“Three Little Words”

Today is my wife’s birthday.  I, of course, won’t tell you how old she is, but it begins the 6 months that we’re the same age.  I remember when we first started dating.  It took me a while to get up the nerve to ask her out, but after admiring her from afar for a year we went out for the first time in September 1973.  We saw Fantasia in an old theater in Squirrel Hill which is now a restaurant.

Teenage boys usually aren’t that good at expressing their emotions so when our relationship progressed to the point that I realized she was “the one”, expressing that wasn’t the easiest thing for me to do.  I don’t remember who said it first, but the first one always has the fear that they’ll say it but the other won’t.  That, no matter how well you think the relationship is going, there’s that little voice of insecurity whispering in your ear “what if she doesn’t”.  I don’t quite remember the “when” or the “who first”, but it seems to have worked out.  It will be 33 years in August.

The good thing about saying “I love you” is that it gets easier with time.  Not that it has any less meaning, but you know how you feel, you have confidence in who you are as you age and, frankly, you’re not so shy about expressing it.  Once you have kids who mean the world to you, how can you not say how you feel about them and as you age you seem to have less desire to hide your feelings and put less emphasis on being what others expect you to be.

Sadly, there are three other words that seem to get more difficult to say as you age or as you move up the career ladder.  They are just as important in maintaining a good marriage and in demonstrating leadership and integrity in an organization but in both cases they become harder and harder to say.  They are “I was wrong”.

I know that they can be hard to swallow in a relationship, but nothing can diffuse an angry situation and bring peace to the house quicker than those three words, spoken sincerely of course.  And don’t think the spouse doesn’t know when you don’t mean it.  Sadly, they are words rarely heard coming from senior leadership in most organizations.  We hear lawyered up responses that talk about “organizational inconsistencies”, or “inadvertent data errors”, or “decisions made with incomplete information”, but all that needs to be said is “I was wrong”.  There is no better way for a leader to demonstrate his humanity, his integrity, his honesty, his contrition, his professionalism than uttering those heartfelt words.  In most cases, unless you were visiting prostitutes in Columbia, people respect honesty and need to know that you’re not, nor do you think that you are, perfect.

Now I’m not saying you can throw it out there after you’ve tried everything else.  It needs to be the first thing you think of, not the last.  If it’s your last resort then maybe it’s time for a little self examination.  It also doesn’t work to point to your staff and say “he was wrong” or even “we were wrong”.  Your staff, your mistake.  We all have to live with our decisions and be confident enough in who we are to suck it up and take the bad with the good.

What we do when we’re wrong says a lot more about our character than what we do when we’re right.

“Happy Birthday Peg, I love you!”