Running a marathon. Traveling to space. Making decisions all day long. What do these three common and less-common efforts have in common? One, they’re all exhausting. Two, they require a high level of mental toughness to do successfully.
Putting (leadership) decision-making in the same category as space travel and other incredible feats of physical endurance may seem silly. But decisions make the world go round, for better or—all too typically—for worse. Whether your organization is thriving or stagnating, it’s a given that every day you’re forced, perhaps dozens of times, to weigh tradeoffs, pick a winner, and hope for the best. Decisions matter.
All of this weighing in on, though, can be cognitively exhausting, especially for managers, who are essentially paid to make good decisions. So it’s probably not surprising that studies have consistently shown that fatigue is closely correlated with poor decision-making skills, diminished academic performance, and other negative outcomes.
Leadership Decision-Making Isn’t Like Marmite…
And you shouldn’t be making “Love it, Loathe it” decisions
To offer an example, in a massive 2016 study from Denmark that surveyed every child enrolled in the Danish public school system, researchers found that for every hour later in the day students were given a standardized test, scores decreased by 0.9% of a standard deviation.
A different study, from 2019, found that “patients who met a surgeon toward the end of his or her work shift were 33 percentage points less likely to be scheduled for an operation compared with those who were seen first.” The researchers’ takeaway was “that surgeons become more inclined to rely on heuristics and go with the status quo option when tired.”
Dozens of other studies measuring the effects of so-called decision fatigue have reached similar conclusions. But it’s not enough to just save leadership decision-making or assessments for the morning. Fatigue is a major risk factor for subpar or plain-old bad decision-making, but certainly not the only one. Other major risks include a tendency to rationalize (“I can’t say no, I’m one of the nice managers!”) and stress.
To make matters worse, all of these risk factors get amplified the higher up the food chain a leader is. In our own ten-year longitudinal study of more than 2,700 leaders, which was published in the Harvard Business Review, 57% percent of newly appointed executives said that decisions were more complicated and difficult than they expected.
The Downsides of Rationalizing
Too many leaders avoid making tough calls. Whether it’s because they’re reluctant to upset others or worried about losing status in the eyes of their followers, they often concoct sophisticated justifications for putting off difficult decisions.
Ultimately, the delay often does far more damage than whatever fallout they were trying to avoid. Hard decisions only get more complicated when you kick the can down the road. (You probably know this, though.)
With that in mind, here are three of the most common rationalizations leaders invoke. If you’re not careful, these can lead to a state of paralysis and a state of reactiveness. Add fatigue and stress to the mix, and you have a recipe for dissatisfied employees and poor company performance.
“I’m being considerate of others.”
For some leaders, the thought of alienating those they lead with a difficult call is paralyzing. I’ve heard management team members say things like, “Morale is already low. I hate to add to their stress.” The real issue is that many leaders don’t want to disappoint their people.
In one organization I worked with, an executive was given four months to prepare his department for significant budget cuts that would go into effect when the next fiscal year began on March 1. In November, he decided that ruining people’s holidays with the news would be cruel.
When January came, he felt people were already too focused on closing out the year with final reports and the extra work of planning for the new fiscal year. By early February, everyone had completed their planning and had already built budgets that now exceeded the targeted cuts.
It may seem counterintuituve as a leader to be vulnerable; however, often your greatest strengths will be found in transparency, vulnerability, and openness.https://t.co/eOArWtviaD#leadership #management #organization pic.twitter.com/Z9EwAOgKZ9
— Navalent (@Navalent) May 27, 2022
When people found out about the cuts, they were understandably upset by the excessive rework they now had to do, not to mention disappointed by the loss of funding for the projects they had hoped to take on. And when they found out their boss had known about the cuts for months, they felt deceived and angry.
The emotional turmoil the executive caused —the very thing he had spent four months avoiding —was now much harsher than it would have been had he just told them when he first knew. The executive missed an opportunity to help his team build resilience in the face of a tough challenge.
Instead of learning to rally together and find creative solutions, they felt demoralized and confused by their leader’s deceit. He had essentially taught them that they shouldn’t talk openly about bad news. That important decisions could be wished away.
