Lee's glare made me look away.
She wasn't taking the news of her redundancy well. Twenty minutes later, it turned to verbal abuse as she left with her husband.
Their anger stayed with me long after the door closed.
But that moment was the cost of leadership decision making. As a senior management team, we had made the call to tighten the P&L.
It was the right decision. It also meant someone else had to live with the outcome — someone who didn't choose it and couldn't escape it.
That asymmetry is what separates the decisions you make for yourself from the decisions you make as a leader. When you decide for yourself, the consequences land on you. When you decide as a leader, they land on the people around you.
This article is about what changes when that shift happens — and what it actually takes to decide well under that weight.
The Next Leadership Decision You Face Deserves Better Than a Gut Call.
One Good Decision walks you through it. Seven days and that decision is behind you.
What Makes Leadership Decisions Different
Most leaders understand, intellectually, that their decisions affect other people.
What takes longer to understand is that this changes the nature of the decision itself. Not just the stakes. The standard you are being held to.
When you decide for yourself, the feedback loop is tight and personal. You bear the outcome, absorb the discomfort, and adjust if it goes wrong.
Leadership decisions don't close that cleanly.
The redundancy that stabilises the business ends someone's livelihood. The restructure that improves efficiency disrupts a team that was working well.
Daniel Kahneman's research shows that people feel losses more acutely than equivalent gains. Your team is not evaluating your decisions on their strategic merits. They are feeling the consequences on their lives.
That scrutiny does not go away because the decision was correct.
This is why leadership decision making is not just harder than personal decision making. It is different in kind. It demands that you reach the right conclusion through a process that accounts for what it will cost others, one you can stand behind when the room turns hostile.
The Leadership Decisions That Go Wrong Most Often
Neil had been brought in to fix the business. Not to manage it — to fix it.
Within weeks he had a grip on the P&L and the cashflow forecast. The numbers told a clear story. Prices needed to go up and costs needed to come down.
He broke it to Dave and me in a senior management meeting.
As much as he wanted to kick the can down the road, there was no denying the mess we were in. The forecast needed a fix.
That moment — a leader naming an uncomfortable truth to a room that would rather not hear it — is what leadership decision making looks like from the inside. Neil could have softened it. He could have framed it as something to monitor rather than something to act on.
He chose the forecast over the comfort of the meeting.
Lee's redundancy followed from that choice. Not as a failure of process — as the consequence of a decision made correctly.
Most leaders don't face moments that clean. The pull toward the defensible call is rarely obvious in the room. It arrives quietly, dressed as caution or consideration or respect for the process.
In the years leading up to the two 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019, Boeing's leadership faced a series of decisions that followed a recognisable pattern.
Engineers raised concerns about the MCAS flight control system. Those concerns were documented.
The decisions that followed — on certification timelines, on what to disclose to regulators, on how to characterise the system to pilots — consistently landed on the side of protecting the programme rather than addressing what the engineers were flagging.
Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing's CEO through both crashes, later testified before Congress. The picture that emerged was not of a leader who lacked information.
It was of a leadership culture where the defensible call had become the default call. Protect the timeline. Protect the stock price.
346 people died in those two crashes.
The failure was not incompetence. Boeing had the engineering capability and the institutional knowledge to make different calls.
The failure was a leadership culture that had learned to optimise for internal defensibility rather than the people who would bear the consequences of its decisions.
You will recognise the same pattern in smaller versions. The decision you delayed because the timing felt politically difficult.
The call you softened because a stakeholder wouldn't like the honest version. The option you chose because it was easier to defend in the meeting than the one you actually believed in.
None of those moments feel like a Boeing-scale failure in the room. They rarely do at the time.
But leadership decision making is built from the accumulation of those calls. The direction they pull you in is always the same — away from accountability, toward the call that protects you. That compounds quietly until the cost becomes visible.
What Good Leadership Decision Making Actually Looks Like
The pattern Boeing reveals — and Neil avoided — is not unique to crisis moments. Most leaders feel that pull at some point. What separates the ones who decide well is not that they don't feel it.
