Confident Without Needing to Be Right
When honesty starts to cost you
I like to think of myself as confident, decisive and honest, so people always know where they stand. Directness and honesty are typically associated with being from the North of England. Being from Yorkshire we value directness as a strength. But under pressure, the line between being direct and being defensive gets very thin. And people feel it.
I'll admit it: I've been guilty of this.
I've always tried to be honest, so people know where they stand with me. I would rather be direct than disingenuous. Transparency, to me, is a form of respect.
And directness can be a strength. It cuts through ambiguity, speeds up decisions and signals that you aren't playing games. But I've also learned, sometimes the hard way, that the same directness can create tension. It can make people feel uncomfortable, shut down a conversation that needed to stay open, and leave colleagues feeling they've been corrected rather than heard.
The uncomfortable truth is this: the gap between being direct and being defensive is often much smaller than we think. Especially under pressure.
Carmen's story: brutal honesty, or a need to be right?
I was reminded of all this listening to a recent episode of HBR'sCoaching Real Leaders podcast, How do I lead with confidence without always needing to be right?
Host and executive coach Muriel Wilkins works with Carmen, a leader with a reputation for being direct, confident and decisive. Carmen has received feedback that her communication can create tense interactions with colleagues.
Carmen describes her default as "brutal honesty", and it's part of what she values in her leadership. Honesty isn't the problem. The problem is where it comes from at the moment. When it starts with "I'm feeling…" rather than "What is the other person experiencing right now?", it lands as defensiveness. It looks like a need to be right.
What I found most valuable was how the conversation unfolded:
It's about how you show up under pressure. The tension wasn't constant. It appeared in specific, high-stakes moments.
Carmen didn't dismiss the feedback. She stepped back, got curious about what was driving those moments, and committed to act.
She didn't have to stop being herself. The goal was never to become less direct or less honest. It was to stay true to her values while changing the impact.
That last point matters. So much feedback advice implies you should sand down your edges. Good coaching does the opposite: it helps you keep your strengths and lose the negative side effects.
Why so many leaders get stuck here
The pressure to prove competence
For many female leaders working in male-dominated environments, I believe this defensiveness has a very specific root. There is often an unspoken pressure to prove you belong in the room. To show you have the answers. To never be caught out.
When your competence feels like it's constantly on trial, being challenged doesn't feel like collaboration. It feels like a threat. And under threat, "brutal honesty" can quietly turn into "I need you to see that I'm right." It's an understandable, protective response. But it can undermine exactly the credibility it's trying to defend.
Competitive leaders, collaborative teams
There's a wider organisational pattern here too. In transformation, product development and agile, collaborative problem solving is the backbone of how we tackle complexity and innovate to create value. We ask our teams to experiment, challenge each other and build on each other's ideas.
Yet as leaders become more senior, cross-functional collaboration often gets harder, not easier. I've seen many senior leadership teams struggle to collaborate and align beyond their own function. This is especially true in more traditional environments that reward competitiveness in senior leaders over collaboration, even when those same leaders oversee agile teams.
The result is a disconnect: collaborative teams led by a competitive leadership layer. It's one of the most common, and most persistent, challenges my clients face.
That's why I focus on team dynamics at leadership level, helping leaders see their peers as their teammates, not their competition. A large part of that work is built on the core pillars of Emotional Intelligence.
Foresight, Insight, Hindsight
In the episode, Muriel helps Carmen through three lenses: Foresight, Insight and Hindsight. Before the moment, during it, and after it. I love this framing because it maps neatly onto the Emotional Intelligence tools I use with leadership teams. Here's how I'd put them to work.
1. Foresight: know yourself before the moment arrives
Foresight starts with self-awareness: the ability to notice your own emotional state in real time, and to understand how that state shapes your thinking, your words and your impact on others.
Most tense interactions are usually pretty predictable. The same meetings, the same people, the same topics tend to set us off. Foresight means knowing your triggers well enough to walk in prepared, rather than feeling ambushed.
The behaviours to develop:
Notice when your mood shifts, before it affects others
Recognise when you are becoming angry or defensive
Understand how you interpret situations, and why
Be aware of your internal self-talk and its tone
Understand the impact of your behaviour on others
Express your thoughts and feelings clearly and calmly
And some honest questions to ask yourself:
Do I recognise my emotions when they happen?
Do I notice when I start thinking negatively?
How do I react when I feel defensive?
Am I aware of how I speak to myself?
Do I understand how others see me?
That last question is the one Carmen's feedback was really answering. Before a high-stakes conversation, try asking: What am I likely to feel in this room, and what do I want the other person to experience?
2. Insight: choose your response in the moment
Knowing your emotions is only half the battle. Self-management (or self-regulation) is the discipline of choosing your response, rather than being driven by your immediate reaction. It's the ability to regulate your emotions, thoughts and behaviours, especially under pressure.
This matters for leaders because emotions are contagious. Leaders who are in control of their emotions:
Create an environment of trust
Reduce politics and infighting
Increase productivity and performance
Attract and retain talented people
Adapt to change and support their teams through it
Think of self-management as three pillars.
Emotion management is regulating how feelings are expressed in professional situations.
Stress management is recognising pressure building up and using strategies to recover balance.
Emotional agility is moving fluidly through difficult emotions to take constructive action.
