Decisiveness in Leadership Is Not About Speed

On January 6, 2024, one day after a door plug blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 at 16,000 feet, the FAA grounded 171 Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft. It did not ask Boeing to look confident or promise lessons learned. It stopped the planes and made inspection the price of flying again. That is decisiveness in leadership. It is a public stopping rule, not a personality display.

Decisiveness in leadership is not about speed. It is about knowing what you are betting on before you commit. The useful part is simpler than anyone's name on it: know enough to act without pretending to know everything. Roger Estall and I wrote the Universal Decision-Making Method down because too many organisations confuse speed with judgement, and then wonder why fast decisions still go wrong.

I have watched too many boards stare at a fat paper pack and a useless risk register, then complain that the room needs more decisive leadership. That advice is easy to sell because nobody has to name the broken machinery under it, which is excellent news if you bill by the workshop. Most of the leadership-advice trade flatters the leader and excuses the process. It tells people to trust instinct when what they really need is to expose the assumption carrying the decision. I set out what effective decision making in leadership actually requires elsewhere, and none of it involves instinct.

Why most advice on decisiveness in leadership is backwards

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Even McKinsey's 2024 survey of 757 senior executives ends up at the obvious point: clean up roles and process, and decisions move faster. Fine. That should not require a survey, though a fair slice of the advisory industry depends on pretending it does. The useful finding is that delay sits in structure. The useless habit is to turn that back into a sermon about courage.

In my experience, slow organisations breed side-door vetoes and swollen papers until the whole thing turns into governance clutter. Consultants like it because it creates more surfaces to sell. Committees like it because responsibility goes foggy. The accountable leader inherits the mess at the end of the chain and gets told to be bolder. Much of what people call indecision is just exhaustion, which is the territory I wrote about in executive decision fatigue.

Why decisiveness in leadership starts with assumptions

The 2022 paper "The Relationship between Psychological Safety and Management Team Effectiveness" looked at 1,150 leaders across 160 Norwegian management teams. Ignore the subtitle. The point is simple: if nobody can say what they doubt, the meeting is theatre and the decision basis stays hidden. You do not get to sufficient certainty by intimidating the room into silence.

I have seen supposedly decisive leaders ruin a room by speaking first. Once the boss tips a preference, the conversation rearranges itself around it. People stop testing the live assumption and start decorating the emerging answer. Later everyone describes this as alignment, which is a charming term for obedience. The same dynamic wrecks problem solving in the workplace: the room stays in complaint mode because the boss has already read out the answer. I do not want alignment at that stage. I want the awkward question that shows the whole recommendation is resting on one untested belief.

Roger and I kept coming back to one question in Deciding: what are we assuming here? Ask it early enough and half the drama leaves the room. Ask it late and the room has already married the answer. When the stakes are high, this becomes the practical work of how to make a difficult business decision. The hard part is rarely finding more adjectives for boldness. It is naming the thing that has to be true for the decision to work.

Mt Erebus remains the bleakest warning I know. A small administrative change to the navigation coordinates for Air New Zealand Flight 901 was not properly communicated to the crew. They flew the programmed track into whiteout conditions and 257 people died. The disaster was built out of a hidden assumption and a broken chain of communication. If you want the accountability line around that, I wrote separately about Deciders. Small decisions kill people when nobody visible owns the assumptions beneath them.

Fast action is sometimes a pause

The same logic appeared in April 2021 when the CDC and FDA recommended a pause in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after reports of rare clotting events. ACIP reviewed the evidence in public and resumed use with warnings and monitoring once the grounds were clear enough. That is decisive action under uncertainty. Pause when the assumption is in doubt, then move again when the threshold is met. People who equate decisiveness with uninterrupted motion usually have no serious monitoring design.

I have always distrusted leaders who think a pause makes them look weak. In real work, a pause can be the fastest honest move available. It tells people the decision has not vanished, only that the threshold for continuing has changed. It also tells implementers what signal matters next. That is miles better than ploughing on and calling the wreckage resilience.

Consistency is not what decisiveness looks like

Maersk did this in the Red Sea. It paused vessel transits, signalled a return, then reversed again when the security picture still did not support that call. Executives who call that inconsistency usually mean they would rather protect face than revise a bad assumption. Face-saving is very popular in senior circles. It is also expensive.

I call the alternative stubbornness with good lighting. A leader announces a course, then clings to it so nobody can accuse them of wobbling. If the assumption changed, the decision should change with it. This is where decisiveness in leadership parts company with performance. Refuse to do that and you teach the whole organisation that fresh evidence is unwelcome, which is one road into analysis paralysis in business. People stop speaking because they know the answer has already been staged.

What decisive leaders can say out loud

What I want from a decisive leader is plain speech. Tell me what we are doing and what would make us stop or reverse. If you cannot say the assumption carrying the call in one sentence, you are not ready. Those lines are more useful than any sermon about courage, and in my experience they are rarer. The leadership market prefers traits because traits are flattering. If you want the broader frame around that job, I set it out in the full guide to decision making for leaders.

Decisiveness theatre protects egos and keeps the governance machinery well fed. The people who pay for it are usually nowhere near the polished table where the performance took place.

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Grant Purdy is the co-author, with Roger Estall, of Deciding (2020), and the architect of the Universal Decision-Making Method.