Lead, Don’t Hover: Teams Need Decisive Leadership
- Klara Furstner
- Oct 6
- 9 min read
At one point or another, we've all been the leader who tries too hard to be humble. We involve everyone, create space, and then... we fail to make the decision everyone is waiting for. That indecision is expensive. It slows progress, blurs ownership, and erodes trust, often costing more than potentially making the wrong call. Regardless of the size of your team, this is a look at what happens when uncertainty takes over, why it happens, and how we can lead with more clarity and courage in every situation.
TL;DR
We often avoid decisions because we fear being wrong, being blamed, or being seen as too directive.
Decision-making is at the core of leadership, but it’s easy to defer or dilute it in the name of collaboration or consensus.
Indecision has real costs: burnout, rework, quiet quitting, and a pile-up of unresolved decisions that become harder to untangle over time.
Effective leadership means creating clarity: who decides, when to act, and how to support those who step up.
Strong teams don’t need full agreement. They need trust, ownership, and the courage to move forward.
Why We Avoid Decisions and Why it’s Harder as Leaders
Before we dive into the pitfalls of lack of leadership, let’s look at why this happens. It will help us approach the topic with compassion towards ourselves and our colleagues. Avoiding decisions isn’t a unique weakness; it’s deeply human. Psychology and behavioral economics have shown us that when faced with uncertainty, our brains are wired to hesitate (Kahneman, 2011).
As Daniel Kahneman (2011) explores in Thinking, Fast and Slow, two key biases often kick in:
A. Loss aversion: we fear losses more than we value equivalent gains
B. Status quo bias: we prefer inaction over change, even if the current state isn't great
Now layer that with leadership pressure.
When we're the ones expected to decide, those fears become even sharper. We’re not just making a call, we’re carrying the risk, often in public, and with limited information. So instead of choosing a direction, we:
>> Wait for more data
>> Ask for more input
>> Hope for consensus
>> Delay, just a little longer
Not because we’re procrastinating, but because we’re afraid of being wrong. Or of being blamed. Or of being seen as too directive, a tyrant, too confident, too something.
But here’s the truth: indecision is also a decision, and it often carries a higher cost than being wrong. As leaders, our job is not to eliminate uncertainty. It’s to hold it, navigate through it, and still move forward.
What Happens Without Decisions
The outcomes I’m about to share aren’t inevitable. With the right leadership, a bit of awareness, and a willingness to step up, many of them can actually become moments of growth for individuals and for teams. But when decision-making is consistently delayed or avoided, these are the patterns we tend to see.
This isn’t just my subjective reflection – we’ve been warned! Across decades, thoughtful voices in leadership, psychology, engineering, and organizational design have written about what happens when decision-making gets diluted: strategy drifts, accountability vanishes, momentum fades. And yet, we keep repeating the pattern. So, let’s turn to the literature and explore five things that tend to unfold when decisions go missing.
1. Endless Work, Shifting Priorities, and No Clear Path Forward
When decisions aren't clearly made (or aren't made at all) everything begins to feel temporary. Priorities shift frequently, new questions and edge cases keep surfacing, and what was once a clear plan starts to unravel into an ongoing, reactive process. It’s not that work is being redone, but rather that new decisions keep being added, without anyone stepping in to consolidate direction.
In the absence of a strong call, work expands into ambiguity. Momentum stalls, not because the team isn’t moving, but because no one is steering with conviction.
This echoes what Fred Brooks described in The Mythical Man-Month when he warned against “design by committee.” In system design, too many contributors without a single guiding vision lead to conceptual incoherence and the architecture loses clarity and purpose (Brooks, 1995).
The same is true in leadership: when no one owns the decision, the result is often scattered effort and a diluted outcome.
2. Either You Burn Out or You Opt Out
One of the most damaging consequences of indecision is what I’d call motivation inequality.
Those who are internally driven will pick up the slack. They’ll chase clarity, lead initiatives, jump in during outages, even if no one asked them to. Meanwhile, others may stay on the sidelines, waiting for permission or protection.
Over time, this either burns out your strongest people or creates a culture where no one steps up at all and you start to pay for it in slipped timelines, unclear accountability, and quiet dysfunction.
