Leadership Skills: Saying No to Being Right
What if the desire to be right were getting us into trouble? What if that feeling of being right were just that, an emotion, something to consider while not taking fully at face value? All kinds of wrong can happen when we get stuck on being right, and all kinds of solutions can surface when we loosen our grip. Read more about this leadership skill for complex times.
We have all experienced that confident glow, shoulders back, head held high, that comes from being sure that you are right. It feels invigorating, powerful, delightful. We want it. We want more of it. And the more we feel it, the more we know that when we are right, we are right.
Wait, euh, that was a quick slip from confident to pretentious. The next step is to always be right. Which is pretty wrong when times are complex, the ground is shifting and it’s hard to have all the data points.
Feeling Right and Being Right
In her book Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity, author Jennifer Garvey Berger describes it succinctly, “Your sense of being right about something, the sparkling clarity of certainty, is not a thought process, not a reasoning process, but an emotion that has nothing to do with whether you are right or not.”
We confuse feeling right with being right. Being right is an emotion. According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, even moral judgements (what’s right and wrong in the first place) arise not from reason but from gut feelings.
When our “right” is challenged, the reasoning brain kicks into action. First we feel confident. Then we start reacting. Feeling annoyed or offended. Justifying. Defending our position tooth and nail.
Leadership Skills
Yikes. This is a far cry A-game leadership skills of curiosity, connection and learning to find solutions.
We look at the world and believe what we see. We think a thought and believe what we think. We are expected to be right as experts, and our natural confirmation bias goes into high gear so we see only what confirms our stance. We certainly feel confident and cognitive dissonance sets in. We don’t see what contradicts our stance. It becomes hard to admit ignorance. Embracing uncertainty enters the realm of out of the question!
Today, we are being called to be much more discerning. Just because it feels right does not mean it is right. Leaders need to attend to the data, listen to those around them, and increase their self-awareness exponentially.
Telling Right from Wrong
So being right is an emotion. There’s nothing wrong with emotion. Here are a two qualities to help lead yourself and others more effectively in complex environments.
Awareness. The first step is to be aware. When we notice a shift to “rightness,” we can stop and choose another response.
Curiosity. When we feel the feeling of being right, that’s a good time to break out the questions:
What do I believe and how can I be wrong?
Why do they disagree with me
What am I missing here?
What do they know that I maybe don’t?
Listening for Leaders
Honing our listening skills helps shift the ego to the side to make space for empathy. There are four levels of listening. Try them out, particularly when “you’re right”:
Listening for what you already know—such as that you are right. Not very helpful.
Listening from curiosity, for what is different than what you know. A good start.
Listening from empathy, stepping into another perspective. This opens the way for new ideas.
Listening from a deeper, gut level, searching for the stillness to hear what is emerging rather than trying to fix or find a solution. Harder to reach but more powerful.
“There is no more destructive force in human affairs—not greed, not hatred—than the desire to have been right. Non-attachment to possessions is trivial when compared with non-attachment to opinions.”