Decisiveness: Enough to Decide, Not Enough to Be Blameless

Trait 26 is Decisiveness, and the first thing to clear up is that it is not speed. Fast leaders are easy to find and a lot of them are wrong. Decisiveness is the willingness to make the call at the point where you have enough to make it, instead of waiting for the point where nobody could blame you for it.

Here is what waiting costs, and it is more than most leaders think. A late decision does not stay neutral while you gather more information. The team stalls around it. The two people who need the call start working on their own guesses, which are different guesses. The window you were protecting by waiting closes on its own. By the time the perfect decision arrives, the situation it was perfect for has moved.

Here is why it reads as presence. A room can feel the difference between a leader who is thinking and a leader who is stalling, and the difference is whether there is a moment when the thinking ends and something happens. People do not need you to be right every time. They need to know that when it is time, you will decide, so that they can act.

The practice has two parts. First, the seventy percent rule: when you have about seventy percent of what you would want to know, you have enough. Everything past that is either unknowable or arriving too late to matter, and waiting for it is usually about the fear of being wrong in public, not about the quality of the decision. Second, sort your decisions by whether they can be reversed. Most can. A reversible decision made today and corrected next week beats a perfect one made next month, and treating every call like it is permanent is how leaders end up frozen.

So the move for this week. Find the decision that has been sitting on your desk for longer than it should have. Ask whether it is reversible. If it is, and it almost certainly is, make it today with what you have, and tell the team you will revisit it in two weeks with what you learn.

Decisiveness is not confidence that you are right. It is the understanding that the team needs a decision more than it needs a perfect one.

https://youtu.be/F7WvL2-Y5kQ

Executive Presence: 50 Traits. The field guide. therightaltitudebook.com