Page 76 - Fearless Leadership

Chapter

3

The Need to Be Right

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong
than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
—EDWARD DE BONO (1933–)

here is nothing wrong with the need to be right; it is instinctive and
Tnatural. The problem rests with our inability to recognize when we
become stuck in unbending and unyielding views and do not know how
to move beyond them.
The startling fact is not that we have the need to be right; it is how we
allow our need to be right to drive our thinking and actions despite disas-
trous consequences. Leaders defend their views even when it sabotages their
personal success, reduces their choices, and locks them into inferior options.
We fail to recognize a critical principle of behavior: the need to be right
is much stronger than the need to be effective. You may be trading your effec-
tiveness and relationships for the need to be right.
In this chapter, we explore why leaders loathe being wrong and how
the need to be right triggers blind spots. You will learn the behaviors that
keep you stuck in defending your views. We will also explore the mecha-
nism of automatic listening and how the mind filters and distorts informa-
tion. Understanding the consequences of the need to be right on decision
making is critical and examined in this chapter. The chapter concludes
with how fearless leadership reverses our automatic impulse to be right
and places our focus where it belongs: on being effective.

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