Page 86 - Fearless Leadership

The Need to Be Right 73

your intention and take accountability for your impact, others do not feel
heard or understood.

Building a Case

Building a case is collecting evidence to prove you are right and accumu-
lating reasons, justifications, and explanations for what you believe. Your
case—based on your perception of what is and is not possible—happens
in an instant when you collapse facts with interpretation.
Serious problems occur in decision making and relationships when we
misidentify facts and interpretation. A fact is a fair witness observation—
what you can observe to be true. An interpretation is your inference about
the observation. But even observations can be tricky, so you must be par-
ticularly rigorous in asking, “Is this a fact or simply my interpretation?”
Let’s look at an example. You observe a colleague close an office door
while she is having a conversation with one of your peers. You do not trust
your colleague, and you interpret the closed door as a deliberate attempt
to keep you from hearing a conspiracy against you. Your mind is filling in
the blanks. You knock on the door and they stop talking. You now have
proof and a case: they are conspiring against you. But let’s separate the facts
from the interpretation. The facts: the door was closed, and when you
walked in, they stopped talking. Your interpretation: they are plotting
against me and trying to undermine me.
Building a case is self-reinforcing. Once you have wrapped your mind
around a point of view, you then argue and twist information to support
the validity of your case. When you attempt to find the resolution to a prob-
lem inside a reduced framework, things can look pretty dismal. And just
think, you did this all by yourself with no help from anyone.

Not Investigating Other Views

When you need to be right, you stop investigating other interpretations
and perspectives. You have a “yeah, but” response for everything. In other
words, “Yeah, I hear you, but that doesn’t apply to my situation.” A “yeah,
but” response lets you make your situation unique and impenetrable so
you can reject alternative views or solutions. Your only choice of action
is to do the same things over and over again, with the same results.