What's happening in your brain
When we feel challenged, the amygdala, our emotional brain, can react before the prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, catches up. This is the amygdala hijack: a strong emotion takes control before we can think clearly.
Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol trigger a physical response: a faster heartbeat, faster breathing, tense muscles and a strong emotional reaction. In that state, "being right" can feel like survival. Your body is treating a disagreement in a meeting as a threat.
The good news is that those physical signals are also your early-warning system. Self-aware leaders learn to spot them, and that's the cue to pause.
The Emotional Audit
One of the most practical tools I share with leaders and teams is the Emotional Audit. Its goal is to shift activity away from the amygdala and re-engage the thinking parts of your brain, so you regain cognitive control and give yourself constructive options.
It's four questions:
What am I thinking and feeling? Name your thoughts and emotions. Labelling them helps take the edge off.
What do I want now? Focus on your intention and the outcome you actually want. (Rarely is it "to win this argument".)
How am I getting in my own way? Is this how I want to behave?
What do I need to do differently? Use this data to respond more effectively, now and next time.
Imagine an executive whose team has just delivered a poor presentation to an important client's C-suite. Her immediate impulse might be to shout at the team, or to sit in grim silence, glare at everyone and stalk off.
With self-management, she chooses her words carefully. She acknowledges the poor performance without rushing to judgement. She steps back to consider the reasons: were there mitigating factors, or personal ones? Then she brings the team together, lays out how she feels, and presents her analysis of the problem with a well-considered solution.
The honesty is still there. The standards are still there. What's gone is the hijack.
A few questions to check in on your own self-management:
Can I manage my anxiety in times of change?
Can I calm myself quickly when I'm angry, or when I'm the target of someone else's anger?
Can I reflect on negative feelings without being distressed by them?
3. Hindsight: reflect, then choose a better style next time
Hindsight is where the learning sticks. After a tense interaction, the instinct is often to replay who was right. A more useful replay is: What did I want? What did I do? What did the other person experience? And what will I do differently next time?
Part of that reflection is recognising which conflict style you defaulted to, and whether it fitted the situation. Different situations need different responses.
The Thomas-Kilmann model maps five conflict styles across two dimensions: assertiveness (how much you pursue your own needs) and empathy (how much you consider others'). See video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4eObpGH3l0&t=1s
STYLE - COMPETING
ASSERTIVENESS - High
EMPATHY - Low
OUTCOME - I win, you lose
WHEN IT FITS - Urgent decisions, or when a firm line is genuinely needed
STYLE - COLLABORATING
ASSERTIVENESS - High
EMPATHY - High
OUTCOME - I win, you win
WHEN IT FITS - Complex problems worth investing time and resources in a win-win solution
STYLE - COMPROMISING
ASSERTIVENESS - Medium
EMPATHY - Medium
OUTCOME - Middle ground
WHEN IT FITS - When flexibility is needed and a workable deal beats a perfect one
STYLE - ACCOMMODATING
ASSERTIVENESS - Low
EMPATHY - High
OUTCOME - You win, I lose
WHEN IT FITS - When the issue matters far more to them than to you
STYLE - AVOIDING
ASSERTIVENESS - Low
EMPATHY - Low
OUTCOME - We both lose
WHEN IT FITS - Rarely; often a sign someone has withdrawn from the conversation
Here's the insight for leaders like Carmen, and like me. Direct, confident leaders often believe they're being assertive. Under pressure, though, we can slide into Competing without noticing, because empathy is the first thing the amygdala switches off.
The shift isn't to become less assertive. It's to keep the assertiveness and turn the empathy back up. That moves you from Competing to Collaborating. You still say what you think, clearly and honestly. You just stay genuinely curious about what the other person sees.
That is what confidence without the need to be right looks like.
Your peers are your team
Carmen's story isn't only about one leader's communication style. It's a microcosm of what happens across leadership teams every day.
When senior leaders treat every cross-functional conversation as something to win, alignment stalls, politics creep in, and the collaborative ways of working we ask of our teams stop at the leadership layer.
When leaders bring self-awareness, self-management and a collaborative conflict style to the table, they start to see their peers as teammates. That's when real alignment, and real agility, becomes possible.
You don't have to give up your directness, your honesty or your confidence. Carmen didn't. Neither did I. The goal is to make sure they land the way you intend.
Three things to try this week:
Foresight: Before your next high-stakes meeting, ask yourself what you're likely to feel, and what you want the other person to experience.
Insight: When you notice the physical signs of a hijack, pause and run the Emotional Audit's four questions.
Hindsight: After a tense interaction, ask which Thomas-Kilmann style you defaulted to, and which one the situation actually needed.
I'd love to hear from you. Where do you find directness tipping into defensiveness? And how does your leadership team handle disagreement across functions?
If you're working with a leadership team that wants to collaborate more effectively beyond functional lines, that's exactly the work we do at Agile-Leads. Let's talk.
Episode referenced: Coaching Real Leaders: How do I lead with confidence without always needing to be right?, hosted by Muriel Wilkins (HBR, September 2026).
Thomas-Killman LeaderLike You! by Robert Kahn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4eObpGH3l0&t=1s
A Note on This Article
AI is a valuable research and writing companion, but it doesn't replace experience, judgement or human insight. The views and reflections shared here are my own, shaped by more than +20 years leading delivery and transformation across the UK and Middle East. Any statistics or external information referenced have been verified and attributed to their original sources. If this article resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments..