Choose teachability by examining the method, hearing the challenge fully, and testing what is true. Keep conviction by holding to the purpose and moral boundaries that guide your work, rather than treating every familiar process as untouchable.
In the first century, Peter withdrew from table fellowship with Gentile believers in Antioch after people associated with James arrived. Paul records in Galatians 2 that he confronted Peter publicly because Peter’s conduct was pulling others toward a division the gospel had already addressed.
The difficult part is easy to miss. Peter was not being challenged because he lacked experience. He had seen the church grow through conflict, pressure, and cultural difference. Yet a practice that may have once felt protective, familiar, or responsible was causing harm in a new moment.
A younger colleague’s question can land the same way: “Why are we still doing it this way?” Your first reaction may be to defend the method that helped you deliver good work when the stakes were high. Pause before you answer. Their challenge may be incomplete. It may also reveal something your experience has taught you to stop noticing.
Separate the principle from the procedure
Methods often earn loyalty because they solved a real problem. A weekly approval meeting may have prevented costly errors. A detailed review process may have protected a team when it was smaller. A leader’s insistence on preparation may have built trust after a chaotic season.
Those outcomes matter. They do not prove that the method must remain unchanged.
Ask yourself what the procedure was meant to protect. Was it accuracy, fairness, safety, quality, shared understanding, or accountability? Name the principle first. Then ask whether the current method still serves it.
This creates room to listen without surrendering conviction. If a colleague proposes skipping review altogether, and the review protects people from avoidable harm, you can say so plainly. If they propose a shorter review, clearer ownership, or a different way to catch errors, the principle may remain intact while the practice improves.
The point is not to reward novelty. The point is to refuse confusion between faithfulness and familiarity.
Hear the challenge before you prepare the defense
Social norms shape what feels responsible. When everyone on a team has used one process for years, questioning it can sound careless. When a newer colleague brings a different expectation from another workplace, their suggestion can sound like an attack on the standards that built the team.
Atomic Habits points to a useful behavioral observation: belonging influences what we consider normal. That can strengthen good practices, but it can also make a group defensive when a needed question arrives from outside its usual pattern.
Try one practical action in your next disagreement: ask the colleague to show you the problem in one concrete example before you explain why the current method exists.
You might say, “Walk me through where this slows the work down or creates a risk.” Then listen for the actual issue. Is the problem a repeated delay? Is someone being left out? Is the method asking people to perform effort that no longer changes the outcome?
This does not require agreement. It gives you evidence before you reach a conclusion.
A team member may need to understand history they have not lived through. You may need to understand the cost they are carrying now. Both can be true in the same conversation.
Test a change without making the team prove a point
Defensiveness turns every suggestion into a referendum on authority. Teachability makes a smaller, wiser move possible: run a bounded test.
Choose one project, one meeting cycle, or one part of a workflow. State what you are trying to protect and what you are willing to change. Decide in advance what you will observe. Then review the result together.
For example, if a younger colleague argues that a long status meeting repeats information people have already read, try a written update for a limited period while retaining a shorter meeting for decisions that need discussion. Watch for missed concerns, unclear ownership, and the quality of decisions. Do not judge the test by whether it proves who was right.
This approach honors both experience and contribution. Experience supplies context. New perspective can expose friction that context alone cannot see.
The same posture matters in leadership transitions. Leadership succession: Receive the Assignment, Not the Costume explores the difference between receiving responsibility and copying every outward form of the person who held it before you.
Conviction has room for correction
Paul’s confrontation in Antioch was not a demand for Peter to become less faithful. It called Peter back to the truth that should govern his conduct. The correction was serious because the principle was serious.
That is a useful standard for your own work. Hold firmly to truthfulness, dignity, accountability, and service. Hold more lightly to the meeting format, template, sequence, or communication habit through which you have previously pursued them.
Before the next conversation, write two short sentences:
“I want to protect ________.”
“I am willing to reconsider ________.”
Bring both sentences with you. They make it harder to hide defensiveness behind standards, and harder to mistake flexibility for a loss of conviction.
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