Jeopardy is the most popular game show in history for three simple reasons:
- We are amazed by people who know all the right answers
- We want to believe that we know all the right answers too
- Alex Trebek’s moustache
Today we are going to focus on the first two only. Sorry.
Knowing all the right answers matters. Not just in Jeopardy, but in life.
At least that’s what we were taught in school.
If you believe that schools are a microcosm of society, then knowing all the right answers is important in life. It separates the haves from the have-nots.
The people who know more have more opportunities. Period. Full stop. Plie.
[Editors Note: the plie is optional] In most schools, our grades – and, hence, our future academic opportunities – are based on doing well on tests where the sole purpose is to memorize and regurgitate all the right answers to miscellaneous questions.
The more schooling you have, the more we assume you know the right answers and the more we are willing to trust you and pay you.
That’s why we trust the answers of lawyers and doctors, even when our questions fall outside of their specialty.
Too bad always being right is not always right.
The Always Right Dilemma
My mother is a family therapist. She often works with couples who are having difficulty in their relationships. One of her soon-to-be-trademarked phrases is this:
You can either be right or you can be married. You can’t be both.
Her point is that healthy communication doesn’t happen when one person views it as a zero-sum game. If you insist that you’re always right, then you are insisting that the other person is wrong.
That is a crappy dynamic and it tears apart marriages, friendships, and work environments.
And that leads us to the problem with entrepreneurs.
The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma About Always Being Right
As a leadership coach and serial entrepreneur, I work with many entrepreneurial leaders. The thing I love about working with them is that they all have the same basic problems to overcome.
When they do well, they all encounter the same dilemma about being right.
You see, when you start a company, nobody knows the vision like you. By sheer necessity, you are the one that always has all the right answers.
An operational visionary who knows all the answers is what helps catapult the growth of early-stage companies.
It’s when you get to about 30 employees that the wheels start falling off the train.
At that point, knowing all the right answers suddenly turns from a benefit to a detriment. With a more robust infrastructure, you are inevitably hiring people who are specialists at their jobs. They know the right answers better than you for what they do. Or at least they should.
Always being right suddenly becomes wrong.
This is the most difficult transition for almost every successful entrepreneur – transforming from the person who knows all the right answers to the one who doesn’t.
And this brings us back to my mother, the therapist.
When Being Right Is Wrong
I often paraphrase my mother in my leadership coaching work. Here’s what you’ve probably heard me say umpteen times:
You can always be right or you can be a respected leader. You can’t be both.
It is a leader’s job to mentor and empower their people. It is not their job to micromanage (or macromanage, for that matter).
In order to empower people, you need to let them learn and let them grow. You need to let them make decisions on their own.
Basically, you need to stop being the one that has all the right answers and start being the one that asks the employees to come up with answers on their own.
If a leader always needs to be right, they will alienate themselves.
The always-right leader ends up being involved in every minutiae of the company and that frustrates the hell out of employees. It also limits company growth.
The always-right leader doesn’t let people learn. Instead, they stifle creativity and thwart innovation.
The always-right leader is a royal pain in the tuchus to work with.
It is always wrong for a leader to be always right.
Richard Feynman, the coolest physicist ever, put it best:
Knowledge is having the right answers.
Intelligence is asking the right questions.
Wisdom is knowing when to ask the right questions.
So it’s time to forget all those lessons you learned in school. It’s time to shut your trap on all those times you want everybody to know how you know the right answers.
Stop being right all the time and start helping others learn how to come up with the answers on their own.
Who knows, you may even learn something along the way.
Maybe you were wrong after all.
A Somewhat Relevant Quote
“You learn nothing from life if you think you’re right all the time.“
Somebody – A person, a human, breathed air