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# The Right to Be Wrong
- URL: https://leadfromthefront.ebmeridian.com/the-right-to-be-wrong/
- Published: 2026-09-09T16:00:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-09T16:00:48.000Z
- Author: Ed Brzychcy

## **Part 3 of 4 in our Leadership Development series.**

Building the skill to be a leader can be difficult, as we've talked about before; however, building leadership in others is often the hardest skill for anyone to learn.

![The Right to Be Wrong](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b7/17/b7173bf1-6afe-4a6b-8fb0-8deaf15ec2a7/content/images/2026/09/wooden-peg-dolls-on-a-blue-surface-2026-01-07-00-20-08-utc.jpg)

Envato Elements

### **Where the third stage stalls**

[Part 2](https://leadfromthefront.ebmeridian.com/the-un-comfortable-half/) ended on two capabilities, terrain acumen and trail acumen, one comfortable to build and the other resistant to every method that works on the first. Handing over authority rather than tasks sat in that list as one of five trail capabilities. It earns its own stage because it stalls for a reason none of the others share.

Will, then skill, then trust, then legacy. By the third stage, the capability usually exists somewhere in the building, and somebody is genuinely ready to use it. The constraint has moved, and it now sits inside the person who has to release the decision. Every stage before this one asked us to build something. This one asks us to stop and let others do it.

### **Five reasons we hold on**

Similar patterns come up in nearly every conversation across the leaders I work with. 

The first is identity. If we are not doing the work, what is our value? We were promoted for being exceptional at the work, and the work has changed underneath us into something that looks a lot less like competence and a lot more like waiting.

Then perfectionism, which wears the costume of high standards and wears it convincingly. They will do it wrong, which almost always translates to doing it differently. They might well make mistakes. The part that doesn't hold is our way being the only right way.

Efficiency is the one that sounds most like judgment. It's faster if we do it ourselves. That stays true for roughly the next 30 minutes, and it gets expensive over the next 30 months.

Irrelevance is the one nobody says out loud. What if they stop needing us? For tactical decisions, that is the goal, and reaching it frees us for the work nobody else can do.

And risk. What if they fail? They will. Failure is the tuition for building capability, and it gets paid whether we budget for it or not.

Naming and recognizing these blockers in ourselves moves the discomfort from a signal that something has gone wrong to a sign that the work is proceeding as designed. Successful leaders aren't fearless here. They have built ways to keep working while the anxiety runs, and I have yet to meet one who called this part comfortable.

Left unmanaged, the five compound into something structural, and eventually into artifacts of organizational culture. Permanent structures which are increasingly difficult to remove or work with. An organization that runs entirely on one person's judgment stays fragile in a way that doesn't show until that person steps away. The person holding it together is usually the last to see it. Everybody else worked it out a while ago.

### **What we actually withhold**

The delegation itself is rarely where it breaks. Most of us hand the thing over, name the owner, say the words, and mean them at the time.

Then the decision comes back for a signature, and everyone in the room already knows what that signature will be. Problems arrive late, in the version that has already been handled. The week after a trip fills up with items that begin with "wanted to run this by you." Somebody makes a call we would have made differently; it works, and we go looking for the flaw anyway.

And the last time one of them got something wrong somewhere a customer or the board could see it, we explained it. We were fair about it. We were careful. We explained it.

That last one is where the bill comes due. Every explanation is a small public notice that the decision was really ours all along, and teams read those notices far more closely than anything said out loud in a meeting.

What it buys is a quarter spent inside decisions that stopped needing us two years ago, and a company a buyer prices down because it runs on one person's judgment.

We never withheld the authority. What we withheld was the right to be wrong.

### **Leading from the front, in this stage**

It means standing in front of a decision that was not ours.

I learned it from the NCOs who trained me. When I made a call that turned out wrong, my senior sergeants pulled me aside privately and walked me through what I'd missed. In front of the platoon, they backed my authority completely. At the time, I thought that was just how it worked. It took years to understand what it cost them.

A team that knows we will defend their authority in public and build their capability in private will run through walls for us. The reverse teaches its own lesson, and teaches it faster.

Correct small mistakes in front of everyone, take back decisions already given, and people learn exactly what we are teaching. Don't take risks. Don't decide anything. Wait for the boss. We manufacture the dependency we feared.

So when one of their calls goes sideways in a room we happen to be sitting in, and somebody turns to us for the explanation, the answer runs in one sentence. She owns that call; we’re behind it; the outcome is ours. Then stop. No reconstruction of how the decision got made, no quiet note about what we'd have done differently. The conversation was already happening. The only thing that sentence costs is the urge to fill it.

### **Making being wrong affordable**

Trust is a structure before it is a feeling, and that structure makes being wrong survivable.

Most teams that look indecisive are well calibrated to an ambiguity nobody has resolved for them. Never having been told what a mistake costs, they price every decision as though it might be the expensive one. That is a sorting problem in the costume of a capability problem, and it is ours to fix.

Customer complaints, small overruns, and slipped timelines on noncritical work are safe to fail. Hand those over completely and without conditions. When one goes wrong, and one will, the temptation is to rescue. Sitting still is the harder discipline, and the one that pays.

Legal exposure, safety, major financial loss, and damage to a relationship the company can't replace sit in a different category. Those need guardrails, and the way in is a ladder, not a leap.

- Bring the recommendation, and we decide together.
- Make the call, and tell us before it executes.
- Make the call, and tell us after.
- Make the call, and we'll hear about it in the regular meeting.

Each rung builds their judgment and our confidence at once. Jumping straight to the top rung tends to get read as trust, and it lands a lot closer to abdication.

Budget for the cost, because there is always one. The first time somebody takes on a task it runs about three times as long as it would have taken us. The second time, twice. The third time they're at our pace, and the fourth they're teaching somebody else. Taking the work back in month one writes the whole investment off, and most of us do it around week two.

Then write the rules down, so people know which decisions are theirs outright, which need a conversation first, and which need approval. Ambiguity produces paralysis. Clarity produces movement.

### **Looking at the bench**

- When did we last let someone fail in a way that cost little and taught a lot? If nothing comes to mind from the past quarter, we're either not delegating or not making it safe enough to try.
- Who has earned room we haven't given them? We extend more latitude to people who remind us of ourselves. The question worth sitting with is who's being passed over, and why.
- Can this team win an argument we aren't in the room for, and would we hear about it from them rather than from somebody else?

The bench depth in our organization is ultimately the best indicator of our readiness to meet challenges, adversity, and to adapt in the face of change. In complex challenges, bringing this bench depth to life starts with how we hand off decisions and opportunities for others to learn and, in turn, builds a lasting imprint and legacy that will outlive anything else that we ever do.

Part 3 of 4\. Next: The Final Handoff