The assumption I used to carry into every shift
Early on, I believed that the best clinician in the room should do the most talking. If I had the most training and the most reps, my voice should carry the loudest weight in a crisis. I do not think that anymore, and it took a long stretch of practice to unlearn it.
What started to bother me
The shift did not happen because of one dramatic case. It built up slowly, from small moments that repeated themselves. A nurse would mention something quietly, almost as an aside, and it would turn out to be the detail that mattered most. A tech would hesitate before saying something, because rank in the room told them to wait their turn. I started noticing how much good information gets lost when people feel like they need permission to speak.
I used to think my job was to be right quickly. I now think my job is to make it easy for someone else to correct me quickly, if they have a reason to.
Why I changed my mind
The turning point was recognizing that speed and authority are not the same thing. A confident, fast decision that ignores one piece of information is not actually fast. It just moves the delay to later, when someone has to catch the mistake and fix it under worse conditions.
I also had to admit something less comfortable: being the most senior person in a room does not mean I always have the most current information. A junior team member who just checked on the patient five minutes ago knows something I do not. Treating that as a threat to my authority was never serving anyone, least of all the patient.
Faith has shaped a lot of how I think about this. Humility is not a weakness you manage around. It is a discipline you practice on purpose, the same way you practice a procedure until it becomes automatic.
What I do differently now
I ask more questions before I give more answers. When someone offers information, even if it contradicts what I already assumed, I treat that as the system working correctly, not as an interruption. I have also gotten more direct about inviting pushback in the moment, instead of waiting for a debrief afterward when it is too late to change the outcome.
This does not mean every decision becomes a group discussion. In an emergency, someone still has to call it. But calling it well depends on what got said in the thirty seconds before the call, and that depends on whether people felt safe saying it.
A distinction worth naming
There is a difference between confidence and certainty. Confidence is knowing you can act well with the information you have. Certainty is believing you already have all of it. I try to hold onto the first and let go of the second, shift after shift.
I made this mistake for longer than I would like to admit, and I do not think I am unusual in that. Training rewards decisiveness. It is easy to mistake decisiveness for infallibility, especially once you have years of experience behind you. Experience is valuable, but it can also make you slower to ask, because asking starts to feel like it contradicts the reputation you have built.
What I would tell someone earlier in their career
Do not wait until something goes wrong to find out whether your team feels comfortable speaking up. Ask them now, directly, whether they would tell you if they saw something you missed. Watch how they answer. If there is hesitation, that is information too.
Reevaluating a habit or a goal is something I try to do daily, and this is one of the beliefs I keep coming back to and checking against how I actually behave. It is easy to say you value input. It is a different thing to have built a room where people believe you.
The short version
I used to think being right was the goal. I now think building a room where the truth surfaces fast is the actual goal, and being right follows from that. It is a small change in emphasis, but it changes what you do with your first five minutes on every shift, not just the hard ones.