Being Right Doesn’t Matter

I started Letting Go by mentioning it was the story of how I learned one of the three most important leadership lessons I ever learned. It was predictable that someone (hi Jasmine!) would ask “wait, what are the other two?”

During the same week I learned the first lesson, at the Center for Creative Leadership’s Leadership Development Program, on the penultimate day, we did a little exercise to demonstrate “synergy.” The way it went was quite simple: We were given an exercise, a puzzle to solve, where the distance from the “perfect” answer could be assessed objectively and quantitatively. At first, each person did this on their own. Then each group of people got together and tried to come up with a group answer. Synergy — the ability of a group of people to come up with a better outcome than any individual in the group could — could simply be measured as the difference in score between the best individual score in the team an the team’s score.

The Exercise

(Only read this section if you’re curious — you can skip it safely).

We were given a list of ~16 steps to take after an earthquake, taken from the Red Cross, which had a canonically correct ordering, and were meant to order them correctly. In general, this is something that could be worked out logically (e.g. “check yourself for injuries” should come before “be careful when driving”). The ‘distance’ between the perfect answer and one’s own answer could be defined as the sum of the absolute values of the distance between each step’s correct order and the order you put them in, which is such an abstract statement I figure an example will be helpful.

If we have five steps — A, B, C, D, E — in that order, and instead we order them as D,B,A,C,E then this solution scores:
D should be 4 but is 1, so that’s a diff of 3 (absolute value, remember)
B should be 2 and is 2, so that’s a diff of 0
A should be 1, but is 3, so that’s a diff of 2
C should be 3, but is 4, so that’s a diff of 1
E should be 5, and is 5, so that’s a diff of 0
So the overall solution’s “distance” is 3+2+1 = 6
And, obviously, a solution with a distance of 0 is perfect.

What Happened

I came up with my own answer, then sat down with my team to come up with a consensus solution. I was relatively ineffective in advocating for the particular order I believed in, and if I recall at some point was getting pretty frustrated and emotional. I remember there was a moment where someone said “Roy, you’re thinking like an engineer” and I responded, my voice somewhat raised, “yes! Use that!”

They did not.

In the end, our group was noteworthy for two particular aspects of our performance:
1. We had the only perfect individual solution to the exercise. It was me. I got a perfect, 0-distance, answer to the exercise.
2. Not only did we not have synergy — it would have been hard in this case to demonstrate a better answer than the perfect one, obviously — but we had the worst degradation in quality between the best individual answer in the team and the team’s overall answer.

We failed. Atrociously.

No, wait, I failed. Atrociously. Because

Being Right is a Booby Prize If You Can’t Persuade Others

There are some exceptions to this, mind you. Most people have some power to just unilaterally enact some of their decisions without needing others to be bought in. But — especially as a function of being a leader in an organization — the vast majority of time our ability to get work done, our ability to impact the success of the organization, simply knowing what the right answer is will not be sufficient to actually get the organization, and its people, to do the right thing.

Up until that moment, I thought that what was required of me in the workplace was being smart, and being able to figure out how to solve the problems that were ahead of me. In that moment of failure, I finally figured out that if you’re wrong and you don’t persuade people, that’s fine — heck, that’s probably best since you’re wrong. But if you’re right? You have a duty to be effective in persuading others that you’re right. There’s no partial credit for “I was right, but nobody listened to me.” And when that happens, the failure is not entirely on the other side (and personally, I’m going to argue it’s in one’s best interest to take it as an entirely personal failure).

(If it sounds like this is similar to That Burning Feeling When You’re Right, congratulations, you’ve spent too much time reading my writing. That post covers the same point, but from a different point of view, and with a different voice)