Admitting you’re wrong is a sign of great strength!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

If you’re lucky enough to have a job, chances are you’re unlucky enough to have a boss who drives you just a little crazy.

For me the hardest thing about having bosses was their inability or unwillingness to admit they were wrong. For some reason, they seemed to feel that if they owned up to making a mistake, they might be perceived as being weak.

This stupidity arises from either plain ignorance or various insecurities clustered around each other, like broken crisps at the bottom of the packet.

So then you find yourself doing what the Americans coined as ‘managing up’: using all your social skills and workplace experience, you try to find a way to explain to this person who’s making your life a misery by dumping all their error-streaked pooh on your desk, ladder, van, whatever it is you work at, that it’s okay to be wrong.

It’s okay to have made a mistake. If you just admitted that you’ve made a mistake, which we all know you have, we won’t suddenly think you an incapable fool. We won’t think ‘Aha this person is able to make mistakes, when I had previously believed them to be infallible. Now I cannot trust them to do their job, or advise me of anything’.

What we might think is that you’ve suddenly grown up a bit. Once you’ve admitted to making a mistake, you’ll have less to hide, so you’ll be more able to do your job, not dump the extra work your wee booboo created on us, like you have been doing, because you couldn’t admit it was your fault.

Now we can feel at last that you’re worthy of respect, because the absolute truth is that admitting errors is a sign of great strength. All those years you thought you were doing so well, working so hard to hide from us the fact that you might be weak and drop the odd clanger, all those years wasted because all we felt was a growing contempt for your lack of understanding.

Given that we all accept and respect each other’s errors on a daily basis, I’ve always been fascinated by the terror that authority has of admitting mistakes. From a pretty early age we realise that everyone screws up; that the issue is not so much about whether you make a mistake, but rather how you deal with it. It’s pretty basic stuff, Life 101, yet world leaders aren’t fond of saying ‘Oops, sorry!’

To be fair to politicians – sorry, just have to take a breath after typing that – the media have made it almost impossible for people to admit they were wrong. By pursuing both the innocent and guilty with equally eager vigour, the exhausted journalists of rolling 24/7 TV news have to come up with stories, never-ending stories, rolling stories that generate other story strands, until it doesn’t matter who said or did what to whom, whatever happened or why, because facts are the least important issue between each commercial break. So in the context of cable newsrooms, it doesn’t matter if somebody did or did not admit to making a mistake. All that matters is the story.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.