Why Being Right Is Costing You More Than You Think

My mother taught me something when I was young that took me until my late thirties, maybe even my early forties, to truly understand: stay out of right-and-wrong conversations, because even when you’re right, you lose.

This morning reminded me why that lesson matters so much.

I was working through a marketing topic with two people on my team, my Director of Operations, who helps drive our marketing activities, and a member of my marketing team. The conversations started separately. In both cases, my first instinct was frustration. I was convinced we had already resolved this. We had been through it. The answer was clear, to me. And yet here we were again.

In both conversations, I almost did what most experienced CEOs do without realizing it. I almost skipped the question and went straight to the answer.

Instead, I got curious.

I went back to my Director of Operations and asked him why he was thinking the way he was. I went back to my marketing team member and asked her what she was trying to accomplish when she created what she created. And then all three of us came together. What started as two separate conversations became a co-creation. No one was right. No one was wrong. We converged on an answer that none of us held individually, and the outcome was better than anything I would have produced if I had simply insisted on being right.

That is the hidden cost most CEOs never see. Not the bad decisions. Not the wasted time. It is better to have an outcome that never happens than to have one that does, because the leader already had the answer.

 What Got You Here

Marshall Goldsmith spent decades coaching some of the most successful leaders in the world. What he discovered was both humbling and counterintuitive: the habits and beliefs that drive people to the top are often the same ones that prevent them from going further.

In What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, he identified four beliefs that successful people carry. Each one is genuinely useful on the way up. Each one becomes a liability at the top.

The first is “I have succeeded.” Success makes us selectively blind. We remember our highlights and discount our failures, which means we stop getting accurate feedback about what is actually working and what is not.

The second is “I can succeed.” Confidence is essential. But it can quietly become the belief that our current thinking is optimal simply because it has worked before. We stop questioning our own assumptions.

The third is “I will succeed.” This drives optimism and persistence. It can also drive burnout and the overextension of resources when we refuse to acknowledge that a direction is not working.

The fourth is “I choose to succeed.” A strong need for control yields results until it breeds resistance. When we need to be the one who decides, we often cannot hear the evidence that suggests we should decide differently.

None of these beliefs are wrong. Every one of them helped build your business. But at scale, they create a specific kind of blind spot: the unshakeable conviction that you are the smartest person in the room. And that conviction, more than almost anything else, is what limits what your organization can become.

 The Ceiling You Don’t See

Here is what most CEOs miss: you do not have to say a word to shut down a room.

When your team knows you already have an answer, they stop generating their own. Not because they are lazy or disengaged. Because they are smart. They have learned, through dozens of interactions, that the discussion will eventually arrive at your conclusion anyway. So they stop investing in the journey. They manage upward instead of thinking forward. They present ideas they believe you will approve rather than ideas they believe are right.

You get the appearance of collaboration without any of its benefits.

And the cost compounds quietly. The team member who had a genuinely better idea but kept it to herself. The creative solution that never surfaced because the room read your energy and self-edited. The talent that eventually left because they were tired of being in a room where their thinking did not matter. None of these show up on a dashboard. None of them appears in a quarterly review. But they are real, and they accumulate.

Goldsmith identified two habits that capture this dynamic precisely. The first is adding too much value. When leaders feel compelled to improve every idea, contribute to every discussion, and put their stamp on every decision, they do not elevate the work. They diminish ownership. The person whose idea just got corrected feels less invested in the outcome, not more. The second is judging and rating others. When a leader responds to ideas with evaluation rather than curiosity, open dialogue shuts down. People stop bringing their real thinking because the cost of being wrong feels too high.

The result is a ceiling, invisible to the CEO, obvious to everyone else. And the tragedy is that the ceiling is set not by the team’s capacity, but by the leader’s presence.

 From Certainty to Curiosity

The antidote is not humility as a performance. It is curiosity as a practice.

There is a meaningful difference between a leader who pretends not to know the answer and one who genuinely wants to understand how others are thinking. People can feel the difference immediately. Performed humility is just another form of control. Genuine curiosity changes the room.

What does that shift look like in practice? It looks like asking why before offering what. It looks like sitting with an answer you disagree with long enough to understand where it came from. It looks like going back to your Director of Operations and asking him to walk you through his thinking, not to find the flaw in it, but to identify what you might be missing.

And here is what genuine curiosity produces that certainty never can: co-creation. When no one in the conversation is trying to win, the conversation itself becomes generative. Ideas build on each other. Perspectives that seemed contradictory turn out to be complementary. The outcome that emerges is something none of the individuals in the room could have held on their own.

This is where your mother’s lesson reveals its full depth. Stay out of right-and-wrong conversations because even when you’re right, you still lose. Proving someone wrong does not make them better. It does not make them more committed to the outcome. It makes them feel attacked. It triggers defensiveness rather than growth. And it signals to everyone watching that being wrong in this room carries a cost, which means that next time, people will work harder to appear right than actually to think well.

Curiosity removes that cost. When the leader’s default is a genuine question rather than a waiting verdict, the room opens up. People bring their real thinking. They take risks with ideas. They tell you what they actually see rather than what they think you want to hear.

That is not soft leadership. That is the highest form of it.

 The Question That Changes Everything

The smartest person in the room is not the one with the best answer. It is the one who asks the best questions.

That reframe sounds simple. It is not. It requires a CEO to consistently resist one of the most deeply wired instincts successful people have, the urge to demonstrate competence by providing the answer. Every time you have built something, solved something, or led someone through a difficult moment, that instinct got reinforced. It worked. And now it is working against you.

No one person knows more than ten people in the room. That is not a motivational statement. It is a mathematical reality. The collective intelligence sitting around your table on any given day almost certainly exceeds your own, if you create the conditions for it to surface. Most CEOs never find out because they never create those conditions.

The shift is not about becoming less. It is about building more. When you stop being the answer, you start developing the people around you into answers. When you stop setting the ceiling with your certainty, you find out how high your team can actually go. When you approach a conversation with curiosity instead of conclusion, you stop winning arguments and start winning outcomes.

My mother was right. Right and wrong conversations are traps. Even when you win them, you lose something more valuable; the trust, the openness, and the collective thinking of the people you need most.

The hidden cost of being the smartest person in the room is not what goes wrong. It is everything that never gets the chance to go right.

What would change in your organization if you replaced your next answer with a genuine question?

 

 

About the Author: Howard M. Shore is the Founder and CEO of Activate Group, Inc., a growth-focused management coaching and advisory firm that helps CEOs and leadership teams of mid-market companies accelerate results through stronger leadership, aligned teams, and effective execution. He is the author of Your Business Is a Leaky Bucket and The Leader Launchpad. Howard is known for helping leaders turn complexity into clarity and strategy into measurable outcomes.