If you ever faced a personal crisis, you remember how unhelpful it was when a friend said “Let me know if I can help.”
Well-intentioned, but unhelpful. It just added on more task on your overwhelming list. What you needed was a friend who said “Our family is going out to dinner and we’ll take your kids along so you can have a couple hours of quiet time.”
At work, when your team is struggling to meet a critical objective (financial or otherwise), asking them to let you know if they need help is equally unhelpful. Unhelpful and potentially dangerous. They might think that you care about the objective but not about how they will meet it. What they need to hear from you is “Let’s get in the conference room and figure out exactly how we are going to meet this goal the right way.”
The Ethical Leader 