You Can Be Right and Still Be Wrong for the Team
Why serving the team matters more than winning the argument, and why unity doesn’t require everyone to think alike.
I recently attended NewSpring Church and listened to Pastor Dan Lian preach on Christian freedom when I started thinking about organizational dysfunction.
I know. Probably not what the pastor had in mind, but I always find parallels in the Bible that relate to business.
The sermon focused on Romans 12 and 14, where the Apostle Paul addresses believers who were quarreling over what he called “disputable matters,” like what to eat and which days to treat as sacred. Paul’s answer was that real freedom shows up in how we serve one another, not in how hard we insist on our own way.
And just because someone sees things differently doesn’t automatically make them wrong.
As I listened, I couldn’t help thinking about the leadership teams I coach. The sermon focused on unity, diversity, and clarity, and those same three ideas underlie most workplace conflicts that consume an extraordinary amount of time and energy.
Sometimes the biggest obstacle to organizational health isn’t a lack of talent, resources, or strategy. The biggest challenge is people so committed to being right that they forget they’re supposed to be on the same team.
What If Clemson and South Carolina Became One Team?
The pastor used an example that probably made every South Carolina football fan in the congregation a little uncomfortable.
What if Clemson University and the University of South Carolina merged their football programs?
If you’re from South Carolina, I’ll give you a minute to process that. If you know, you know.
Picture the Clemson Tigers and South Carolina Gamecocks as one team with one identity and one future.
Now, what colors are they wearing? Garnet and black? Orange and purple? Some unfortunate combination, like garnet and orange, that makes everyone unhappy? What happens to the mascots, traditions, and fight songs? And which stadium gets the home games?
If you know anything about South Carolina football, you know this hypothetical merger could spark a family feud before anyone even talks about the starting quarterback. Both programs have passionate supporters, talented people, established traditions, and strong identities. Neither side has to be wrong for bringing them together to be incredibly difficult.
Sound familiar?
Changing the Jersey Doesn’t Change the Team
Organizations do this all the time.
Two departments merge, and suddenly people argue over processes nobody questioned the week before. A new leader introduces a different approach, and longtime employees interpret the changes as criticism of everything they’ve accomplished. A company acquires another business, unveils a new logo, and expects everyone to embrace the new identity immediately.
Leadership calls it integration, but employees may experience it as loss.
When people resist change, leaders often assume they’re being difficult or inflexible. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes people are protecting something they genuinely value: their expertise, relationships, traditions, or sense of belonging.
When someone says, “But we’ve always done it this way,” we tend to hear resistance.
What they might actually be saying is, “What we’ve built here matters to me.”
That doesn’t mean preserving every outdated process or accommodating every preference. It means understanding what people believe they’re losing before demanding that they embrace something new.
You can change the name on the jersey overnight. Changing what happens in the locker room takes much more work.
Unity Doesn’t Mean Uniformity
We often assume a unified team is one where everyone gets along, thinks alike, and enthusiastically supports every decision. That’s not unity. It might actually be groupthink. Romans 12 warns against conforming to the pattern of this world, and plenty of teams mistake conformity for unity.
Healthy organizations need different perspectives. They need someone who questions assumptions, a creative thinker who sees possibilities, and a detail-oriented colleague who asks how those possibilities will actually work.
I see this regularly when working with teams using DiSC assessments. One person wants to move quickly. Another wants more information. One processes ideas by talking. Another needs time to think. None of these preferences is inherently wrong. The trouble starts when we treat our preferred approach as the only acceptable one.
Suddenly, the person who wants more information is labeled resistant. The person who moves quickly is called reckless. We assume the quiet employee is disengaged, and we accuse the outspoken employee of dominating.
We’ve stopped trying to understand one another and started judging one another. And then we wonder why collaboration is so difficult.
Unity is everyone understanding what they’re working toward and respecting the different contributions required to get there, rather than everyone is thinking the same way.
Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
Here’s where the sermon really connected with leadership for me.
Paul wrote to believers arguing over what to eat. His conclusion: “All food is clean, but it is wrong for a person to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble” (Romans 14:20, NIV). In other words, you can be right and still be wrong. That’s a pretty useful principle for the workplace.
A manager has the authority to decide without consulting the team. But should they?
An employee has the right to disagree with a new initiative. But does that give them permission to undermine it?
A department leader can protect their own resources. But what happens when doing so prevents another department from succeeding?
Having the authority, experience, or freedom to do something doesn’t automatically make it the best choice. Paul’s idea of freedom flips the way most of us think about it. Freedom is the ability to set your way aside when doing so builds someone else up, rather than thinking you have the right to get your way. It’s. At work, that’s the heart of servant leadership: using your authority to help the team succeed rather than to protect your position.
You can be right about the facts and wrong about how you treat people.
