When you make a case that’s followed by crickets, even if you’re right, you lose influence.
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The Problem
You make the case for an idea in a group setting. Your logic is flawless, the data indisputable. You look to your boss (or anyone else) for an assist.
Crickets.
You’re left thinking: Why isn’t anyone backing me up?
Earlier in my career, I was in a meeting with my boss and a diagonal leader, arguing against a specific tool the diagonal leader asked us to use. In my mind it was distracting and not a good use of time.
When my boss didn’t back me up, I was incredulous. Here I was was, reporting from the front lines what was actually happening on high-stakes calls, and he didn’t care!
Only later did I realize: Even if my boss had agreed with me entirely, he couldn’t say it in that room with the diagonal leader because of how I was making my case.
When a leader publicly backs you up, they are both validating your idea and co-signing your behavior.
If I am publicly trashing another leader's project, and my boss says, "Jen is right," they are suddenly adopting my combative stance. By failing to regulate my tone, I put my boss in a bind by making the political cost of agreeing with me too high.
The Discovery
I wanted my boss to validate my frustration. I wanted Emotional Empathy. But I totally missed the critical counterpart: Cognitive Empathy.
Emotional Empathy (Affective Resonance): This is feeling what the other person feels. If you are frustrated, I feel your frustration.
Cognitive Empathy (Perspective-Taking): This is intellectual. It is the ability to understand what the other person is thinking and the constraints they are operating under, without necessarily absorbing their emotions. It is seeing the chessboard from their seat.
Psychologist Paul Ekman is the pioneer who originally categorized empathy into distinct types. Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman popularized Ekman’s framework for the corporate world.1 Goleman is the one who took Cognitive Empathy and explicitly tied it to executive leadership, arguing that it is the essential skill for reading the room.
We expect our teammates to empathize with our tactical struggles, but we rarely empathize with their systemic reality.
The Experiment
In your next cross-functional meeting, when you have a point of view to share, run a quick soundcheck:
Corner Check: If my boss agrees with me right now, whose work does that shut down? Am I leaving that peer a graceful out so they don't lose face?
Co-Sign Check: If I say it this way, am I asking my boss to co-sign a solution, a question, or an attack?
If you are just poking holes in someone else's work, rewrite the script. Because ultimately when you make a case that’s followed by crickets, even if you’re right, you lose influence.
The Takeaway
With today's AI tools, we have more opportunities than ever to be technically correct about a strategy or a broken process. But interpersonally, being right only gets you so far.
If your flawless argument publicly corners a colleague, your teammates cannot support you without attacking a peer. But, if you can start spotting the interpersonal tripwires everyone else misses, you can protect the people around you—even the ones you disagree with— and translate being right into influence.
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