The Paradoxes of Leadership, Pt. 2 - Decision Making
- Pete Ward
- Aug 27
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 28
About the Author: Pete Ward - Partner, Rise Above Consulting
Pete Ward is a globally experienced founder and executive. After kicking off his career as a rock climbing rescue ranger, Pete then contributed to our foundational understanding of the mathematics of Neuroscience at university. Looking for the greatest possible positive impact, Pete brought that intellectual rigor combined with a fearless commitment to results into the business world where he has built his career as a leader. That career has spanned industries and continents and resulted in a truly unique perspective on how to build and grow profitable businesses. From New York to Oxford to Switzerland and from Tech to Financial Services to Retail, Pete has crafted high-performance strategies on the cutting edge regardless of context.
HOT TAKE: “We live in uncertain times” is code for “I don’t understand leadership”. Show me the period in human history where everyone was thinking that the future would be easy to predict and I’ll show you a lesson in revisionist history.
Times are always uncertain and the most fundamental work of a leader is to clarify the uncertainties of the world by making decisions that direct the success, even the survival of your organization.
Last week I introduced the concept of the Paradoxes of Leadership and the four core responsibilities of a leader. In the simplest terms, the work of a leader is as follows
Make Decisions | Provide direction, commitment, and impetus to your organization |
Motivate Your People | Align your organization, clarify its purpose, and get buy-in |
Resource the Organization | Provide the tools, structure and assets that your people need to do the job |
See the Big Picture | Think strategically, and know when to be adaptable and when to be resilient |
Today, we will focus on what makes a good decision and how you, as a leader, should be self aware in how you approach your decision making.
What is a decision for leadership (vs. anyone else)
Most of us face simple choices, like the choice between crunchy or creamy peanut butter. You have complete information about both sides of that choice, there are only 2 options that were given to you by someone else, and you can always go back and get the other option.
Leadership doesn’t always get complete information. You have to identify the options yourself, you might not have previous experience with similar decisions, and for the big decisions, once the choice has been made there’s typically no going back.
So, what can you do to make better decisions?
Understand What Matters
Great leaders don’t aim for perfect decisions; they aim to make the best possible choices with the information they have, and then learn from those choices. The key to improving as a decision-maker isn’t avoiding mistakes, it is developing the discipline to reflect, recognize patterns, and refine your approach over time. It is the process, and your own self-awareness, that matter in the end.
A good decision-making process includes:
Clarity: Provides clarity on what to focus on, and (crucially) what to ignore.
Situational Awareness: Takes into account who is affected and how they are impacted.
Practicality: Has taken logistics into account and has a clear path to execution.
Metrics: Can be assessed and measured after the fact to determine if it was a good decision or not .
It all sounds so simple, but if you’re honest with yourself, how many of your decisions really check all four of those boxes?
Understand your decision making style, why it’s good and why it’s bad
The Paradoxes of Leadership introduce a core tension of leadership: Do I act now, or do I stop and think? We define that paradox as the balance between being decisive and being analytical. I also like to think of it as the balance between being courageous and being strategic. All of us will have our own bias towards action or towards gathering information, so what are the benefits of each approach?.
Strategy is one of those words that everybody loves and that almost nobody can accurately define. A brilliant professor of mine once joked that “Strategy is a word you put in your job title when you want a raise” and I think that’s about as far as many leaders understand the concept.
For our purposes, the strategic/analytical leader is one who values the power of information above all else. The strategic leader is constantly working to see the entire field of play and to understand the second, third and fourth-order consequences of every decision. The strategic leader is wary of rash decisions and poorly understood consequences.
On the other end of the spectrum…
Courage is “action in the presence of fear”, and when your decisions carry consequences for your entire business almost every action requires some level of courage.
In this context, we define the decisive leader as one who values the power of agency above all else. The decisive leader believes in their ability to make things happen, by force of will if necessary, and is wary of over-thinking things, and falling into paralysis by analysis.
We have arranged Decisive/Courageous and Analytical/Strategic as complementary antonyms because the complete leader must understand when it is the moment to take action versus when it’s time to consider what action should be taken. The complete leader must possess both courage and strategic thinking equally.
That’s the hard part: You need BOTH skills. The complete leader has the ability to be decisive AND analytical, and can choose between those traits as needed. As I wrote last week, there are rarely easy answers, only tradeoffs.
So here are the tradeoffs for each style:
Decisive Leadership
The GOOD
You are a person of action. Even in difficult circumstances, your team can count on you to make the hard choices. You are self-motivated, assertive and perhaps even brash. The people around you can be deeply motivated by your confidence which empowers them to take risks that they might never be willing to engage without the support and energy you provide.
The CHALLENGE
Some people experience you as reckless, arrogant or even narcissistic. You may face opposition before action is even taken because of the force of your personality and approach. You may have trouble convincing grounded, thoughtful, and sophisticated people of the quality of your decisions.
Analytical Leadership
The GOOD
You are calculated, rational and precise. When you make a decision, the people around you know you have considered every possible angle and count on you to make the right call. Your choices are thoughtful, deeply rooted in logic and therefore your hardest decisions are easier to quantify, analyze and defend after the fact.
The CHALLENGE
Some people may experience you as too calculated or distanced from the creativity required for a truly innovative approach. Your desire to avoid impulsive choices could build anxiety in your teams and lead to a risk-averse culture where the goal becomes avoiding failure rather than achieving success.
So what does all that mean for me?
The most important takeaway for any manager, owner, board member or investor is this:
We always live in uncertain times. As a leader, the most fundamental thing you can do for your organization is to bring order to the chaos with clear, empathic, practical and measurable decision-making.