There’s a common trap that catches many smart people—the urge to always be right. You’ve probably seen it (or felt it) before. Someone in a meeting who can’t let go of an argument until everyone admits they had the correct answer, or at least their way is the only right way to go. Or the teammate who points out every tiny flaw in a code review to prove their expertise. At first glance, it seems logical. If everyone just listened to the person who’s right and all, wouldn’t the team succeed faster?
In reality, it’s not that simple.
Far from that, actually.
A team isn’t a courtroom where the most correct argument wins by default. It’s more like a crew rowing a boat. If one rower insists on rowing their way because they’re sure it’s the “right” way, the boat starts to zigzag. Momentum slows. Friction builds. The “right” rower might feel good about proving a point, but the boat still drifts off course. In contrast, when each person focuses on moving the boat forward (being valuable to the team’s goal), progress happens. Even if it means someone had to adjust their technique or admit another approach was better.
Being right is satisfying.
Being valuable is harder, but it’s what counts.
Here’s why that difference matters more than ever and how shifting your mindset from needing to be right toward striving to be valuable can transform the way you work.
Why do we cling so tightly to being right? Part of it is human nature and ego. We grow up getting rewarded for correct answers, so it’s natural to carry that mentality into meetings and discussions.
Being told “you’re right” feels like a validation of our intelligence and worth. In the moment, winning an argument or being the expert can give a rush of pride.
However, that short-term rush has a long-term cost. When being right becomes a personal trophy, collaboration starts to suffer. Discussions turn into debates with winners and losers, and real problems go unsolved amid the point-scoring. Team members who may have a different perspective begin to shut down.
Have you ever been in a brainstorming session where one person kept correcting everyone’s ideas? Pretty soon, nobody else bothers to speak up. The conversation dies, and so does any chance of finding a truly creative solution.
Psychologically, we also equate being wrong with weakness, so we double down on our stance to avoid that feeling. It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially for knowledgeable professionals and experts. It feels like it’s our duty to correct mistakes and guide the ship. But if that “duty” turns into dominating every discussion, it stops being helpful. In fact, it can alienate the very people whose input you need. As psychologist Dr. Mike Brooks notes, if you “win” an argument by bludgeoning someone with logic, what kind of victory is it? The other person isn’t actually convinced; they’re upset or disengaged. You’ve won the point, but you might have lost their trust or willingness to collaborate.
In a team setting, winning an argument can quickly turn into losing an ally. And a team without allyship and openness cannot win overall. Google’s famous internal study, Project Aristotle, found that the highest-performing teams weren’t those with the smartest individuals operating in silos. It was those where members felt safe to speak up and share ideas without fear of being shot down. In other words, teams built on respect and openness outperformed teams built on any one person being “always right.” If someone’s need to be right creates an atmosphere of fear or hesitation, you’re robbing the group of valuable ideas and candid feedback. The smartest idea in the room might never be voiced if everyone else is afraid of being told they’re wrong.
If being right is about personal correctness, being valuable is about collective success. It means your presence and actions genuinely help the team, the product, or the customer move forward. It’s less “Did I prove my point?” and more, “Did I improve the outcome?”
Being valuable can take many forms, and often they’re not as flashy as a triumphant “I told you so”. It could mean asking the question nobody else thought of that saves the project from a blind spot. It could mean writing clear documentation that helps the next developer (even though you’ll never get credit for it) or noticing a teammate struggling and pairing with them to solve a problem. It might even mean letting someone else’s idea take the spotlight because, ultimately, it serves the project or the user better than your idea would have.
One way to think about value is to consider impact over ego. The impact of your work and interactions should outweigh the need to personally shine. For developers, for example, being valuable might mean focusing on building the right product rather than just building the product right. You can write a piece of code that is technically perfect, using the “correct” patterns, but if it implements a feature nobody needs, what value was created? On the other hand, a quick, imperfect hack that saves users from a major bug right now might be far more valuable in context than an elegant solution delivered too late.
Being valuable often requires zooming out to see the bigger picture.
