How important is it to you to be right—to win every argument?
Before continuing, I’d like to say that I am equally guilty of this trait. But I am also willing to admit that I’m not perfect; far from it. I am a work in progress, just like everyone else.
I was reminded of this recently while working on the content library for an upcoming executive development program. I’ve been organizing the leadership development materials I have gathered over the course of my career into the Trusted Leader framework.
Because the program incorporates stakeholder-centered coaching, a method developed by Marshall Goldsmith, I have also been reviewing a collection of videos featuring Marshall talking about leadership.
One category of his videos immediately caught my attention: “Teaching Leaders What to Stop.”
I think that is an interesting way to think about leadership development. We spend a great deal of time thinking about what leaders need to learn, what skills they need to develop, and what behaviors they need to start practicing. But sometimes development is about what we need to stop doing.
A couple of the titles made the point particularly well: “Aren’t I Smart and Aren’t They Stupid?” and “Winning Too Much,” which is about the need some of us have to win every argument, even when winning doesn’t really matter. We want the satisfaction of demonstrating that we were right. We want to correct the other person. And when something happens exactly as we predicted, we can’t resist the temptation to say, “I told you so.”
And I think it’s fair to ask: What is the point of this behavior? What exactly does it accomplish?
Perhaps we have demonstrated that we were right. But we may also have demonstrated something else: that being right was more important to us than our relationship with the person standing in front of us.
That is where I think humility becomes particularly important in leadership.
Humility Is Not a Lack of Confidence
Some people see humility as a weakness, or a lack of confidence. I don’t see it this way. I think of confidence as occupying the healthy middle ground between two extremes:
Lack of confidence — Confidence — Arrogance
A leader can be highly confident and still be humble.
Humility doesn’t require pretending that we don’t know something when we do. It doesn’t require minimizing our expertise, avoiding disagreement, or allowing other people to make poor decisions simply because we don’t want to appear arrogant.
The difference is in calling into focus what we need from the interaction.
A confident leader can say, “I disagree.” A confident and humble leader can also ask, “What am I missing?”
A confident leader can know the answer without needing everyone else to know that they knew the answer first. And sometimes humility means surrendering the satisfaction of being right. That can be harder than it sounds.
What Humility Communicates
When I conducted my research on trust and distrust in leaders, humility emerged as one of the behaviors employees associated with leaders they trusted.
It showed up in very practical ways. Leaders admitted when they didn’t know something. They acknowledged their weaknesses and mistakes. They took responsibility instead of immediately looking for someone to blame. They shared credit. They apologized when an apology was warranted. They were willing to jump in and work alongside employees without behaving as though their title made certain work beneath them. Employees described these leaders as more human.
The opposite also mattered. Employees noticed when leaders conveyed superiority—when their behavior suggested that their position, expertise, or status made them more important than the people around them.
Arrogance doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it sounds like, “I told you so.” Sometimes it is interrupting someone because we already know where the conversation is going. Sometimes it is dismissing an idea before we have really considered it. Sometimes it is winning an argument that didn’t need to be won.
And sometimes we never actually say, “Aren’t I smart and aren’t they stupid?” But people can feel the attitude in the way you carry yourself. “I know better than you.”
Creating Room for Other People
This may be one of the most important things humility does for a leader: it creates room for other people.
Room for someone else to have the good idea, or for someone with less experience or status to know something we don’t. Room for another person to disagree with us without paying a price for doing so, or for someone to tell us that we made a mistake. And room for all of us to change our minds.
None of that requires a lack of confidence. In fact, I would argue that it requires quite a bit of it. It takes confidence to admit that you were wrong and apologize. It takes confidence to give someone else the credit. And it takes confidence to listen seriously to an opposing point of view without feeling that your own credibility is somehow threatened.
That is why humility and confidence belong together.
As I have been developing these materials to help leaders become trusted executives, I have found myself reminded of behaviors that I need to continue practicing myself. Throughout my career, I have found that this is how it should be. Leadership development isn’t something we eventually finish. There will always be habits to examine, behaviors to improve, and occasionally things we need to stop doing.
And maybe “winning the argument” is one of them.
There will be times when we know we are right, when our advice is ignored, and when events prove that we knew better. In those moments, humility means resisting the temptation to claim the victory and instead asking what people need from us at that moment.
Because in leadership, you have to decide: Is it more important to win the argument, or to win the trust of the people around you?