Pick Your Battles: Don’t Win the Argument and Lose the War
One of the more important lessons I’ve learned in life and leadership is knowing when to pick your battles. Unfortunately, we seem to be living through a time when everything has become a battle. Every disagreement becomes an argument, every difference of opinion becomes personal, and almost every issue seems to require us to choose a side.
Division is everywhere. Conflict dominates the airwaves, social media rewards outrage, and too many of our public leaders seem incapable of disagreeing without attacking one another. Everything is presented as if we are standing on the edge of some precipice and the next controversy will somehow determine the future of the country.
It’s exhausting, and I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. More importantly, it certainly isn’t the model of leadership I would encourage any CEO, business owner, or senior executive to follow.
The Example Being Set at the Top
I think our current president, Donald Trump, provides a very visible example of what I’m talking about. You may strongly support many of his policies and accomplishments. You may strongly oppose them. That’s not really my point.
What concerns me from a leadership perspective is the highly confrontational nature of his approach. Opponents are frequently attacked, disagreements can become personal, criticism often generates a counterattack, and there seems to be a constant need to win the argument. Whatever you think of the politics, I don’t believe that’s a particularly healthy leadership model for the rest of us to follow.
I’m also not suggesting this problem begins and ends with Donald Trump. Far from it. I’ve been disappointed by the behavior of leaders in both parties, and I think our political and media environment increasingly rewards people for antagonizing one another rather than finding ways to work together.
But presidents set a tone. CEOs do too.
The person at the top is always modeling behavior, whether they realize it or not. If you treat every disagreement as a battle, personalize criticism, attack people who challenge you, or demonstrate that compromise equals weakness, don’t be surprised when some of that behavior starts showing up elsewhere in your organization.
Culture has a funny way of taking its cues from the top.
Not Everything Needs to Be a Fight
Healthy disagreement is important. I don’t want to surround myself with people who think exactly as I do, and I certainly wouldn’t encourage any CEO or business owner to do that either. Some of the best decisions I’ve seen leaders make came after someone had the courage to challenge their thinking.
You should also have principles and core beliefs that you are willing to stand behind. There are times when leadership requires taking an unpopular position, having a difficult conversation, confronting unacceptable behavior, protecting your people, or refusing to compromise on something that really matters.
Sometimes the right battle will be uncomfortable, expensive, and unpopular, and you still need to fight it. Picking your battles isn’t about avoiding conflict. It’s about making sure the conflict is worthy of the cost.
The problem is that everything shouldn’t matter equally. When every disagreement becomes a battle, you eventually lose your ability to distinguish between something that is truly important and something that simply irritates you.
I’ve certainly fought a few battles over the years that, looking back, weren’t worth the time or energy I gave them. I suspect most of us have. That’s part of getting older and, hopefully, a little wiser.
Good Leaders Know Which Battles Matter
I see unnecessary battles happen in business all the time. A CEO gets frustrated because someone didn’t follow their preferred process, even though the person produced the right result. Two senior executives allow a relatively small disagreement to become a test of loyalty. Someone digs in during a negotiation because they don’t want the other person to feel like they won.
I’ve also watched leaders refuse to reconsider a previous decision because changing direction might look like admitting they were wrong. At that point, the original issue is no longer driving the decision. Something else is.
One of the hardest things about leadership is recognizing when that something else is your ego.
The more successful you become, the easier it can be to confuse being challenged with being disrespected. That’s when I think every leader needs to ask a difficult question: Am I fighting for the organization, the principle, or the outcome—or am I fighting because my ego doesn’t want to lose?
The answer isn’t always comfortable. But having the self-awareness to ask the question is one of the things that separates mature leaders from everyone else.
Every Battle Has an Opportunity Cost
There is another part of this we don’t talk about enough. Every battle consumes something. It consumes time, energy, attention, emotional capacity, and goodwill, and all of those are finite resources.
If you’re a CEO and you spend three hours stewing about something relatively insignificant, those are three hours you aren’t thinking about your customers, your people, your strategy, or the future of your business. If your leadership team spends half a meeting arguing about something that really doesn’t matter, that’s time they aren’t spending solving something that does.
The question isn’t simply whether you’re right. A better question may be: Is being right about this worth what it’s costing me and everyone else?
I’ve watched leaders be technically right and still do tremendous damage because of the way they handled the situation. Being right doesn’t automatically mean you’re leading well.