Quotation Call Out
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
– Peter Drucker
“I’m committed to quality and accuracy.”
For leaders who struggle with the ambiguity that often comes with decisions that have long-term implications, the anxiety over being wrong can be consuming. They try to impose certainty by analyzing more data and soliciting more opinions, but the real issue is their fear of looking stupid.
Taking action in the face of incomplete data is an executive’s job. This is an essential truth when it comes to decision-making and leadership. You sometimes won’t know if the decision was “right” until long after it’s made.
Among the thousands of decisions you and your fellow leaders make in any given week, some of them will not go as hoped. You better serve your people by modeling how to navigate that reality than by trying to convince them it can be avoided.
“I want to be seen as fair.”
In a world of headlines about leaders mistreating people with harsh and unfair expectations, and bonuses calculated on employee engagement scores, many leaders fear being seen as uncaring or playing favorites. This has become especially true in a world where everyone gets a “participation trophy” because leaders falsely believe acknowledging differences in performance is the same as showing different levels of respect.
Under the guise of fairness, leaders often avoid hard decisions that would separate out stronger performers from average performers, and, even more painfully, they fail to remove poor performers.
But failing to address underperformance or to acknowledge the great work of your high performers couldn’t be more unfair or disrespectful. Differentiating levels of performance is part and parcel of leadership and decision making.
When you avoid decisions that do so, you dilute meritocracy and redefine contribution as merely one’s efforts, regardless of outcome. It’s unfair to the highest performers whose work likely accounts for a larger percentage of the team’s success, and it’s cruel to the lowest performers to allow them to ounder in roles for which they are ill prepared.
The base level of respect we owe others as colleagues and fellow human beings isn’t compromised when we are honest about how talent and contributions differ—it’s strengthened.
Importance of Decision-Making as a Leader
The ability to make good decisions under challenging circumstances and stick by them is truly a skill that cannot be overrated. It’s easy to feel confident about your leadership and decision-making process when things are going well; it’s a lot harder to feel the same way when things are tough.
Stamp Out Stress
It’s probably intuitive for most people, but study after study shows that stress hurts effective decision-making. Our brains are simply wired to be more reactive and less deliberate when we’re stressed.
More specifically, under stressful conditions leaders (and regular people) are much more likely to resort to binary choice-making, limiting the options available to them. In tough moments, we reach for premature conclusions rather than opening ourselves to more and better options.
It’s obviously impossible to expect our days to be stress-free. But having a reliable, deliberate decision-making process can certainly help things. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time you need to make a decision, try to rely on a set of steps that consistently lead you to a decision you are happy with, or can at least live with.
It could go something like this: gather evidence, get input from stakeholders, test, then decide. Whatever your approach, there is stability (and stress-reduction) in being able to rely on your processes, even when things are difficult.
Better Decision-Making Skills = Better Leadership = Better Outcomes
The takeaway is that it’s important to create some space if you want to cultivate stronger decision-making leadership skills in yourself and others. This means paying attention to and averting decision fatigue, and minimizing stress as much as realistically possible.
You don’t have to wear the same clothes every day, as Mark Zuckerberg reportedly does and Steve Jobs did, presumably so they wouldn’t risk wasting even an iota of mental exertion on decisions they consider unimportant. (Then again, the disgraced former Theranos executive Elizabeth Holmes, who idolized Jobs, did the same during her own tenure, so your mileage may vary.) The film director David Lynch supposedly eats the same meal of chicken every day for the same reason.
Some decision fatigue is inevitable, but having a stable, consistent methodology in place for decision-making in leadership can help mitigate its worst effects. (On the flip side, not having one can exacerbate decisions made under fatigue or duress.)
As an executive, your own decision-making process shapes your organization’s decision-making culture over time. Excuses teach people that self-protection and self-interest are legitimate motivations for making difficult choices. Whatever temporary pain you might incur from making a tough call should pale in comparison to the precedent you set: that it’s important to put the organization’s success first, starting right now.
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