the projection of the bully's own feelings of inadequacy onto the victim.[12]
There can be cases where an employee is set up to fail because the stated goals of the task are considered harmful to the organization; an internal investigation is one example. Institutions may protect themselves by "going through the motions" of a sham investigation in which the findings conveniently fail to find any evidence of wrongdoing by the authorities involved with setting up the investigation.
From the Harvard Business Review:
That was specifically about employees and bosses, but it's possible for parents/children, co-workers, teammates... any number of relationships. Even yourself!
This phrase is used for a range of things, so I don't think you'll find an exact equivalent for all the usages.
The one phrase that comes the closest, but is still fairly violent (though not exactly morbid, I guess) is: let him shoot himself in the foot. This captures the sense of "rather than fight about it and drag things on, just give him the autonomy he wants, he'll fail quickly, and we can move on."
But it's missing the sense of actively feeding them rope to hang themselves with. And if the rope metaphor is objectionable, this is not likely to be an improvement.
Give somebody the freedom to make mistakes or give somebody the space to make mistakes.
These are often used in the context of management and education. It's a bit nicer than talking about hanging (or shooting oneself in the foot).
Amy Rees Anderson wrote in Forbes: "As a business leader, I found that one of the scariest things to do was to give your people the freedom to make mistakes." (Amy Rees Anderson, "Good Employees Make Mistakes. Great Leaders Allow Them To.", Forbes, April 17, 2013)
Graeme Richardson wrote something similar in The Guardian: "But universities, it seems to me, are a good place for making mistakes; and the freedom which is a university's soul includes the freedom to make mistakes." (Graeme Richardson, "A university's soul is the freedom to make mistakes", The Guardian, Oct 22, 2010)
Jack Kornfield claims Gandhi said "Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes." I don't know if Gandhi said this, but it's still a good maxim. (Jack Kornfield, "Freedom to make mistakes", Jack Kornfield blog)
These are neutral expressions, a lot more positive than "give someone the rope to hang themselves", which recognise that sometimes making mistakes are the best way to learn. If you say "give someone the rope to hang themselves" or similar expressions about "shooting themselves in the foot" you appear to expect the person to do something stupid, or even to gloat about it.
It's not really a set phrase, but a pretty good swap in would be: give someone shoelaces long enough to trip themselves with.
Not so morbid, not particularly violent. And most people will recognise it as a variation of the original and take it to have largely the same meaning. It does miss the nuance that most people are not asking for longer shoelaces, but with the original phrase I think the assumption is that they are happy to have more rope.
Came here looking for an answer to this exact question and found the top-voted response to be missing a critical component of the original, which is the increase in freedom and flexibility.
So possibly:
Give someone “room to run with it.”
As I have already implied in my comment, I see nothing morbid about “giving someone enoucgh rope to hang themselves”, and I do not think there is an exact equivalent.
However a form of anodyne words to convey the requirements of the poster using an idiomatic expression, might be
To encourage someone to bite off more than he can chew
This differs from a straight idiom-for-idiom equivalence, in that my addition of “to encourage” is needed to cover the act of “giving”, satisfying the poster’s “empowering” (his words, not mine). His reference to “a capacity”, expressed by “enough rope” in the original idiom, implies surplus capacity — a limited amount of rope would be enough, but more is given to allow “misuse to self-detrimental effect” (in the words of the poster). I would suggest that “more than he can chew” embodies the same idea of “surplus capacity” (“capability” in the words of the poster) with the “self-detrimental effect” being merely implied — indigestion? choking? embarassment at having to spit the meat out? — but clearly there.
(unless the act of chewing is considered vulgar with its association with gum). is just being unnecessarily sarcastic and catty. Now, if it had been witty that would be a separate matter.
Dec 5, 2018 at 11:30