Reference reading
Arrogance
Making the authority of the office an exemption from correction.
An inflated sense of one's importance or judgment that discounts correction and other people's standing.
Imagine this: A director dismisses an engineer's correction because the engineer lacks the standing of the people who approved the plan.
How the pattern works
The bridge model does not become sound when an important person approves it. The executive can legitimately decide who is accountable for a project and whose expertise is relevant. Arrogance makes a different move: the standing of the decision maker is allowed to settle whether an inconvenient observation deserves examination.
Once a plan has acquired senior sponsorship, a precise objection can sound like a challenge to the sponsor. The engineer must then overcome two obstacles: establish the defect and make it possible for the powerful person to admit it. Information already available within the organization becomes difficult to use because accepting it seems to threaten the hierarchy.
What it costs the work
People learn which findings are welcome before deciding what to bring forward. The executive can receive increasingly confident agreement while becoming less well informed. Responsibility remains concentrated at the top, but the observations needed to exercise it have been discouraged.
A distinction worth keeping
Expertise, decisive leadership and disagreement with an objection are not Arrogance by themselves. The question is whether the answer remains responsive to reasons. Vanity depends excessively on admiration; Arrogance may disregard the audience while assuming that its own judgment deserves exemption. Accountability does not require treating every opinion as equally well founded.
What a useful response can change
Separate the observation from the position of the observer. What would establish whether the beam is cracked, and who can examine that question competently? Rank can allocate the examination; it cannot supply its result.
Make an acknowledged correction ordinary business. Identify what changed and who noticed it, rather than turning the occasion into a ceremony about the leader’s generosity in listening.
An invitation to challenge needs consequences that make challenge credible. Asking for candid views while humiliating the first contributor teaches people to prepare a safer answer next time.
Questions for reflection
- Which objection has become harder to hear because I sponsored the original decision?
- Can someone with less standing change the answer without first protecting my reputation?
Other perspectives
To the open mind, nature and social experience are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further.
John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source
Dewey describes a disposition toward inquiry, not an exemption earned by expertise. An experienced organization can still allow an unfamiliar observation to change its account.
The categories of such a mind are pride and ignorance—pride in outside show, to which they sacrifice every thing, and ignorance of the true worth and hidden structure both of words and things.
William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source
Hazlitt is criticizing an intellectual style that prizes outside show over underlying worth. The contrast questions whether an impressive assurance has examined what it approves.