Leader: You’re on the Clock! (#247)
The Confident Leader
BOOST YOUR LEADERSHIP IN UNCERTAIN TIMES
A CEO recently confided, “I feel like I’m being asked to make a dozen critical decisions a day—but with only half the data.”
Then he said something that stuck: “It’s not that I don’t know what to do. I feel too fried to decide. I’m out of decision-making capacity.”
“You cannot make progress without making decisions.” – Jim Rohn
This Week’s Edition
Research from the American Medical Association shows that decision fatigue leads to decreased self-control and impaired judgment later in the day.
Clarify Your Thinking
While some leaders play checkers, effective leaders play chess. But those leaders are finding that it’s no longer an ordinary chess game—it’s speed chess. And the clock is always ticking.
Leaders today are faced with a relentless stream of decisions: staffing, strategy, client issues, team dynamics, budget shifts—and half of them arrive incomplete, contradictory, or urgent.
One executive I coach said, “By the end of the day, I’m making decisions just to make them—just to get them off my desk.” That’s a red flag. Leadership effectiveness drops when the goal becomes clearing the board rather than choosing well.
Two things happen under this decision-fatigue pressure:
- Others power through—making dozens of decisions a day, until burnout catches up and their judgment erodes.
- Some leaders freeze—stuck in analysis paralysis, hoping for perfect clarity before moving forward.
Either way, the result is the same: slow progress, unclear direction, and eroded confidence—both in yourself and your team.
But here’s the thing—leadership doesn’t require perfect answers. It requires clear thinking in the fog. And the fog isn’t going anywhere.
What leaders need is not more time or more data. What they need is a filter.
A way to prioritize, simplify, and move forward—even when everything feels like it’s coming at once.
Old Thinking:
If I don’t have all the information, I can’t make a decision. And if I do, I might make the wrong one, so I wait or overanalyze. Or worse, I’ll go the other direction. Out of frustration, I’ll make quick decisions, hoping nothing breaks.
New Thinking:
I don’t need perfect information—I need a consistent process. When I focus on what matters, use guiding principles, and delegate the rest, I can confidently move even in the fog.
Thoughts Lead to Actions
Your thoughts shape your habits, and habits shape how you lead under pressure.
What is your decision-making habit? When you “codify” your decision-making system, your decisions become faster, smarter, and less exhausting.
- Vision
- Vision is an excellent filter for decision-making.
- Are you clear on the specific details of your vision – where you are taking the organization into the future?
- If so, you can ask yourself: Does this decision move us closer to (or further away) from our vision?
- Priorities
- Are you clear on the priorities for your organization according to your knighted strategies?
- If so, you can order the things you have to decide based on that rank order of your priorities.
- Make decisions related to the top priorities before you make decisions on lower priorities.
- Delegate
- Empower your team to own decisions within their lane.
- Ask them if they are clear on the vision and priorities.
- Communicate your expectations: what you want them to do (not how).
- If they need you to weigh in, ask them to make their recommendation. Trust them.
Leaders don’t need to be heroic decision-makers. They need to be smart, steady ones.
Decide on your process. Then let your process guide you as you decide.
Boost Your Performance
What’s Your Opinion?
When was the last time you froze or overdid it when making decisions? Share it with me at robin.pou@robinpou.com.
If you are going to be a leader, you might as well be a good one. Don’t let doubt count you out. Have a confident week!
Robin Pou, Chief Advisor and Strategist
We live to make bad leadership extinct so forward this newsletter to others who strive to be confident leaders.
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What is “The Confident Leader”?
During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I began a video series called “Panic or Plan?” It was designed to equip leaders to navigate the doubt they experienced and to rise in the confidence they needed to lead during turbulent times. It took off. I then started this newsletter to equip leaders in the same fashion each week for the doubt that crashes across the bow of their leaderSHIP.
