A piece of feedback that changed how I lead
Early in my leadership career, I received feedback that stopped me in my tracks: I was taking too long to make decisions.
My first reaction was defensive. I wasn’t being indecisive, I told myself — I was being thorough. I was waiting until I had enough information to make the right call. That felt responsible. It felt like the mark of a careful, considered leader.
But sitting with that feedback, I started to see something I had missed entirely. While I was waiting for the complete picture, the people around me were waiting for direction. And what looked like diligence from the inside looked a lot like inaction from the outside. That gap — between my intention and my impact — was causing real frustration.
That moment sent me on a path of reflection that fundamentally reshaped how I think about leadership and decision-making.
The trap of waiting for perfect information
Here’s the thing about seeking complete information before making a decision: it’s a reasonable instinct, but it’s often a trap.
The drive to gather more data before committing is rooted in something good — a desire to make smart, well-supported choices. No one wants to be the leader who shoots from the hip and leads their team off a cliff. So we wait. We ask for one more report. We schedule one more meeting. We tell ourselves we’re almost ready.
But in most leadership contexts, perfect information never arrives. The environment keeps shifting. Stakeholders have competing needs. The data is incomplete, or contradictory, or simply unavailable. Waiting for certainty, in these conditions, is not a strategy — it’s a delay.
And delays have a cost that’s easy to underestimate.
When a team is waiting on a decision, they’re often stuck. Work stalls. Momentum drains. People start to fill the vacuum with assumptions, rumors, or their own competing directions. The absence of a decision doesn’t create a neutral state — it creates a state of uncertainty, and uncertainty is exhausting to operate in.
What I learned from watching strong leaders
As I reflected on my own tendencies, I started paying close attention to the senior leaders I admired most — people in VP-level roles and above who seemed to operate with genuine confidence and clarity.
What I noticed was striking in its simplicity: they didn’t seem paralyzed by incomplete information. They made the best call they could with what they had, communicated it clearly, and moved forward. If something wasn’t working, they course-corrected — but they didn’t stand still waiting for permission from the data.
And here’s the thing I came to understand about decisions at that level: the bigger the decision, the less complete the information tends to be. That’s not a bug in the system. It’s the nature of leadership at scale. Strategic decisions — the ones that actually matter — are made in conditions of ambiguity almost by definition. If everything were clear and certain, it probably wouldn’t require a leader to decide.
These leaders had internalized something important: their job wasn’t to be right every time. It was to set a course, move the organization forward, and adapt as needed. That, more than any single correct decision, was how they created impact.
Inaction is also a decision — and often the worst one
This is the reframe that unlocked something for me: not deciding is itself a decision.
When you delay a call indefinitely, you’re not holding space for a better answer — you’re choosing the status quo by default. And depending on the situation, the status quo might be the worst possible outcome. It leaves people directionless. It signals uncertainty or lack of confidence. It puts your team in a holding pattern that costs time, energy, and trust.
The aspiring leaders I’ve seen struggle most with this often share one underlying fear: they don’t want to be wrong. They worry that making a call with imperfect information — and having it not work out — will damage how they’re perceived. So they hedge. They delay. They wait for a moment of certainty that never comes.
What they don’t yet see is that this pattern has its own cost to their credibility. People look to leaders for direction. When that direction doesn’t come, they don’t conclude that their leader is being careful — they conclude that their leader isn’t ready to lead.
Practical takeaways for early-career leaders
If this resonates with you, here are a few things I’d encourage you to try:
1. Set a decision deadline for yourself
When you catch yourself gathering more information, ask: what would change if I had this? If the answer is “not much,” you probably already have enough to decide. Give yourself a hard deadline — even if it’s just 24 hours — and commit to making the call by then.
2. Distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions
Not all decisions carry the same weight. Most leadership decisions are more reversible than they feel in the moment. If you can course-correct later without catastrophic consequences, the bar for acting on imperfect information should be much lower. Save your extra deliberation for the decisions that truly can’t be undone.
3. Make your reasoning visible
One of the things that makes imperfect decisions land well is transparency. When you share your reasoning — “Here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, and here’s why I’m making this call anyway” — you build trust even when you’re uncertain. People don’t need you to be infallible. They need you to be honest and clear.
4. Normalize course correction
Strong leaders don’t treat a course correction as a failure — they treat it as a sign that the feedback loop is working. If you make a call, gather new information, and adjust, that’s not weakness. That’s how good decision-making actually works in practice. Model this openly for your team.
5. Notice the cost of waiting
Next time you feel the pull to delay a decision, take a moment to map out the real cost of waiting. What’s blocked? Who’s waiting? What’s at risk if the status quo holds for another week? Making the cost of inaction visible — to yourself — is often enough to break the pattern.
Setting the course is the work
One of the most important shifts I made as a leader was recognizing that direction-setting — not perfect execution — was my greatest contribution. The people around me were talented. They could figure out how to get there. What they needed from me was a clear answer to: where are we going?
If you’re early in your leadership journey and you recognize this pattern in yourself, take heart. It comes from a good place. It means you care about getting it right. But channel that care into the quality of your thinking, not the length of your waiting. Make the best call you can. Be transparent about your reasoning. Stay open to new information. And when you need to adjust, adjust without drama.
That’s not imperfect leadership. That’s what real leadership actually looks like.
A note on process: the thinking, frameworks, and ideas in this post are my own — developed through years of experience and work in this space. AI was used to help shape and articulate those ideas into the finished piece you just read.
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