The Courage to Be Wrong

Some of the most important words a leader can say are also among the simplest:

“I was wrong.”

Leadership creates an interesting pressure.

The more responsibility we have, the more people look to us for answers. And somewhere along the way, it can become tempting to believe that credibility depends on always having the right one.

I’ve learned the opposite.

People don’t expect leaders to be right all the time. They do expect us to recognize when we’re wrong.

I’ve made decisions I would make differently today. I’ve pursued ideas that didn’t work. I’ve misread situations. And there have been times when someone on my team saw something more clearly than I did.

Those experiences didn’t diminish my confidence in leadership. They changed my understanding of it.

Admitting a mistake isn’t a surrender of authority. Done sincerely, it’s an expression of confidence.

Getting it right matters more than being right.

And something else happens when leaders become comfortable saying, “I was wrong.”

Other people become more comfortable saying it, too.

That matters.

Because organizations where people are afraid to acknowledge mistakes eventually become organizations where problems are hidden rather than solved.

The strongest teams I’ve known weren’t teams that never made mistakes. They were teams where people could recognize them, talk about them honestly, learn from them, and move forward.

Leadership doesn’t require perfection.

It requires enough confidence to acknowledge our mistakes — and enough humility to learn from them.

Sometimes the strongest thing a leader can say is simply, “I was wrong. Let’s get it right.”