Decision Making: The Loneliness of Leadership

Volume #46 - Feburary 2006

“The higher you climb, the lonelier it gets” is an aphorism that’s been around for awhile. I’m not sure who said it or when it was said, but it holds a great amount of truth. Leaders experience this loneliness in a variety of ways, but essentially it comes down to the fact that leaders must make final decisions. In the end, they’re responsible for their actions or lack of action, for what their group accomplishes or doesn’t accomplish, for the success or failure of whatever it is they’re leading.

As a leader, you need the courage to make decisions on your own, and to own the outcomes – good or bad. You must have the objectivity to make decisions that might negatively impact people you like and the self-confidence to know that your decision might make people extremely unhappy with you. You must have the capacity to stand firm and not waver from your values and ethics when making decisions, which can be especially difficult and lonely if your decision is unpopular. And you must have the knowledge relevant to the situation so that the decision you make is based on solid information and a good understanding of the issue.

One of the reasons why people find coaching such a great developmental tool is because it enables people to have sounding boards that they wouldn’t otherwise have. It allows them to play out their own ideas and inspect their own thinking in ways that they might not feel safe to do with others inside their organizations. It also enables them to dissect their ideas to gain validation and support or to discover how their own mental models can be influencing or biasing their decisions. They can trust their coach to question them and to help them see what they’re not seeing, to discover what they need to know, and to uncover how their own views might be distorting their perceptions of reality.

But if you don’t have a coach available, what can you do for yourself?

One thing you can do is to look for a very small group, perhaps two, three or four people, who will agree to be your advisors, listen to your ideas, keep them in confidence, and feed back to you what they honestly think. Your goal in these conversations is to lay out your ideas, ask questions, and then listen so that you can later reflect on all the advice you were given. Meet with these people on an individual level, so that they are not influenced by the group dynamic. When selecting this group, choose people whose expertise you admire and respect and whose judgment you trust. Make sure the group has a diversity of thought. You don’t want everyone to think like you do: you want to include people who are different from you and who can provide you with a different perspective. When you work with a group of advisors, you will still be the ultimate decision maker, but you will know that you have considered the opinions of others whom you value.

Before you make decisions, make sure you have all the facts. You can’t be self-confident that you are being objective if you haven’t rationally examined the situation and all the options and outcomes. President Bush is being criticized now because he made decisions based on faulty evidence without sufficiently analyzing all the possible outcomes. You need to be able to balance the evidence with your own values. You must have the capacity to stand with your own values, which Bush does, but you shouldn’t make decisions from your values alone. Good leadership is about being grounded spiritually, emotionally and rationally.

If you know that you analyzed all the relevant information, asked the right questions to inform yourself, listened to the wisdom of others, use your values to guide you, and put your own ego and personal gratification aside to do the best for those you are leading, you might not feel less lonely, but you’ll know that you did the best that you could.

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