Week 6 Day 2: You Can Be Humble and Still Make Hard Calls

Humility does not mean avoiding difficult decisions. It means making them with full awareness that you might be wrong, communicating the reasoning behind them, and staying open to correction. Some leaders use humility as an excuse to delay. They keep gathering data, holding meetings, seeking consensus -- not because they need more input but because deciding feels risky. But indecision has a cost, and that cost falls on the team that is waiting for direction.

I learned this lesson during a reorg. Two teams needed to be merged, and both team leads had strong opinions about how to structure the combined group. I spent three weeks trying to find a solution that made everyone happy. I gathered feedback, ran scenarios, held joint meetings. Nothing converged because the two perspectives were genuinely incompatible -- one was organized around features, the other around customer segments. Eventually my VP pulled me aside and said: 'You have all the information you are going to get. Make the call.' So I did. I chose the customer segment model because the data supported it, even though one team lead disagreed. I told both teams why, I acknowledged the tradeoffs, and I committed to revisiting the decision in 90 days if the metrics showed it was not working. The team lead who disagreed was unhappy for about two weeks. Then the work started flowing better, and he came around. What he told me later was revealing: 'I did not agree with the decision, but I respected that you finally made one. The three weeks of limbo were worse than any outcome would have been.'

Research on decision-making under uncertainty by Gary Klein, published in 'Sources of Power,' demonstrates that experienced leaders rarely make decisions by analyzing all options and selecting the optimal one. Instead, they use what Klein calls 'recognition-primed decision making' -- they pattern-match the current situation to previous experiences and select the first workable option, then mentally simulate it for flaws. Klein's research across firefighters, military commanders, and intensive care nurses shows that this approach produces good decisions faster than analytical comparison -- and that the biggest risk is not making a suboptimal choice but taking too long to make any choice at all. Separately, Kathleen Eisenhardt's research at Stanford on strategic decision-making in high-velocity environments found that the fastest decision-makers were also the most effective, contradicting the assumption that speed sacrifices quality. Eisenhardt identified that fast decision-makers used more real-time information (not less), considered more alternatives simultaneously, and had trusted advisors who provided rapid input. The common thread: humble leaders who decide quickly and correct openly outperform cautious leaders who decide slowly and defend rigidly.