Instead of zeroing in on a colleague’s minor mistake to prove you caught it, you look at whether the overall approach is sound and helps the team reach its goal. This higher-level focus is what separates a merely smart contributor from a truly valuable one.
An experienced engineer once told me this: junior engineers worry about writing code that works, senior engineers obsess over writing code the “one correct way,” but the most valued engineers balance quality with pragmatism. They ask whether the code is solving the right problem in the right way for the business and the user. That pragmatic mindset is gold on a team.
Crucially, being valuable is NOT about being a doormat or never expressing your ideas. It doesn’t mean you should pretend to be wrong when you believe you’re right.
It does mean you’re willing to let the best idea win.
Even if it isn’t yours.
It means contributing your knowledge and then collaborating on the solution, rather than clinging to your solution. When every team member takes that approach, good ideas build on each other instead of getting smothered. The end result is a better product and a stronger team.
“The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize”—Dr. Shigeo Shingo
Insisting on being right carries some hidden costs that can quietly drain a team’s morale and effectiveness. One cost is TIME. Think about the hours wasted in meeting rooms or Slack threads because two people argued to death over who had the correct approach, while the deadline loomed closer. Often, being overly attached to rightness leads to analysis paralysis or decision deadlock. Valuable contributors know when it’s more important to make a timely decision and iterate rather than perfecting an argument or polishing a technical detail ad nauseam.
Another cost is INNOVATION. If one or two voices always dominate with their “rightness,” you lose diversity of thought. Others might stop offering creative ideas, assuming they’ll just get overruled. Over time, this can turn a once-dynamic team into a rubber-stamp committee for the loudest ego in the room. Teams like that might execute okay in the short term, but they rarely innovate or excel because they’ve been reduced to one-track thinking. Dr. Shigeo Shingo famously said, “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” When you silence others, you waste their insights, and you may not even realize what your team is missing.
Perhaps the biggest cost, though, is RELATIONSHIP DAMAGE. We touched on this, but it bears repeating. If you consistently make your teammates feel small or dismissed, they will disengage. Imagine a scenario in a code review: a junior developer submits code that isn’t in the style you prefer. You cover the diff with 15 nit-pick comments about spacing, naming, and every tiny imperfection. Technically, you were “right” about each detail. But how does the other person feel? Probably overwhelmed and demoralized. They might think twice before asking you for help again or avoid collaborating with you in the future. They might vent to others about the experience, seeding distrust. In the worst case, they might decide that working in this team (or in software at all) isn’t worth the frustration and check out entirely. All because someone insisted on being right about things that might not have even mattered in the end. Was it worth it to get that spacing perfect or prove your preferred syntax? Unlikely. In trying to win on principle, you’ve lost on people.
On the flip side, there is power in being wrong, or rather, in embracing when you’re wrong. Teams that aren’t afraid to be wrong can course-correct faster. If a design or strategy isn’t panning out, valuable teams don’t waste time assigning blame for the “wrong” decision; they take the lesson and pivot to a new approach. In fact, some of the most successful tech companies attribute their success to this willingness to be wrong and learn. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos once noted that the people who are right a lot are the ones who change their minds a lot. In other words, the willingness to say, “Turns out I was wrong. Let’s try something else” can lead you to the right outcome faster than stubbornly sticking to your guns. Being wrong isn’t a personal failure if it leads to a better solution; it’s just a data point on the way to creating value.
Shifting from a “must be right” mindset to a “focus on value” mindset takes conscious effort. Here are some practices worth considering:
Before diving into a debate or a perfect solution, make sure you’re all aligned on the real goal. Keeping the user’s need or core problem front and center will remind everyone (including yourself) that delivering a solution that works for the user is more important than who proposed it or how elegant it is. If you stay anchored to the user’s perspective, you’ll naturally gravitate toward valuable discussions and away from petty arguments. After all, if a brilliant technical solution isn’t solving the user’s problem, what value is it delivering?