This dynamic shows up clearly in Patrick Lencioni’s (2002) book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He identifies avoidance of accountability and fear of conflict as two critical dysfunctions that cause teams to stall. When there’s no commitment or clarity, people either over-function or disengage entirely.
No one knows:
>> Should I act on this or wait for someone to tell me?
>> Is it my decision to make?
>> Will I be blamed if I get it wrong?
That uncertainty is exhausting, and we eventually escape that which hurts us.
3. Effort Without Alignment Feels Like No Progress at All
When decisions are unclear or absent, it’s not just strategy that suffers but the team’s spirit. People are working, contributing, trying their best. But without a shared direction, efforts scatter. Everyone’s rowing, but not in the same direction or at the same rhythm.
Work piles up in parallel tracks, each responding to different voices, different urgencies, different interpretations of what matters most. Teams stretch themselves trying to satisfy competing priorities, bending toward whatever seems most important in the moment, only to find that, in the end, nothing really moved.
I often think of this in terms of rhythm. In dragon boat racing, it’s not the strongest paddler who drives the boat forward: it’s the drummer. Without that steady beat, everyone ends up out of sync. The boat loses momentum. People get tired fast, and the finish line never feels any closer.
4. Lack of Leadership Leads to Quiet Quitting
When decisions aren’t being made, it doesn’t just stall progress, it changes how people show up. Without clear ownership or direction, people stop raising concerns or challenging decisions. They begin to disengage.
Over time, people lose enthusiasm, commitment, and care, not because they don’t want to contribute, but because they’ve stopped believing their input will lead to action.
This can turn into a subtle withdrawal from meaningful participation. People may start to self-censor to avoid being difficult. They might nod along in meetings, even when something feels off. New information can get brushed aside simply because no one’s sure what to do with it. And those who do speak up may risk being seen as negative or as creating friction.
This is exactly the pattern that Irving Janis (1982) explored in his theory of Groupthink. He identified a set of psychological traps that creep into teams where harmony is prized over clarity and accountability:
>> Silence is mistaken for agreement (illusion of unanimity)
>> People censor themselves to avoid rocking the boat (self-censorship)
>> Warning signs are rationalized away instead of discussed (collective rationalization)
>> Dissent is discouraged or subtly punished (direct pressure on dissenters)
The tension doesn’t disappear. It just goes underground.
5. The Longer You Wait, The Harder It Gets
Decision paralysis may seem harmless at first, but over time it builds complexity and friction across your systems, processes, and teams. In product development, operations, or organizational design, the longer we stall, the more mess we accumulate waiting for someone to make the call.
>> If organizational problems are identified but no action is taken, the team just keeps working around them until they can’t anymore.
>> If we don’t align on tooling, different teams or even individuals end up using different tools depending on who they’re communicating with. What starts as flexibility eventually becomes overhead, context-switching, duplicated effort, and compatibility issues that slow everyone down and become difficult to unravel later.
>> If there’s no clear architectural ownership, the system turns into a patchwork of decisions made in isolation. Eventually, solutions to the same problems are recreated multiple times, or no one wants to touch the core because doing so feels like unraveling a fragile knot that could bring more risk than value.
Avoiding a decision doesn’t freeze the problem but instead allows it to grow roots. And often, it’s not that decisions are too hard, but that we treat them all the same. We hold off until we feel fully certain or universally aligned, even when the cost of delay is higher than the risk of moving forward.
How to Make Decisions Better
We’ve looked at what happens when decisions are avoided, but let’s not stop at critique. The authors mentioned earlier don’t just diagnose the problem. They offer clear, actionable models for stronger decision-making.
Here are some of the most useful ideas, starting with the ones that move the needle the most.
Make the Call, Learn, and Adjust
Don’t wait for perfect information. Regardless of how you feel about Jeff Bezos, he did build one of today’s most operationally disciplined companies. In his 2015 Letter to Shareholders, he introduced a useful distinction between two types of decisions (Bezos, 2015).
One-way door decisions are difficult to reverse and carry long-term consequences. These should be made carefully, with alignment and deliberation. This is where you spend your time: bring in stakeholders, write documentation, and weigh the risks thoughtfully.
Two-way door decisions are reversible. You can make the call, see what happens, and adjust if needed; no permanent damage done. These don’t need a long meeting or a detailed plan. A short conversation, a Slack thread, or even a quick comment in a document might be all it takes to move forward.
