Right, Not Just Correct

THE GUT CHECK SERIES · Success · No. 1
One leadership question, examined. A new one every Tuesday.

Is it ‘Right’ (not just correct)?

Car on the shoulder. White knuckles on the steering wheel. Tears running down a sixteen-year-old’s face, blue lights in the rear-view mirror, a tap on the window, and a blinding beam from a very long flashlight.

“Where’s the fire, son? I was going 105 and wasn’t catching you until you pulled over.”

That is how my conversation with Officer Dent started that night.

One of my best friends had been killed by a drunk driver the night before. I was driving home from her memorial service. I was furious, and I was stupid.

Officer Dent looked at my license, listened to my story, let me go with a warning, and told me to drive straight home. My mother met me in the driveway, furious and scared. He had called her from his squad car and explained what had happened. And then he said, “Go easy on him, Mom, he’s having a really rough night.”

By the letter of the law, he could have put cuffs on me and had my mother collect me at the precinct. I had held a license for three months. I might not have held one again for three years. All of that would have been correct.

Officer Dent did not think it was right.

Correct is a low bar wearing a tall hat. Correct means you followed the rule, checked the box, and can defend the decision on paper. Right means you served the purpose the rule was written for. Most of the time they are the same thing. The moments that define a leader are the times they are not.

Notice what right cost him. Correct was the easy night’s work: write it up, hand it off, go home clean, and not think about it again until a court date the next month. Right took longer. He had to ask a question he did not have to ask, weigh an answer he could not verify, decide what a frightened kid actually needed, and then pick up the radio and find my mother. Right is rarely the easy option. It is usually the one that takes more work and leaves you more exposed.

And he did not “let me off.” He served the purpose the speed limit exists for. There was a dangerous driver on that road, and by the time he pulled away, there was not one anymore. He got the outcome the rule was written to produce without spending a kid’s next three years to get it.

I have learned to distrust correct, because it is the answer that ends the conversation. It is technically defensible, procedurally clean, and entirely capable of missing the point. A policy gets applied with perfect precision while the mission fails in the margins. Correct protects you. Right protects the people and the purpose you are responsible for. That is a different job.

The distinction matters because correct is easy to delegate and right is not. You can hand a competent someone a checklist and get correct all day long, but right requires judgment; judgment requires context, and context puts the work back on you.

I’m not advocating for anarchy here. Right is not the enemy of correct. It is the why behind the policy that correct is meant to protect. The rule, the standard, the procedure: these are accumulated wisdom, and ignoring them comes at real cost. The discipline is to keep asking whether meeting the standard actually served the higher purpose. Correct is the floor. Right is the point.

In practice, the feeling that accompanies this decision is a small discomfort you are tempted to ignore. That is your conscience noticing whether correct and right are still integrated. Bad leaders train their people to suppress it, because raising it increases friction and friction costs money. Good leaders encourage their people to say “this may be correct, but I’m not certain it is right,” and then they listen.

A police officer had compassion for a kid in front of him and for the man that kid might become. Both of them were his to protect that night. He had to be curious enough to see the second one at all.

Gut check: somebody will stand in front of you this week whose paper says one thing and whose situation says another, and you will be able to defend the decision either way. Which decision will you still be glad about in three years?

Row Well and Live.

Talk this question over with your peers in ERETAI Connect. Request Your Invitation.

Next in the series: Success on Purpose. The Gut Check series runs every Tuesday. See every question so far, or start at the beginning with Nobody Meets a Standard They Can’t See.