Being Wrong at the Right Level

your ego is the bottleneck

I used to work with a senior leader who was almost always the smartest person in the room. Let’s call him Larry. Larry was sharp, experienced, and confident. The kind of leader who made quick decisions and moved fast. The problem wasn’t that Larry was wrong sometimes. Everyone is wrong sometimes. The problem was what happened when Larry was wrong.

Larry insisted on hiring someone to lead a new business function. We’ll call this person Fred. Fred was experienced on paper, but he was also an absolute jerk. He treated his peers and his team poorly, performance struggled, and Fred had an explanation for all of it. He blamed his team. He blamed his peers. He blamed anyone who wouldn’t bend over backwards to accommodate him.

It was obvious to almost everyone that Fred was a bad hire. Everyone except Larry.

Instead of stepping back and looking at the pattern, Larry doubled down. Fred wasn’t delivering, so Larry gave him more headcount. Fred complained about his peers, so Larry made organizational changes based on that feedback. Larry had made a bad call, and rather than admit it, he spent months trying to turn it into a good one.

What happened in the meantime was quieter and more damaging than the Fred situation itself. People stopped bringing Larry problems. They’d seen what happened when you challenged his thinking, even respectfully, and even with data. So they stopped. They worked around Fred instead of escalating. They watched the situation deteriorate and said nothing, because saying something felt riskier than staying quiet.

That’s the real cost of not being able to be wrong. It’s not the bad decision. It’s everything that doesn’t get said afterward.

Fred was eventually let go. Larry addressed the team and admitted he should have seen the signs earlier. It was more than some leaders would have offered. But by then, the trust that had eroded over months didn’t come back in a single meeting. Some of the people who’d been most affected had already started looking for roles elsewhere.

The Trap

At senior leadership levels, being right matters a lot less than you think. What matters more is whether the people around you can tell you when you’re wrong.

Think about that for a second. If your team believes that challenging your thinking is risky, that you’ll defend your position, dismiss their concerns, or remember who pushed back, they’ll stop doing it. They’ll let you be wrong. They’ll build the thing you asked for even when they know it’s not the right thing. They’ll stay quiet in the meeting and complain in Slack DMs afterward.

You won’t know your roadmap is broken until you’ve already committed to it. You won’t know your best engineer is frustrated until they hand you a resignation letter. You won’t know the project is on fire until it’s too late to do anything about it.

That’s not a team problem. That’s a trust problem that started with how you handle being wrong.

What It Actually Looks Like

The leaders who figure this out do something that feels counterintuitive at first. They get comfortable saying “I was wrong about that” out loud, in front of their team, without hedging or explaining it away.

Not performative vulnerability, or saying, “I was wrong but here’s why it was a reasonable call at the time.” Just a clean acknowledgment that the thinking was off and here’s what they’re changing. No hedging - just honesty.

Admitting mistakes to your team does more for team trust than a dozen all-hands meetings where you tell people they have psychological safety. It tells people that it’s safe to bring you the hard thing, and that you’re more interested in getting to the right answer than in being the one who had it first.

The Shift

There’s a reframe that helps here. At the IC level, your job is to have the right answer. At the Director and VP level, your job is to create the conditions where the right answer can surface, even when it’s not yours. A lot of leaders miss this transition, and their teams suffer.

That means your value isn’t in being right. It’s in building a team that can find the right answer faster than you could alone. And you can’t do that if people are managing your ego instead of solving problems.

The leaders who are hardest to work for aren’t usually the ones who make bad decisions. They’re the ones who can’t update or adapt. They’re leaders who treat every challenge to their thinking as a challenge to their authority, and who confuse consistency with integrity.

Being wrong gracefully is a skill. It’s also one of the clearest signals your team will use to decide how much to trust you.

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If you’re a Director or VP and you’re not sure how your team experiences you when you’re wrong, that’s worth finding out. It’s one of the most important things you can know about yourself as a leader.

If you’d like to think through that together, I’d love to talk more.