Being Overruled and Being Wrong are not the Same Thing, but Most Leaders Treat Them as if They Were.

There's a moment I've now watched play out in enough coaching sessions that I've stopped being surprised by it, though it still catches the leader across from me off guard every single time, when someone with more perceived authority pushes back on their idea. And this sharp, capable, usually the most prepared person in the room — folds. Not because she's been out-argued. Because the other person's title got there first.

I used to think of this as a confidence problem. I don't anymore. It's something more specific, and honestly more interesting: a trust problem, aimed entirely in the wrong direction, where high-performing leaders trust almost everyone's read of a situation before they trust their own — including, infuriatingly, the read of people who are demonstrably wrong more often than they are right. And to learn more in the research, let’s turn to Amy Edmondson, who has spent her career studying what happens inside teams when someone has to decide whether to say the true thing out loud.

Edmondson’s most famous early finding, from a study of hospital nursing units, found that the units that supervisors rated as best-performing didn't have fewer documented errors - they had more.

Not because the units made more mistakes — because they were the units where people actually felt safe reporting the ones that happened. The worse-performing units weren't safer. They were just quieter. Edmondson's 2023 book, Right Kind of Wrong, pushes that idea a step further when she argues that most of us have quietly trained ourselves to treat "I spoke up and got overruled" and "I was wrong" as the same event, even though they're not remotely the same event — one is a fact about hierarchy, the other is a fact about reality.

Once hierarchy and being incorrect fuse in someone's head, they stop needing to actually be silenced by anyone. They start doing it to themselves, pre-emptively, before the room even gets a chance to disagree. Nobody has to override a leader in this state twice because once is usually enough to teach the lesson permanently, and the lesson is almost always wrong.

Meet George and Mariah

I want to tell you about Mariah, an associate director at a large university alumni association. She had built two things from scratch inside her organization: a recruitment pipeline and an annual assessment, both of which existed only because she'd spotted the gap, pitched it in four sentences, and then quietly become the only person who understood how either program actually worked.

Mariah’s boss, George- and yes, he was trained as a lawyer, and yes, it shows in every conversation he has— was thrilled to let her run both, mostly because neither one interested him enough to want to manage it himself. Inside those two programs, Mariah was unshakeable. Ask her a hard question about either one and she'd answer it in a sentence, no hedging. But hand her a role with edges nobody had bothered to define — which is exactly what happened when she was promoted into a newly invented executive director title with no job description attached — and something changed. The clearest version of it occurred at a series of young alumni recruitment events held almost every night for three weeks, each night in a different city, which she ran almost entirely on her own, since George was not interested in doing so.

She'd planned a Friday evening session for the New York City alumni chapter in the heart of Union Square at a hot new bar on purpose, because she wanted to engage young alumni membership as much as possible. George arrived a few hours before the event, decided he preferred the event to be in the traditional space next door where New York City alumni events were typically held, and moved the session there without asking her — and then came and found her afterward specifically to explain why she'd been wrong to put it in a different location in the first place.

George opened the rest of the New York City alumni events that same weekend by telling the whole group, warmly and publicly, that Mariah had envisioned this event and made it happen. Both things were true. He meant both of them. He also overrode her within twenty-four hours of saying it, and never seemed to notice the contradiction. And young alumni, disappointed to be at a stodgy bar, and not a hot new one, stayed away, while the retirees came out in droves.

Mariah noticed. She always noticed. She told me she could predict, with something close to statistical confidence, that if she stated a position and George pushed back, she'd yield — and that weeks or months later, she'd usually find out her original instinct had been the correct one. She'd even developed a theory to explain her own patience with this: she was simply waiting for the old guard to retire, playing a long game.

That's a real strategy, and a smart one, some of the time. But when I asked her how many times she'd need to be proven right before she started counting it as evidence about her own judgment rather than his, she went quiet for a second — and then admitted the number had already come and gone. She just hadn't been keeping score. What she was missing wasn't information. She had the information — every instance of being overridden and later proven right was sitting in her own memory, fully available, the moment I asked her to go looking for it, but what she'd never done was the boring, unglamorous arithmetic: actually counting.

Mariah needed to treat her own track record as data with the same seriousness she'd extend to a spreadsheet George handed her. Once she counted, the picture stopped being ambiguous fast. Mariah hadn't lost a real debate with George in months. She'd just never kept score, so the losses were the only ones that registered — the wins didn't feel like data because nobody had stamped them with a title. I want to be careful here, because I don't think the answer is "trust yourself unconditionally and never defer to anyone." Strategic deference is a genuine skill — reading a room, picking your battles, protecting a relationship you'll need later. Mariah's reading of George's lawyerly instincts and her decision not to turn every disagreement into a cross-examination were often smart. The problem was never that she deferred. The problem was that she couldn't tell the difference, in the moment, between choosing to yield and believing she had to. One is a strategy. The other is a leak. Being overruled and being wrong get treated as the same event so often that Mariah never noticed she’d merged them. They're not the same event. One is about who has positional power in a given room. The other is about who's actually correct. A title can win the first without touching the second at all — and if Mariah never separates them, she’d spend a career mistaking someone else's confidence for evidence, while her own track record sits there, uncounted, right in front of her. So here's the question I left Mariah with: how many times would you need to be right before you'd start trusting yourself the first time?

If you ask yourself the same question and your honest answer is "I don't actually know, because I've never counted" — that's not a failure. That's just data you haven't collected yet. And it's exactly the kind of thing worth working through out loud with someone who isn't in the room when George moves the meeting.