I have promoted people beyond their capabilities.
I have continued working with executive teams when I should have said much earlier: this is going nowhere.
I have coached people whom I believed genuinely wanted to change, only to realize that I had confused their ability to talk intelligently about development with their willingness to develop.
I got it wrong.
The uncomfortable part is that, in some cases, the evidence was already there. I just didn’t want it to be true.
Admit your mistakes. Sounds obvious.
It gets harder once you have backed a person, defended a strategy or publicly committed to a decision. Because now you are no longer just evaluating reality. You are also protecting the person who made the call: yourself.
Psychology has studied this as escalation of commitment. We can keep investing in a failing course of action because we were responsible for choosing it.
Intelligence doesn’t necessarily protect us. Sometimes it simply makes us better at constructing sophisticated explanations for why we were right after all.
Power and success can make this worse. If your judgment has served you well for twenty years, you have plenty of evidence that your judgment is pretty damn good.
At the same time, fewer people are willing to tell you when it isn’t. And whether they do has a lot to do with what you have taught them happens when they challenge you.
At some point, the decision and our identity become entangled. If I am the brilliant strategist, abandoning my strategy is no longer just a change of direction. It threatens something I believe about myself.
This is where humility matters. Not thinking less of yourself, but needing to protect your image of yourself less. Research on leader humility links it with greater trust and more employee voice.
Humility becomes real when being wrong costs you something.
When you promoted the wrong person. When the strategy you championed is failing. When your team tells you that the problem might be you.
Can you say “I was wrong” without immediately adding an explanation that makes you a little less wrong?
Your people watch this carefully.
Defend yourself often enough and they learn. Bad news gets softened, contradiction becomes rarer, and eventually people tell you what fits your view of reality.
The frightening part is that this can feel exactly like good leadership.
You may call the resulting silence alignment.
So when was the last time you changed your mind about something that really mattered, not because circumstances changed, but because you realized you were wrong?
Your relationship with being wrong eventually becomes your organization’s relationship with truth.