The Power of Patience / Why Leaders Shouldn’t Rush to Decide

Hi Everyone,

When my wife and I were in our late twenties, we had a venting session about a leader she was working with.

You know the kind of conversation I’m talking about.  

It was one of those conversations you had over dinner when you were young and naive and needed to blow off some steam.

The executive in charge of a significant change initiative was holding everyone up because he wouldn’t make a decision, and my wife was pissed.

I remember her complaining about how important it was for a leader to be decisive, and I jumped on that bandwagon.

It turned out that I was dealing with someone in my chain of command who was also indecisive, and I was at my wit’s end.

I remember the conversation like it was yesterday because we were both fired up and emotionally charged when my wife said something pretty funny. She said:  

“I don’t understand why so many leaders struggle with this.  It seems like they’ve all been sent to a secret school that teaches them to implement passive-aggressive leadership techniques.”  

We laughed at the idea, but because we both valued humility, we decided to end the conversation by accepting that perhaps we were missing something.  

Maybe the executives she and I were frustrated with knew something that we didn’t, and perhaps we needed to cut them some slack.

Several years later, while talking to a mentor, I realized that our decision to be humble was a good one.

I also realized that the secret school of leadership might actually exist.  

A Secret School for Leaders?

OK, OK… The school doesn’t exist, but my mentor taught me a valuable lesson that day.  

Leadership is all about wrestling with impossible contradictions.

You must know what contradictions I’m referring to if you are in a leadership position.  We are told to:

• Be decisive but remain flexible.

• Be strong but vulnerable.

• Take risks, but don’t fail.

• Lead by example, but stay out of the way.

• Take control, but empower others.

• Act with confidence, but be humble.

• Be consistent but creative.

It’s no wonder leadership feels like one of the most demanding jobs on the planet. 

It is a role that requires us to play with paradox constantly.

Every day, you’re expected to balance hundreds of opposing demands and appear calm and collected as you wrestle with difficult questions that rarely have a correct answer.

• Should you push your team to go faster or give them space to figure it out? 

• Do you stand firm in your decisions or adjust based on feedback? 

• Should you be innovative as a company or stick to your core competencies?

• Should you be responsive to customer feedback or consider what the late great Henry Ford once said:  “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

These questions come up repeatedly, and there’s no perfect answer.

And that’s the thing about leadership.

Leaders must make peace with the fact that leadership is about dealing with paradox.  

We must manage the tensions between opposing forces and sometimes, like the executive my wife and I were complaining about, allow the tensions to fester.  

In many cases, the best decision is no decision at all.

The Value of Indecision

I’m always amazed at how simplistic advice on leadership can be. 

We are told to be decisive, act quickly, and always know the way forward. But leadership is always about moving across a spectrum of two polarities.

Take decision-making, for example.  

On the one hand, we have a highly decisive leader who takes command and is quick to make a decision.

On the other hand, we have the indecisive leader who likes to think things through and can get stuck in analysis paralysis.

Which one is better?

The honest answer is it depends.

It depends on the context and a whole host of other variables.

Some may admire the decisive leader who acts without fear and gets things moving, but what if the decision is wrong? What if the decision has damaging or destructive repercussions?  

I’ll bet, under those circumstances, you would be begging for a more thoughtful, deliberate, and, dare I say, indecisive leader to take the reins.

Indecision frequently gets a bad rap in leadership circles because we are programmed to believe that there is a stereotypical leader that we should all aspire to be.  

The stereotype includes decisiveness, and anything that looks a bit indecisive is often labeled as a weakness or a lack of leadership capability.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Indecision allows us to gather information, observe our surroundings, and let things unfold. 

When leaders rush to make a decision just to be seen as “decisive,” they often miss critical details or fail to consider the long-term consequences.

Think about it this way: a surgeon doesn’t cut into another human being without fully understanding the anatomy. 

They wait until they clearly understand what they’re dealing with. 

In the same way, leaders need to hold off on making decisions until they’ve gathered enough information to make the best possible choice. 

Pausing, observing, and reflecting aren’t signs of hesitation—they’re signs of wisdom.