LEADERS WHO ARE ALWAYS RIGHT

Leadership requires the courage to believe strongly and the humility to reconsider, argues LINUS OKORIE There is a dangerous point in leadership when confidence quietly becomes certainty. A leader begins with conviction. They make difficult decisions, take risks others are unwilling to take and eventually produce results. Success follows. People begin to trust their judgment. Their opinions carry more weight. Then something subtle can happen. The leader begins to believe that because they have been right before, they are probably right again. People around them notice it too. They become more careful about challenging decisions. Meetings become less about discovering the best answer and more about validating the leader’s answer. And eventually, the leader may find himself surrounded by agreement without realizing that disagreement has simply become too expensive. This is one of the great paradoxes of leadership: The qualities that make a leader successful can eventually become the qualities that limit them. Few leaders illustrate this tension better than Steve Jobs. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was in serious trouble. Apple had an unwieldy product line, intense competition and an uncertain future. Jobs brought something the organization desperately needed: clarity. He simplified the product portfolio, focused the company on a smaller number of products and insisted on an uncompromising standard of design. The result was extraordinary. Over the years that followed, Apple would produce products that reshaped entire industries. The iMac. The iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. Jobs became celebrated for his extraordinary ability to see what others could not yet see. But the story of Steve Jobs is more interesting than the story of a visionary who was always right. Because he wasn’t. In fact, Jobs’s early career at Apple contains one of the clearest warnings about the danger of conviction without sufficient humility. In the 1980s, Jobs became deeply involved in the development of the Macintosh. He pushed the team relentlessly toward his vision of a computer that would be radically different from the machines dominating the market. The Macintosh became an important product and established Apple’s identity around design and user experience. But Jobs’s intensity also created conflict. His management style was demanding. He could be dismissive of ideas he disliked and uncompromising when he believed he was right. His relationship with Apple’s leadership deteriorated, and in 1985 he left the company he had helped create. For years, Apple struggled without him. When Jobs eventually returned, however, something had changed. The older Jobs still had extraordinary conviction. He still had strong opinions. He still demanded excellence. But he had also gained something that many leaders only acquire through painful experience: perspective. His time away from Apple had exposed him to failure, uncertainty and the limits of his own judgment. And perhaps that is one reason his second act at Apple was so powerful. The lesson is not that leaders should stop being confident but it’s quite the opposite. Organizations need leaders who can make difficult decisions when others are uncertain. But conviction becomes dangerous when it removes the possibility of learning. Leadership requires the courage to believe strongly and the humility to reconsider. That distinction matters because every successful leader eventually faces a temptation: to turn experience into certainty. A leader succeeds with a particular strategy and begins to believe that the strategy itself is the source of success. A CEO builds a company using one leadership philosophy and assumes the same philosophy will work indefinitely. A manager makes several good decisions and gradually becomes less interested in the opinions of people below them. A political leader wins an election and begins interpreting every disagreement as opposition rather than feedback. Success can create an echo chamber. The more powerful the leader becomes, the more difficult it can be for people to say, “I think you are wrong.” And that is where intellectual humility becomes essential. Intellectual humility is not weakness. It is the recognition that being intelligent does not make you infallible, being experienced does not make you omniscient, and being successful does not make every future decision correct. It is the willingness to hold your convictions firmly without holding them so tightly that evidence can no longer change your mind. Consider what happens when that humility disappears. A leader proposes an idea. The first person disagrees. The leader dismisses the objection. The second person sees the same problem but decides not to speak. The third person notices that disagreement is unwelcome and chooses silence before even entering the room. Eventually, the leader hears nothing but agreement. They may interpret this as having a highly aligned team. But alignment and silence are not the same thing. The organization may not have become more convinced. It may simply have become more afraid. This is how leaders lose access to one of their most valuable assets: truth. A leader who cannot hear uncomfortable information will eventually make decisions with incomplete information. And incomplete information is particularly dangerous at the top because the consequences of a wrong decision become larger as the leader’s authority grows. This is why great leaders need people around them who are willing to challenge their thinking. Not people who oppose everything. Not people who mistake criticism for intelligence. But people who are secure enough to say: “Have we considered another possibility?” “What evidence supports this?” “What are we missing?” “What happens if this assumption is wrong?” Those questions are not threats to leadership. They are safeguards against leadership blindness. One of the most important things a leader can create is therefore not a culture where everyone agrees, but a culture where people can disagree without fear. Because disagreement, when handled properly, is a form of organizational intelligence. Two capable people can look at the same problem and see different possibilities. One may see the opportunity. Another may see the risk. One may understand the customer. Another may understand the numbers. One may be thinking about today. Another may be thinking about what happens five years from now. Leadership is not about making all those perspectives disappear. It is about bringing them together before making the decision. This is where Steve Jobs offers a particularly nuanced lesson. His greatest strength was his ability to make choices. He was famously focused. He could say no when others wanted to pursue everything. He had an unusually strong sense of what he believed technology and design could become. But the lesson from his career is not “be like Steve Jobs.” It is more useful than that. It is to recognize the tension between conviction and correction. A leader without conviction will be pushed around by every new opinion. A leader without humility will eventually be imprisoned by his own opinion. The first cannot lead decisively. The second cannot learn. Great leadership requires both. There is another reason this matters. The goal of leadership is not to prove that the leader is right. The goal is to make the organization right. That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes everything. If the leader’s objective is to be right, disagreement becomes personal. If the leader’s objective is to get the best possible outcome, disagreement becomes useful. A leader who says, “This is my decision,” may close a conversation. A leader who says, “This is what I currently believe. What am I missing?” opens one. That second question may save a company million. It may prevent a failed strategy. It may reveal an opportunity. It may even expose a weakness in the leader’s own thinking. And that is not a failure. It is leadership working as it should. Every leader should periodically ask themselves a difficult question: Have I surrounded myself with people who tell me the truth, or people who tell me what keeps me comfortable? The answer may reveal more about the health of the organization than any performance report. Because the higher a leader rises, the more intentional they must become about remaining teachable. At the beginning of a career, failure teaches humility naturally. But success can remove that teacher. People applaud. The numbers improve. The title becomes bigger. The room becomes quieter. And without realizing it, the leader can begin to confuse respect with agreement. That is dangerous. The strongest leaders are not those who are always right. They are those who are secure enough to discover when they are wrong. They do not surrender conviction. They refine it. They do not eliminate authority. They use it responsibly. They do not surround themselves with people who think exactly as they do. They build teams capable of seeing what they cannot see. Steve Jobs reminds us that extraordinary vision can change the world. But his journey also reminds us that leadership is not simply about seeing what others cannot see. It is about remaining humble enough to accept that sometimes others can see what you cannot. The leader who must always be right eventually stops learning. And the moment a leader stops learning, the organization begins to inherit the leader’s blind spots. Leadership is not the confidence to say, “I am right.” It is the humility to ask, “What if I am wrong?” Okorie MFR is a leadership development expert spanning 30 years in the research, teaching and coaching of leadership in Africa and across the world. He is the CEO of the GOTNI Leadership Centre.