Do Some People Say You Are Arrogant? Could You Listen Without Needing To Always Be Right?

The pocket book of Top Tips for Inspiring Leaders – picking out Tip 76

A Client – lets call him “Arrogant Andy” believed that he was always Right.

If he wanted your opinion he would give it to you!

This massively eroded trust with the stakeholders have worked with him, irritated them and alienate them. He was either unaware of this or really didn’t care what other people thought because he believed that he was always right.

I encouraged him to take a new Approach: to listen without “Needing to be Right”

I encouraged him to be Curious. A new approach he used was hard at first but got some significant results.  If this applies to you or anyone you are coaching advising mentoring or supporting then ask them to take this line:

Ask Yourself “What if I’m wrong?”

The other helpful mindset is to imagine a world in which everybody else is in lightened but you and they all have something to teach you. I once met a cabdriver in York who said to me everyone I meet in this taxi and in life has something to teach me if only I would listen to them. Sometimes it’s teaching me how not to be in the world how not to treat people how not to speak to people but all the time they’ve got an interesting experience in their life that they can pass on to me. In turn hopefully I can pass that on to others and be of help.

So you may be wondering what was the result with arrogant Andy. He no longer lived up to his name that was the first thing he did begin to work on accumulating a little bit of humanity humility and a good dose of humour to laugh at himself with others. Most importantly he had some dramatic results over a few months and these were that he built trust and now has great relationships with his stakeholders.

Give it a go. Then again you may not ever be wrong so you may not need to improve. Surely you wouldn’t be arrogant would you?