Would You Rather Be Right or Get Better?

Someone questions your decision. They haven’t finished speaking, but you’ve already started preparing your defence.

You know the background. You’ve done this before. They don’t understand the pressures.

Perhaps all of that is true.

But you’ve stopped listening.

We like to think we welcome feedback. What we sometimes welcome is agreement, delivered with enough intelligence to qualify as feedback.

Disagreement gets a less enthusiastic reception.

Over time, people learn which version you prefer. They stop questioning. You mistake the silence for confidence in your leadership.

Winning the argument can cost you the insight – and eventually the person who offered it.

Someone with something valuable to contribute may stop trying to be heard. They may leave. You may never discover what you missed.

The uncomfortable possibility is that an idea you’re defending is now costing you more than admitting you were wrong ever would.
Listening with an open mind is generous. Listening to someone as an equal takes it further. Their experience may reveal something yours cannot. You might learn more about them, see the problem differently, or discover that the answer you keep repeating belongs to a situation that has changed.

You don’t have to agree. But surely you want to understand before you dismiss.

Many of our opinions survive because we haven’t revisited them. We’ve rehearsed the answer so often that it feels like knowledge.With the election behind us, consider how you judge the people now representing you. Are you assessing their positions and track records, or simply renewing an old allegiance?

When someone says, “I got that wrong, and this is what I learned,” do you recognise courage – or mark them down? Acknowledging a mistake doesn’t erase it. But how someone responds to being wrong tells us something important about their capacity to get better.

If we punish people for acknowledging mistakes, we encourage them to hide the next one.

The same applies at work, and at home.

“I got that wrong” becomes useful when followed by “Here’s what I’m changing.” Say it out loud and other people can learn from your experience. You also make it a little safer for them to acknowledge their own.

That gives people a reason to trust how you use your authority.

In my consulting work, I often find that the people closest to the work already know why something isn’t working. They encounter the awkward process, the customer frustration, the unnecessary repetition.

Sometimes management struggles to hear them because management designed the process.

But the reverse happens too. A team may defend a familiar practice because it suits them, even when it serves the customer or business poorly.

Nobody has exclusive rights to useful insight – or self-interest.

Before defending a solution, define the problem together. What are we trying to achieve? For whom? Over what period?

A decision that relieves pressure this week may create trouble next year. Equally, “we’re thinking long term” can become an excuse for refusing to examine poor results.

Agree on what progress should look like and when you will review it. Otherwise, you can spend an hour arguing about answers to different questions.

Invite feedback early, while adjustments are still possible. Waiting until completion can turn a useful observation into an expensive post-mortem.

Then exercise judgement. Leadership requires the strength to stay on course through uncertainty. Not every suggestion deserves a change of direction.

The distinction is between conviction and needing vindication.

Conviction lets you explain your reasoning, listen carefully and revise when the evidence warrants it. The need for vindication has you recruiting evidence to protect a conclusion.

Ask yourself: what would persuade me to change my mind?

If the answer is “nothing”, how useful is your invitation for feedback?

If every challenge to your thinking feels like a challenge to your worth, getting better becomes very difficult.

This week, ask someone affected by your decisions: “What am I making harder than it needs to be?”

Let them finish. Before explaining yourself, describe what you’ve heard and ask whether you’ve understood it. Then decide what deserves action.

Finally, ask yourself:
What are you still defending that you would no longer choose today?