Every leader makes bad calls. It is part of the job.

The real test of leadership is not whether you can avoid ever being wrong. It is what you do when the evidence starts telling you that you were wrong.

That sounds simple. In practice, it can be extraordinarily difficult.

Because once we have publicly supported a decision, invested money in it, defended it in meetings, or attached our credibility to it, changing our mind can feel like losing.

Being wrong is not the leadership failure. Refusing to learn from being wrong is.

When Evidence Becomes the Enemy

People rarely say, “I know this is failing, but I am going to defend it anyway.”

What usually happens is more subtle.

We start looking for evidence that supports what we already believe. We give more weight to information that validates the original decision. We challenge data that contradicts it. We explain away poor outcomes. We find another metric, another interpretation, another expert, or another reason the problem is somewhere else.

Psychology gives us several useful lenses for this: confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and escalation of commitment.

But whatever terminology we use, the organizational consequence is the same:

Eventually, the organization stops managing performance and starts managing the evidence.

An IT Delivery Example

Imagine an IT organization introduces a new incident-management process. Leadership believes the new process will improve accountability, accelerate restoration, and reduce escalations.

Six months later, the operational evidence tells a different story.

Mean time to restore has increased. Engineers are spending more time navigating process gates. Major incident bridges are becoming larger and less effective. Escalations are increasing. Customers are frustrated. Teams are openly questioning whether the new process is helping.

A learning organization would stop and ask: What did we get wrong?

But a defensive organization asks a different question: How do we prove the process is working?

Suddenly the reporting window changes. Certain incidents are excluded. The definition of the KPI is adjusted. A secondary metric that improved becomes the headline. Poor results are attributed to staffing, application complexity, suppliers, or user behaviour.

None of those explanations may be entirely false. That is what makes this dangerous.

The organization can construct a technically defensible story while avoiding the larger truth: the decision itself may have been wrong.

The Employees Already Know

Leaders sometimes underestimate how quickly employees recognize this behaviour.

The engineers know the process is creating friction. The Service Desk sees the additional handoffs. Incident managers see the bridges getting longer. Service management sees the exceptions being added to reporting.

And they are watching leadership.

At first, people speak up.

Then they notice that contradictory evidence is challenged while supportive evidence is celebrated.

Eventually they learn something far more damaging than whether the process works:

The decision has already been made. The organization is only interested in information that supports it.

That is where a decision-quality problem becomes an employee engagement problem.

Engagement, Enablement and Empowerment All Suffer

Engagement suffers. Why should employees care deeply about outcomes when leadership appears more interested in defending decisions than improving them?

Enablement suffers. Data, expertise, operational experience, and analytical tools become largely ceremonial if inconvenient findings are ignored.

Empowerment suffers. Employees stop challenging assumptions because they learn that speaking up carries effort and risk without meaningful influence.

Over time, silence can become rational behaviour.

That is particularly dangerous in IT delivery. The people closest to incidents, changes, infrastructure, applications, and customers often see emerging problems before executives do. An organization that trains those people to remain quiet is disabling one of its most important early-warning systems.

The Human Behaviour Behind It

Changing your mind is not purely an intellectual exercise.

When a decision becomes connected to identity, status, credibility, or authority, contradictory information can feel personally threatening. Instead of evaluating the information neutrally, we may instinctively defend the position.

This is why seniority does not eliminate confirmation bias. In some environments, seniority can make admitting error harder because the perceived reputational stakes are higher.

The antidote is not pretending leaders have no ego. The antidote is building leadership habits and organizational systems that make changing course legitimate.

Lessons for Managers

Separate your identity from your decision. You made the best decision you could with the information available at the time. New evidence can justify a different decision.

Ask explicitly for disconfirming evidence. Instead of asking, “Is this working?” ask, “What evidence would tell us this is not working?”

Reward the person who identifies the flaw. Do not make employees regret bringing inconvenient information forward.

Say the words publicly: “I got this wrong.” That sentence can increase credibility rather than diminish it when it is followed by learning and corrective action.

Most importantly, demonstrate that changing direction is not weakness. It is governance responding to evidence.

Lessons for Organizations

Organizations should design decision reviews around outcomes rather than around defending sponsors.

Define success measures before implementation wherever possible. Preserve baseline data. Give operational teams a genuine voice in post-implementation reviews. Track unintended consequences alongside intended benefits.

And create enough psychological safety that employees can challenge a decision without appearing to challenge the leader's authority.

If employees must choose between telling leadership the truth and protecting their careers, leadership will eventually stop receiving the truth.

Key Takeaways

  • Being wrong is inevitable. Refusing to learn is optional.
  • Confirmation bias can turn performance management into evidence management.
  • Employees quickly notice when contradictory information is unwelcome.
  • When speaking up feels pointless, engagement and empowerment decline.
  • Operational teams are an early-warning system; silencing them creates delivery risk.
  • Strong leaders make it safe to say, “We were wrong. Here is what we learned. Here is what we are changing.”

The strongest leaders are not the people who somehow manage to be right every time.

They are the people whose organizations can discover that they are wrong before the customer has to prove it to them.