You can be right about a process and wrong about refusing to consider alternatives.
You can be right about your department’s priorities and wrong for ignoring the organization’s needs.
Accountability, standards, and results still matter. But there’s a difference between holding people accountable to shared expectations and demanding that everyone operate according to your personal preferences. One builds organizational health, and the other builds resentment.
The Improv Lesson: Acceptance Without Judgment
Some Bibles open Romans 14 with the heading “Do Not Pass Judgment on One Another.” Improvisers would recognize that as the first rule of the stage, and it’s one of the reasons I love using improv to teach leadership and communication.
At the heart of improv is the philosophy of “Yes, And.” While most people associate it with agreement and building on ideas, the foundation is something much more important: acceptance without judgment.
In improv, performers don’t know what their scene partners are going to say or do. The moment one performer starts judging another’s contribution as wrong, stupid, or less valuable, collaboration begins to break down.
Imagine one performer says, “We’re going to miss our flight!”
The other responds, “No, we’re not. The airport is only 20 minutes away.”
Well, congratulations. You’ve won the argument and killed the scene.
Now imagine the response is, “Yes, and that’s why I hired a helicopter!”
Suddenly, we have somewhere to go in the scene.
The second performer didn’t stop to evaluate whether the first person’s idea was good, bad, logical, or realistic. They accepted what was offered without judgment and contributed something that moved the scene forward.
Acceptance doesn’t require agreement. And withholding judgment doesn’t mean abandoning discernment. It means resisting the impulse to immediately dismiss, correct, or defend against someone else’s contribution.
Think about how often we do the opposite at work. Someone suggests a new idea, and before they’ve finished explaining it, we’re already identifying everything wrong with it. An employee raises a concern, and instead of trying to understand it, we start preparing our rebuttal. We’re so busy judging what’s being offered that we never discover what we might be able to build from it.
In improv, acceptance creates the conditions for collaboration. In organizations, it creates psychological safety, trust, and productive disagreement.
Just like being onstage, we don’t always get to choose our scene partners at work. You don’t have to agree with someone’s perspective to accept that it deserves to be heard. Sometimes the most valuable contribution you can make is creating enough room for someone else’s idea to become something better than your idea.
Before You Insist You’re Right, Take The RIGHT Test
The next time you find yourself digging in your heels during a disagreement, ask yourself five questions:
R: Results. Am I focused on the outcome we’re trying to achieve, or am I defending my preferred method?
I: Impact. How is my behavior affecting the people around me?
G: Greater Good. Am I serving what’s best for the team, or asking the team to serve what’s best for me?
H: Humility. What might I be missing in the other person’s perspective?
T: Trust. Will the way I’m handling this disagreement strengthen or weaken our ability to work together?
These questions won’t eliminate conflict, nor should they. Healthy disagreement can improve decisions, reveal risks, and generate better ideas. How we disagree matters just as much as what we’re disagreeing about.
Are You Building One Team or Managing Rival Fan Bases?
Let’s return to our hypothetical Clemson–Carolina merger.
Imagine the new coach spends the entire season debating which school’s colors, traditions, and playbook deserve to survive. How much time would be left for football? Probably not much. Yet organizations routinely spend enormous energy debating whose process, department, experience, or approach should win.
The real leadership challenge is helping people work toward something bigger than their individual preferences, not declaring one side victorious, which requires clarity about what’s nonnegotiable, respect for differences that don’t need to be eliminated, and accountability for behaviors that strengthen or weaken the team.
Paul drew a clear line between core convictions and disputable matters. Leaders need the same clarity about what’s mission, values, and standards, and what’s simply preference. When everything is nonnegotiable, every disagreement becomes a fight, because the greatest test of organizational health is how well people work together when they disagree:
Can they challenge an idea without attacking the person who suggested it?
Can they respect a different approach without interpreting it as a threat?
Can they recognize when winning an argument might mean losing something far more valuable?
You don’t have to give up your colors to play for the same team, but you do have to stop treating your teammates like the opposition. The next time you’re absolutely convinced you’re right, ask yourself:
Am I trying to win the argument, or am I trying to help the team win?
Is Your Leadership Team Playing to Win Together?
When leaders spend more time defending their positions than advancing shared priorities, the cost shows up in lost trust, stalled decisions, frustrated employees, and missed opportunities.
Healthy organizations don’t eliminate differences. They learn how to leverage them.
Through organizational health consulting, leadership coaching, and improv-based workshops, Carmine Communications helps teams build trust, strengthen accountability, navigate change, and collaborate across differences.
If your team is struggling to get on the same page without everyone thinking alike, let’s talk about turning those differences into strengths.
Contact Gina Trimarco Klauder at gina@ginatrimarco.com or visit www.carminecom.com.
