I’ll admit it: I’m one of those people who, throughout my whole childhood, college years, and 20s, always needed to have the last word in every argument. (Thank you, everyone responsible for those childhood mini-almost-traumas… or perhaps unrecognized traumas!) I couldn’t leave any disagreement unless the last word—literally, the final words stated—were mine.
In other words, I was friggin’ unbearable. I still appreciate all my childhood friends who saw through it, especially the ones still by my side today.
There’s a minor problem with always having the last word, and a major one.
The minor problem is that it’s just annoying. After any disagreement, both sides end the conversation thinking they’re right. You didn’t change anyone’s mind, because minds rarely ever change, and a good working assumption for dealing with humans is to assume that they just won’t change. Your logic may have been impeccable, but the other side just didn’t budge (perhaps your logic may just not be as impeccable as you think? Or it’s much, much easier to just think the other side is being hard-headed or stupid.) The other person—your manager, in our context—may have given in to you for practical reasons as a compromise of the sort that’s necessary to get stuff done, but he doesn’t think he’s any less wrong than he did before your discussion. So, given that both sides still retain the feeling that each is in the right, you insisting on having the last word just makes you a blowhard of the sort no one wants to have around. If you were the boss, would you want an employee who, when you thought he was in the wrong (remember, minds won’t change) insists on having the last word in every conversation? You just wouldn’t enjoy talking to him.
More importantly, there’s a major problem, as well. It’s that most people who insist on winning an argument—and I was like this—just don’t realize that winning an argument is NOT the same thing as achieving your true objective, or getting what you need in the mid-term. Said more simply, you may perceive yourself as winning the battle, but you’re setting yourself up for losing the war.
Let’s be more direct about this: winning arguments truly doesn’t matter. Who cares who wins the argument? Your boss doesn’t care because he’s in charge and can fire you at any moment. And because you won a disagreement, you may get a momentary concession on the spot—but the underlying disagreement is still there. So it will pop-up again. Maybe your manager will renege on what he said. Maybe you’ll get what you want now, but in the next disagreement on the same issue, he’ll come down much harder. Maybe he’ll let you do what you want but will be so unenthusiastic about it that he won’t give you the support you need to be successful. Maybe he knows you’ll fail at what you wanted, and he needs to let you fail for you to learn a lesson (at least in his mind.) The battle may be over, but the war isn’t.
So you may not have even won the battle, but just have been given the perception that you won the battle.
Therefore, by insisting on having the last word, you’re being annoying to deal with, and it’s unclear if you’re getting any closer to what you truly want to do.
The best way to work around this is to focus on winning the war, and not on the individual battle. If you don’t have the last word, and your manager (or really anyone) leaves the conversation still stuck in their mindset, that’s perfectly human and perfectly fine, and you just can’t do anything about it. Instead, use this as an opportunity to step back and strategize other, more creative ways, you can go about getting what you need so you can continue pushing the ball ahead.
