A sure-fire way to frustrate your team and ensure they lose confidence in you is to flip-flop on your decisions.

Over the past year I’ve worked with a leader averse to owning his decisions.  This usually materializes in one of two ways.  Either he’s unable to make a decision in the moment and needs to spend a few days thinking it over, or he makes a decision then reverses it out in the same meeting or a subsequent meeting.  Sometimes it’s a mix of both. One time he forgot he’d been involved in the decision-making process and pushed ownership for the decision onto someone who hadn’t even been involved!

As a leader the ability to make decisions in the moment is a necessary skill.  You need to be able to take in the inputs, weight up the consequences and assume the risk for the decision.  Not all the decisions you make will be popular.  But you need to stand by them and be prepared to explain the pros and cons, and the decisioning process you went through.  That’s part of courageous leadership.

Sometimes leaders make the wrong decision and need to pivot.  That’s OK as long as you accept the consequences and don’t pass ownership on to someone else.  Sometimes new information materializes or circumstances change as a natural part of business.  Again, it’s OK to pivot.

What’s not OK is making a habit of changing your mind because you didn’t properly consider the information that was already at hand.

I came across an apt quote from leadership expert, John C. Maxwell: “Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.“

Pulling it together

• Own your decisions – don’t put the risk of your decision on to someone else.
• Be prepared to defend your decisions.  This doesn’t mean blindly defending for the sake of being right, but being able to explain the rationale behind your decision.
• Accept that your decisions will not always be right.  A decision that was right at the time might not be right given changing circumstances.

Photo: Doors in a Victorian-style street in Dublin. Which door will you decide to walk through – black or red?