Practice active listening in meetings or discussions. Instead of waiting for your turn to prove someone wrong, listen for the kernel of truth in their idea. A valuable teammate will say, “That’s an interesting idea. What if we also considered X” rather than “No, that’s wrong, here’s the right way.” By building on others’ contributions, you turn potentially adversarial debates into cooperative problem-solving. Plus, you might discover that the “less correct” idea had a piece of insight that leads to a better solution when combined with your own. Great ideas often emerge from the collision of viewpoints, not from one viewpoint bulldozing the rest.
Not every hill is worth dying on. Save your strong convictions for the issues that truly impact value: architecture decisions that affect scalability, design choices that affect user experience, process changes that affect team velocity, etc.
Learn to let the small stuff go.
Maybe the code isn’t written exactly the way you would do it, but it meets the team’s standards and works.
Let it through if it’s not going to hurt in the long run.
By being selective and fighting only for what really matters, you gain respect. People will notice that when you do dig in your heels, it’s for the good of the product or team, not your ego. In other words, define what “right” means in terms of outcomes, not personal preference.
Measure success by things like user satisfaction, system reliability, and team morale. Those are the metrics that matter, not whether every line of code was written your favorite way.
Create the kind of environment where others feel comfortable contributing. Even disagreeing with you. This means acknowledging when someone else has a great point, giving credit generously, and thanking colleagues who correct your mistakes.
Yes, thanking them.
It sounds counterintuitive if you’re used to being the always-right person. But when a teammate points out a flaw in your plan and saves the project, that doesn’t diminish you; it benefits you (and everyone). Respond with “Good catch, great call,” and suddenly being right all the time doesn’t seem so critical. When people see that you value the best idea over your idea, you set a tone of mutual respect. Over time, you’ll get a reputation not just as the “smart one” but as the one people actually want to work with. That’s far more valuable.
After each project or sprint, ask yourself, “Did the team achieve its goal? Did we deliver value to the customer or end-user?” “How did I help that happen?” Also, where might my obsession with being right have gotten in the way? Being a reflective practitioner helps you course-correct. Maybe you’ll notice you argued for a certain feature that ended up being a dead end—next time, you might advocate for a small experiment rather than pushing all-in on an unproven idea. Or you’ll catch that a teammate stopped bringing ideas to you, a sign you need to rebuild some trust there. Use those lessons to continually align your contributions with the team’s success, not just personal validation.
When you focus on being valuable, you’ll find that you still get to be right plenty of the time, just about the things that count. In a psychologically safe, collaborative environment, good ideas tend to shine. Sometimes you’ll provide them, sometimes someone else will, and often it’s a mix of both. And when you do put forward an idea, your team is more likely to listen if they know you’re not attached to your ego.
Ironically, the less you worry about credit, the more credit people will naturally give you for consistently doing what’s best for the group.
The immediate reward is a better working atmosphere. Work becomes less of a tug-of-war and more of a creative jam session. Problems get solved faster because everyone’s contributing. Meetings become more about what is right for the project than who is right in the room. That’s energizing. It reminds us why we wanted to work with smart people in the first place. It’s fun to build things together when everyone’s aligned on the mission instead of on one-upping each other.
There are personal benefits, too. Your reputation will shift from “that bright but abrasive know-it-all” to “the go-to person who makes the team better.” In career terms, being valuable is far more sustainable. Today’s tech landscape changes so quickly that what’s “right” constantly evolves — languages, frameworks, and best practices come and go. But the ability to add value in any scenario is a timeless skill. It’s the difference between being seen as a brilliant solo contributor and being seen as a leader, regardless of your title. Leaders focus on outcomes and bringing others along, not just on showcasing their own smarts.
In the long run, the people who thrive in any industry are those known for the value they create, not just the knowledge they possess. Knowledge can become outdated or automated; indeed, we now have AI tools that can surface “the right answer” in seconds. But turning knowledge into real-world impact. That’s a human art. AI might give you the correct syntax for a function or the optimal configuration for a server, but it takes a valuable human teammate to decide which feature is worth building in the first place, to understand the nuances of user pain points, or to resolve a conflict in the team about approach.