You Can Win the Argument and Lose the War
If you go through life constantly picking battles with other people, you don’t just exhaust yourself. You exhaust everyone around you. Eventually, people become cautious. They start thinking twice before challenging you and learn which subjects to avoid and which opinions are safe to express.
You may think people are agreeing with you when, in reality, they’ve simply decided it isn’t worth the fight.
For a leader, that’s dangerous because you haven’t just damaged the relationship. You’ve degraded the quality of information reaching you. The higher you move in an organization, the more dependent you become on other people being willing to tell you what you need to hear rather than what they think you want to hear.
Perhaps you proved your point but damaged an important relationship. Maybe you saved a relatively small amount of money but alienated a great customer or vendor. You could win an argument with a talented employee and still cause that person to question whether they want to continue working for you.
Leadership isn’t about accumulating victories over other people. It’s about accomplishing meaningful things with other people. You can win a lot of arguments and still lose the things that matter most.
Compromise Isn’t a Dirty Word
Somewhere along the way, compromise seems to have become associated with weakness. I think that’s unfortunate because compromise is often how intelligent adults with different perspectives actually get things done.
You don’t have to abandon your principles to acknowledge that someone else may have a legitimate point of view. You can disagree with someone without disliking them. You can listen without surrendering, and you can even change your mind without losing.
In business, virtually every successful long-term relationship involves some level of compromise. Partnerships, customer relationships, employee relationships, acquisitions, negotiations, and leadership teams all require people to occasionally give something up to accomplish something bigger together.
There is an important distinction, however. Don’t compromise your values. Be willing to compromise your preferences. Knowing the difference is another important part of leadership maturity.
Our Leaders Are Also a Reflection of Us
It’s easy to blame President Trump, Congress, the media, or social media for the contentious environment we’re living in. All of them play a role, but blaming everyone else is also a bit of a cop-out.
Our leaders are, to some extent, a reflection of ourselves. They respond to what gets our attention, our votes, our clicks, and our money. If outrage works, we shouldn’t be surprised when we get more outrage. If attacking someone generates attention, people will keep attacking.
Maybe we should spend a little less time asking what’s wrong with everyone else and spend a little more time examining our own behavior. Are we genuinely curious about people who see the world differently? Do we listen to understand, or are we simply waiting for our opportunity to respond? Can we acknowledge that someone we disagree with might occasionally be right?
We have plenty of big problems to solve. I’d much rather see us spend our collective energy working on those problems than continually inventing new reasons to dislike one another.
The same is true in business. Most companies already have enough real problems. They don’t need their leaders creating additional ones because of ego, politics, personality conflicts, territorial behavior, or an inability to let something go.
Six Questions Before You Pick Your Next Battle
The next time you find yourself preparing for a confrontation, it may be worth asking yourself six questions:
- Does this really matter?
- Is this a principle or simply my preference?
- Is my ego influencing my reaction?
- What am I actually trying to accomplish?
- What will winning this battle cost me?
- Will this still matter six months from now?
If the issue involves integrity, values, protecting people, or something genuinely important to the future of your organization, then by all means have the courage to address it. But if you can’t come up with a compelling reason why the battle matters, perhaps it isn’t one worth fighting.
Focus Your Energy on What Really Matters
The older I get, the more I realize that not everything deserves my reaction. Time and energy are finite. So is the goodwill we build with other people. I would rather spend those resources solving an important problem, helping someone succeed, building a relationship, or creating something worthwhile than proving I was right about something that really didn’t matter very much.
As far as any of us knows, we get one shot at this thing called life. I would like to think that when it’s over, we will be judged less by how many arguments we won and more by what we built, who we helped, the relationships we created, and whether the places we touched were a little better because we were there.
There will always be battles worth fighting. Integrity matters. Values matter. Protecting your people matters. Standing up for what is right matters, and there will be moments when leadership requires courage and confrontation.
The wisdom is knowing the difference.
We don’t need to agree about everything. We probably never will. But we do need to figure out how to live, work, lead, and solve problems together. And those of us who lead have an additional responsibility because other people are watching how we behave.
What we model gets repeated. What we reward gets repeated. And what we tolerate eventually becomes part of the culture.
Maybe we can’t fix the tone of the entire country, but we can certainly influence the tone of the organizations, families, and communities we lead. We can pick our battles better, park our egos when necessary, strengthen our relationships, remain curious about people who see things differently, and save our energy for the things that genuinely matter.
That’s a pretty good place to start.