IF YOU haven’t seen Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN Summit, I encourage you to go watch it.
I’m not about to go into the technicalities of right versus wrong. The world, along with all its problems, is not as black-and-white as we think it is. Solving these problems usually requires us to come up with pretty “gray” solutions. What I want to focus on, instead, is the fact that sometimes it takes a small child to shake the world’s greatest leaders and allow them to look introspectively at the decisions they make.
Everyone wants to be right. It’s a foregone conclusion in life. We all want to appear like we know what we are doing (when 80% of the time we really don’t) and that we are strong and in control. But are we strong enough to be wrong? It takes fortitude and humility on our part to ever say that we may have overlooked something and that our decisions may have caused repercussions, possibly to people who had looked to us for guidance.
I believe this is a very understated part about leadership. Many of us are leaders in one way, shape, or form. And for all the leadership books that are circulated, one of the aspects of leadership that is criminally absent from most of these is the ability of a leader to be sardonic with himself. The higher we go up in the ladder, the least likely that people will be willing to call us out for fear of any backlash. Which is why it usually takes a Greta Thunberg-like event in our lives to bring us down from our high horses and back to the ground where all the actual action happens.
Let’s not wait for events like those to happen; we can cultivate the ability to be critical of ourselves, if only for our subordinates’ sakes. Being strong enough to be wrong means acknowledging that you do not hold all the answers in the palm of your hand, but since when did that become a bad thing? I would even argue that it contributes to you being more flexible in your leadership; holding on to too much dogma makes you slow, rigid, and unable to cope with (inevitable) change. Of course, flexibility should also be balanced with boundaries, but that’s another story.
I still catch myself balking at the idea of welcoming wrong-ness, so I can say I am not nearly as strong as I want to be. But then again, relieving myself of the pressure of always having the right thing to say is certainly a good trade-off in my book. It keeps me humble and allows me to see there will always be a higher height, a deeper depth, and a wider breadth of things that I can open myself to.
Who of us can say we are strong enough to be wrong?