They just don't follow it.
The leaders who decide well are not the ones who are always right.
They are the ones who build a process that holds up under pressure and stand behind it when the consequences land on someone else.
Three things distinguish them.
The first is separating process from outcome. A good decision can produce a bad result.
The redundancy call our team made was right — the P&L required it, the alternatives had been exhausted, and the timing was as considered as it could be. Lee's anger did not make it a bad decision.
Judging your process by the reaction in the room is how leaders lose confidence in the right calls and gain false confidence in the wrong ones.
The second is transparency about uncertainty. Leadership decisions are almost always made with incomplete information.
The leaders who decide well do not pretend otherwise. They name what they know, acknowledge what they don't, and commit to the call anyway.
Waiting for certainty that will never arrive is not caution. It is a different kind of failure. The people waiting for direction pay that cost too.
The article on decision making under uncertainty is the place to go deeper on that tension.
The third is building the decision making skills for leaders that compound over time. A single good decision is not a system.
The leaders who improve consistently keep a record of their reasoning and revisit their calls. That discipline closes the gap between what they expected and what actually happened.
It is what separates leaders who learn from experience from leaders who simply repeat it.
How to Build Your Leadership Decision Making Skills
The place to start is not a course or a framework.
It is the decision in front of you right now.
Most leaders have a call they are sitting on, something that needs to be made but has not been made yet. Indecision in leadership has its own cost, and it accumulates quietly.
The longer the call waits, the more the context shifts around it. The harder the decision becomes.
What separates leaders who decide well from those who don't is not confidence. It is a repeatable process, something that holds its shape under pressure, in the meeting, with the room watching.
The Leader's Guide to Decision Making is built around exactly that. It covers the full arc from how to approach what kind of decision you are facing through to how you learn from the outcome after the fact.
The skills are built one decision at a time. But they are only built if you bring a process to each one, not just instinct, and not just the call that is easiest to defend in the room.
Poor decision making rarely arrives as a single dramatic failure. It is the accumulation of smaller calls, each one nudging you slightly further from accountability and slightly closer to defensibility.
The direction you choose in each of those moments is where leadership decision making is actually made.
The Question Worth Sitting With
The next time you face a difficult call — the one where the stakes are visible and the people are watching — ask yourself one question before you speak.
Are you about to make the decision you believe is right, or the one you can defend if it goes wrong?
FAQs
Is leadership decision making just about making faster decisions?
Speed is the wrong measure. Leadership decision making is about making calls that account for the people who will live with the outcome — not just the leader who makes it. A fast decision that protects your position at the expense of your team is not good leadership decision making. It is the most common failure pattern dressed up as decisiveness.
How do I know if I'm making the defensible call instead of the right one?
The tell is where your attention goes in the moment before you speak. If you're thinking about how to justify the decision to the room rather than whether it's the right call for the business, you're optimising for defensibility. That pull is normal. Catching it is the skill. The article on poor decision making goes deeper on what that pattern costs.
What's the difference between a personal decision and a leadership decision?
When you decide for yourself, you bear the consequences. When you decide as a leader, others do — people who didn't choose the outcome and can't escape it. That asymmetry changes the standard you're held to. It's not just about reaching the right conclusion. It's about reaching it through a process you can stand behind when the room turns hostile.
How do I start building better leadership decision making skills?
Start with the decision in front of you right now, not a framework. Most leaders have a call they're sitting on. Bring a process to it — one that separates what you know from what you're assuming, and commits to the outcome rather than the defence of it. One Good Decision walks you through exactly that. Free. Seven days.
Why do good leaders still make bad decisions under pressure?
Pressure narrows the options a leader considers and shortens the time given to uncertainty. The result is usually a decision that felt right in the room but was built on incomplete information and unexamined assumptions. Understanding decision making under uncertainty is where that pattern breaks — it's the skill that holds when the stakes are highest.
The Next Leadership Decision You Face Deserves Better Than a Gut Call.
One Good Decision walks you through it. Seven days and that decision is behind you.
Written by
