No point in being right

You hire bright, creative people with strong values who want to make a difference, and who are prepared to stand firm in the face of adversity. No wonder there's friction in the team.

What’s the issue?

1. Some decisions are easy: you do prioritise cashflow over profit; you do train people to operate safely. But the more strategic the decision, the less black-and-white right-and-wrong it will be. Senior leaders earn the big bucks because they must choose to zig or zag based on a whole load of factors besides hard data.
2. Those factors include experience, beliefs, values, office politics, personal circumstances, resource constraints etc. Data is fact. But as these personal factors shape those facts into wisdom, they become opinion and judgement.
   
   Airbus’s judgement was that people would want to fly longhaul into hubs and then shuttle to local airports (A380). Boeing’s was that people wanted to fly direct (787). Only the passengers – not the leaders - could turn those judgements back into facts (that time, Boeing was right, Airbus was wrong).
3. You may have been in a debate where you and your ‘opposition’ used the exact same facts to argue the complete opposite e.g. both sides agree that the market is down, revenues are falling, and the products are showing their age. The solution is completely obvious – cut marketing spend. Or increase it. Discuss.
4. The higher the stakes and the more strategic the decision (Airbus never recouped its $25 billion development of the A380 before they terminated production), the more that the decision-makers will lean into who they are, to shape how they think. And when that helps them believe in themselves, it drives them to dig into the position they’re holding. And then it’s a showdown between Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus.

Activities to consider

I had a boss once who gave me a free rein to modernise the company’s billion dollar supply chain. His guidance was minimal – with one notable exception: when I found myself constantly struggling to see eye-to-eye with a colleague about how best to integrate our parts of the business, he said to me:

‘There’s no point in being right, if you can’t make it right’.

Here’s what that reframe immediately does:

It converts you from standing your ground to supporting the best outcome.

It puts you both back on the same side.

It opens you up to compromise mode.

Yes, sometimes compromise is used in political trade-offs that yield sub-optimal outcomes. Sometimes compromise is the worst of both worlds, when all or nothing are the only viable alternatives. And sometimes when leaders compromise it confuses their followers.

But most of the time, ‘making it right’ is an attitude that will catapult collaboration and productivity way beyond the ability of organisations run by those who are rooted to it being their way or the highway.

Try this

Tell your senior leaders you’ve read a beautifully insightful email that all boils down to a simple one liner. Then challenge them to live by it. See if it makes a difference. And do let me know.

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.