The more our tools improve, the more our teams need people who excel at collaboration, empathy, and big-picture thinking. Those are the people who ensure the right things get done, rather than just insisting on doing things right.
…no one recalls every argument you won…what people remember is how you made a difference and how you made them feel
The tools and trends will change, but the core principles of being a valuable team member hold up year after year. These principles aren’t about coding or design or any specific skill. They’re about how you approach working with others. Keep these in mind, and you’ll naturally avoid the pitfall of ego-driven “rightness”:
Whenever debates get heated, return to the fundamental question: “What will best serve the mission or the end-user?” By keeping that as your North Star, arguments become about what’s right for the project, not about who had the right idea. This mindset makes prioritization clearer and petty disagreements easier to drop.
Share context early and openly. If you’re unsure about something, say so. If you think a decision is going astray, voice it as a concern, not an attack. When you communicate with the goal of clarity rather than scoring points, you prevent a lot of “I was right, you were wrong” scenarios from ever arising. Everyone ends up on the same page faster, and issues become puzzles to solve together, not battles to win.
Trust is the currency of effective teams. You earn it by consistently doing what you promise, helping others achieve their goals, and admitting mistakes. When your team trusts that you care about the group’s success more than your own ego, magical things happen. People come to you with problems early (instead of hiding them) because they know you won’t shoot them down. They involve you in brainstorming because they know you’ll contribute and elevate their ideas rather than rip them apart. With trust, the need to prove yourself fades. Everyone already knows your value.
New information will always emerge. Requirements change, users surprise you with new behavior, and technical constraints pop up. Be the person who adapts when that happens, not the one who digs in and refuses to budge from an earlier stance. Curiosity goes hand-in-hand with this: ask questions, seek to understand why something unexpected happened, or why someone disagrees with you. Often, you’ll find that what first seems like someone else’s “wrong” idea has a piece of truth you hadn’t considered. Flexibility and curiosity together turn situations from me vs. you into us vs. the problem.
It’s easy to get tunnel vision in our respective domains (engineering, design, marketing, what have you). But the value lies in how all those pieces connect to create a successful product or project. Regularly take a step back and remind yourself of that broader context. It not only prevents you from obsessing on a minor point just to be right; it often reveals better solutions that a myopic view would miss. Being valuable is often about linking your piece of work to other pieces, seeing opportunities to improve the whole system, and helping others see it too.
Remember that at the end of the day, no one recalls every argument you won. What people remember is how you made a difference and how you made them feel. The products that ship and make an impact, the teams that gel and overcome tough challenges. Those are the real “wins” in the long run. And those wins usually come from a group of people working together, each contributing their talents and adjusting their approach for the greater good.
So the next time you catch yourself fighting tooth and nail to be right, take a breath. Ask yourself what being right is worth in that moment and what might happen if you focused on being helpful instead. Could your energy be better used refining the idea on the table rather than defeating it? Could you mentor the new guy on the team and raise everyone’s game, rather than showing him up? Every situation is different, but that core question, “Am I trying to be right, or trying to be valuable?” is a compass that will rarely steer you wrong.
Being right might give you a moment of glory. Being valuable can give you a career of meaning and a team of allies. In the fast-paced, interconnected world of modern development, nobody can be right about everything all the time. But you can always aim to add value. Do that, and you’ll find that you don’t need to chase recognition or validation. It will find you on its own, in the form of successful projects, grateful colleagues, and the satisfaction that you’re contributing to something bigger than your own pride.
In the long run, it’s not about your idea winning.
It’s about the best idea winning.
It’s not about being proven right.
It’s about proving that together, the team can get it right.
And if you help make that happen, you’ll be delivering the kind of value that matters far more than any individual point scored.
That’s the person you want to be on a team.
That’s the teammate others remember.
Don’t be right.
Be valuable.
And you’ll end up being right about the things that truly count.
If this piece was helpful or resonated with you, you can support my work by buying me a Coffee!
Become a subscriber receive the latest updates in your inbox.
Member discussion