As leaders, we need to build the muscle to recognize the kind of decision we’re facing, and manage our time spent on discussions accordingly. Is this something we can walk back? Or is this one that changes direction permanently?
That awareness creates momentum. Without it, we default to stalling in the name of safety.
Assign a Single Decision Owner
When everything is a group effort, no one feels responsible. That’s why companies like Amazon and Apple make decision ownership explicit.
Amazon uses the concept of a Single-Threaded Owner: someone whose sole focus is driving a single initiative without distraction (Rubick, 2023).
Apple popularized the idea of a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI): a clearly named person accountable for each task or decision (BiteSize Learning, n.d.).
Support that ownership, even when the outcome isn’t perfect. If we punish initiative, we train people to stay quiet.
This is where psychological safety meets accountability. It’s not about protecting people from failure – it’s about creating the conditions where deciding, trying, and learning are safe to do. As Eric Ries (2011) emphasizes in The Lean Startup, leaders need to create systems where fast, small decisions are encouraged, and where learning from failure is institutionalized.
Separate Input from Ownership
Inclusion doesn’t mean consensus. Input is valuable, but someone still has to synthesize it and decide. That’s leadership.
Execution can be collaborative, but direction needs ownership. In design thinking practices, broad participation is encouraged to spark creativity, but without clear decision-making, that same collaboration can easily become circular.
When input is mistaken for shared ownership, decisions stall. The cost is speed, clarity and follow-through.
Don’t Confuse Alignment with Consensus
You don’t need full agreement to move forward. What you need is clarity, trust, and commitment once the decision is made.
This dynamic reflects what Jim Collins (2001) describes in Good to Great. He found that truly effective leaders, what he calls Level 5 Leaders, don’t chase universal approval. They make hard decisions, rooted in a long-term vision, and they do so with humility and clarity. That decisiveness creates alignment, and alignment creates progress.
For example, if your team debates which analytics platform to use, the role of leadership is to close the discussion with clarity and ensure everyone is aligned in execution, even if they would have chosen differently.
Normalize disagreement. But once the call is made, move forward as a team.
Invite Healthy Conflict
Avoiding disagreement for the sake of harmony weakens decisions and erodes commitment.
Lencioni (2002) identifies fear of conflict as one of the five dysfunctions that derail teams. When everyone is too polite or too afraid to challenge ideas, accountability disappears. Debate is uncomfortable, but it’s also where better decisions are born.
For instance, in roadmap planning sessions, a lack of challenge can lead to bloated backlogs and vague priorities. A strong team surfaces trade-offs early, questions assumptions, and works through the friction together before any final call is made.
Healthy conflict is not a threat to cohesion. It’s a sign people care enough to disagree.
Wrapping Up: Leadership Means Moving Forward
We’re not always going to get it right. That’s the nature of leadership. But staying stuck, waiting for more certainty, more agreement, or the perfect moment often costs more than we realize.
The best teams I’ve seen don’t agree on everything. But they know who owns what. They trust each other to make the call. They move.
Let’s keep creating space for input, challenge, and inclusion, but not at the expense of clarity and momentum. Leadership isn’t about being the smartest in the room or the most agreeable. It’s about being willing to decide, and carrying that decision with care and accountability.
Decisiveness earns trust. Decisions move teams forward.
References/reading list:
>> Bezos, J. (2016, April 6). 2015 Letter to shareholders. Amazon. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm
>> Bitesize Learning. (n.d.). Directly responsible individual (DRI): The Apple approach to accountability. https://www.bitesizelearning.co.uk/resources/directly-responsible-individual-dri-apple
>> Brooks, F. P. Jr. (1995). The mythical man-month: Essays on software engineering (Anniversary ed.). Addison-Wesley.
Available via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/MythicalManMonth
>> Collins, J. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap... and others don’t. HarperBusiness.
>> Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes (2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin.
Available via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/groupthinkpsycho00jani
Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3513757M/Groupthink
>> Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
>> Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. Jossey-Bass.
>> Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup: How today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. Crown Business.
>> Rubick, C. (2023, May 22). Implementing Amazon’s single-threaded owner model. Rubick. https://www.rubick.com/implementing-amazons-single-threaded-owner-model/
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