How leaders can admit they were wrong

Leaders learn to say things with confidence. You may assume that people will be more prone to listen to you when you speak forcefully and with a sense of belief. Despite your best efforts, though, you’re going to say something incorrect every now and again. You might get out ahead of a story only to find out that things were not as they seemed initially. You might just have your facts wrong.

Regardless of why you erred, you still have to be willing to admit that you were wrong.

Happily, there is an easy way to do this, though you may find it hard to do at first.

You have to admit you were wrong. Yup. That’s right. You just have to come out and say it. There is a simple formula for admitting you were wrong.

Do it right away

Let everyone know as soon as possible after you find out that you said something that was not correct. Don’t sit on the error for days. It is best if everyone hears it from you rather than having someone else discover the mistake first and make your admission feel like a reaction.

Of course, if someone else does point out that what you said was incorrect, you should verify that they are correct and then immediately thank them for providing the feedback. You might even credit them in your statement

After all, you want the people who work for you and with you to own their mistakes. The best way to demonstrate that you value corrections is to issue your own quickly. In addition, by thanking people who pointed out errors, you encourage others to step forward with errors they notice as well. That helps to keep the organization functioning with good knowledge.

Use simple declarative sentences

There is some embarrassment that can come along with making mistakes—particularly when you’re new to leadership. You may think that leaders need to be infallible. As a result, you may not want to put a dent in your reputation by saying that you were wrong.

To cover for this embarrassment, you may use tortured sentences to avoid owning the error. You may resort to the passive voice (“Mistakes were made . . .”) or use lots of qualifiers (“When speaking about the upcoming sales meeting, I inadvertently left out . . .”) or cast blame elsewhere (“Sadly, when I spoke, I was relying on . . .”)

It turns out that great leaders don’t need an air of infallibility, they need to project transparency. You create trust by being honest, not by being right all the time. Simply saying something like, “Recently, I told you X. Actually, Y is true,” is incredibly effective. And, again, speaking in this way encourages other members of your team to come forward and admit when they have said something wrong.

Do a postmortem

Of course, just because you admit when you’re wrong doesn’t mean that it is good to be wrong. You’d like to minimize the number of times that you have to walk back something you said.

It is important to figure out why you ended up making a statement that was not true. Perhaps you spoke too quickly without verifying information. Perhaps you relied on sources that did not have the full story. Perhaps you made intuitive leaps that led you astray.

If you have trouble figuring out how you might have gone wrong, consider talking to a colleague or mentor about the situation and walking through it with them. You might find that just talking it through helps you to figure out where you went wrong. And their expertise may bring to light problems with your process that led to you saying something wrong.

When mentoring some of your direct reports, you might even want to refer to the errors in your own judgment that you discover. That way, you can help the people working for you to make a different set of mistakes rather than having to repeat yours to learn for themselves.

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