A few lifetimes ago, when I was in banking, I participated in the management training program. Part of the program involved rotating through different departments to learn how the bank operated, and one of my assignments was in the international lending group. My role was to conduct the credit analysis on loans under consideration for approval. I was excited about the rotation.
A few weeks in, I was handed a file for a loan that would finance an overseas shipment of goods. I spent the better part of a day reviewing the financials, analyzing the risk, and comparing the request against the bank’s lending guidelines. When I finished, I recommended rejection.
Shortly after, I found myself in a meeting with the loan officer and the relationship manager responsible for the client. Not surprisingly, they wanted to discuss the recommendation.
The relationship manager wasted little time challenging my conclusion in a tone that made his opinion unmistakably clear, and he demanded I take another look. I walked him through my reasoning as calmly as I could, answered his questions, and eventually stopped talking. His response was blunt. He told me I had no idea what I was talking about.
The loan officer was quiet through the exchange, and then he asked several questions. They weren’t easy questions, but they were fair ones. After we had worked through each of them, he agreed with my analysis.
The loan was rejected.
Walking out of that meeting, I felt pretty good about how things had gone. I’d done exactly what I had been asked to do. I’d evaluated the deal objectively, defended my recommendation, and an experienced loan officer had agreed with my conclusion. As far as I was concerned, the process had worked exactly as it was supposed to.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I realized something had changed; I hadn’t been assigned another one of that relationship manager’s loans.
At the time, I assumed it was just coincidence, but looking back, I’m not so sure.
For years, if someone had asked me about that experience, I probably would have told the story as an example of standing by your convictions. The lesson, in my mind, was simple: sometimes doing the right thing isn’t popular. There’s still truth to that, but it’s no longer the part of the story I think about.
What I think about now is the relationship manager.
At the time, I saw the meeting almost entirely through my own eyes. I had looked at a file, analyzed the numbers, and reached what I believed was the correct conclusion. Looking back, I wonder what that meeting felt like from his chair.
He had probably spent months building that client relationship, earning trust, understanding the business, and putting the deal together. Then a twenty-something trainee who had been in his department for only a few weeks read a file and recommended rejecting it. Whether my analysis was correct was secondary. To him, I wasn’t questioning the loan. I was questioning his judgment.
I still believe I made the right recommendation. If someone handed me the same file today with the same information, I don’t think my answer would be any different.
But I see the experience differently now because I’ve realized there was more than one outcome. The loan was rejected, and the bank avoided unnecessary risk, but I lost the opportunity to learn from someone who had years of experience because our relationship never really recovered.
For a long time, I only counted the first two. Experience has taught me that life keeps score differently.
I’ve started to notice the same pattern outside of banking. We tend to think disagreements are about determining who is right, but they’re often about much more than that. In business, you can win the argument and lose influence. In friendships, you can prove your point and create distance. At home, you can leave a conversation knowing your facts were correct while quietly damaging the relationship you cared about most.
None of this means we should avoid difficult conversations or compromise our principles. There are times when doing the right thing requires saying something another person doesn’t want to hear. But over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that being right is only one part of the equation. Every decision has consequences we can measure immediately, and others we don’t discover until much later.
These days, when I’m convinced I’m right, I try to ask myself one more question before I speak.
What else is at stake here? Sometimes the answer is nothing, but sometimes it’s everything.
“The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.” – Joseph Joubert
I’d love to hear about a time when being right cost you something you didn’t expect to lose. As always, if this made you think of someone else, feel free to share it.
Have a great weekend.
-Vijay