A colleague you trust starts describing what happened in the last quarter, and their version doesn’t match yours. Before they finish talking, your rebuttal is already loaded. You deliver it. You win. And something in the room gets smaller.
I’ve coached high-performers for more than two decades, and I train the coaches in SUCCESS Coaching Certification to watch for this exact moment because needing to be right is one of the hardest patterns to catch in successful people. Why? Because you usually are right. The accuracy hides the cost.
The Room Stops Bringing You Problems
Here’s what I see in executive clients long before they see it themselves: the arguments stop. Not because everyone agrees now but because nobody wants the fight. People bring polished updates instead of messy problems, and the messy problems are where the real information lives.
Google’s Project Aristotle, a multiyear study of 180 of its own teams, found that psychological safety—a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—mattered more to team effectiveness than who was on the team. When disagreeing with you carries a social price, your team’s safety drops and your access to reality drops with it.
The practical test I give leaders is this: Over last month, who pointed out you were wrong about something that mattered? If no name comes to mind, you’re not surrounded by agreement. You’re surrounded by silence.
Defending a Position Narrows Your Thinking
The cost isn’t only relational. It’s cognitive. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has spent her career studying how emotional states change what we’re able to think of doing. Her broaden-and-build research (2001) makes a simple claim with big implications: negative emotional states such as anger and fear narrow your momentary range of possible actions, while positive states expand it.
In a 2005 study with Christine Branigan, 104 participants watched films designed to induce different emotional states and then listed everything they felt like doing. People in negative states generated measurably fewer options than people in neutral or positive states.
Now map that onto a leadership meeting. The moment someone challenges your account of events, your body treats it as a threat. You drop into something like the narrowed state Fredrickson describes—while making decisions that require the widest possible view. Being right doesn’t just cost you the relationship. It costs you options at the precise moment you need them most.
Certainty Is Fear Wearing a Confident Face
When I work with coaches in training, I teach them to ask one question when a client can’t let go of a position: What does this person believe they’ll lose if the other version of events is true?
The answer is almost never “the argument.” It’s something bigger and vaguer—my judgment gets questioned, my authority erodes, the story I’ve built my decisions on stops being solid.
The need to be right is rarely about the facts on the table. It’s about protecting a settled picture of the world because a settled picture feels safe. The problem is that the world keeps moving whether your picture updates or not, and a leader defending an outdated map gets blindsided by terrain everyone else could already see.
A 5-Step Exercise for Loosening Your Grip
I use this 15-minute written exercise with clients who are stuck defending a position. Focus on one specific disagreement, not your personality in general.
1. Name the stalled action. Write down the specific move you haven’t made. “I haven’t asked my partner what she actually saw in Q2.”
2. Name the feared loss. Write one honest sentence about what being wrong here would mean for you. Put down the real fear, not the professional version of it.
3. Check the size. Compare the event’s actual size to the weight you’re carrying. Being wrong about one forecast is one forecast. Notice how much bigger you’ve made it.
4. Strip it to the bare fact. Remove the protective language. Usually the real loss is something like, “I’d have to admit one part of this was wrong, out loud, to one person.”
5. Plan the day after. Write down what you would concretely do the day after being wrong. When the feared outcome has a next step attached, it stops running you.
Most clients discover the feared loss is survivable by step four. What they gain back is the option they’d taken off the table—the question they were refusing to ask.
Trade Being Right for Being Informed
Needing to be right and leading well are pulling in opposite directions because leadership is an information job and the need to be right is an information filter. As I wrote in a piece on why leaders feel more anger than their teams, the pressure of responsibility puts high-performers into a defensive posture more often than they realize.
So this week, try one move: When someone offers a version of events that contradicts yours, ask one clarifying question before you respond. Not a courtroom question—a curious one. You’re not conceding anything. You’re reopening the option the reflex was about to close.
The goal was never to lose arguments. The goal is to stop paying for the wins.
Featured image from PeopleImages/Shutterstock
