Can great leaders make poor decisions?

The short answer may seem pretty obvious: yes. However, we tend to expect that people we look up to and admire have a consistent and judicious way of thinking that we mere mortals lack.

While I’m sure that there are some Lone Rangers out there, I’d like to hypothesise that our brains were never made to operate in complete isolation.

Think about it. We are not at the top of the food chain simply because we’re strong, fast, venomous, or sharp-toothed, but because we operate in tribes and have learned to communicate and cooperate.

Most leaders today are accountable to a board of directors and have access to a coach, mentors, trusted team members, or confidantes who they can collaborate with, bounce ideas off, and share the burden of decision-making with, to some extent. It’s not without reason that the saying goes, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

So, how do some leaders end up making such spectacularly bad decisions? It would stand to reason that they have either broken away from the tribe, have developed an inflated sense of self, or have been guided or informed by the wrong tribe members. The fact is, from the outside, we might never know exactly what is going on inside another person’s mind.

However, we can introspect and ask ourselves why we make poor decisions, not just as leaders but also as individuals, parents, in social situations, and as professionals.

What happens when we don’t consult our 'board of directors' or tribe members? The answer is that we are often carried away by our cognitive fallacies and distortions due to emotions or attachment.

I recently made a poor call at work when a client made a fervent request for more sessions. They had been through a lot of stress, and I admired and wanted to help them. At that moment, I agreed to accede to their request and move into a gray area, subject to us getting approval from my client’s company.

When I woke up the next morning, I was taken aback at how there was no way that my choice could have been the right one or could be approved by anyone. I was even more surprised since I am a lawyer and I thought I knew how to weigh facts. Additionally, I believed that I understood company policies and rules. And yet I thought there might be a chance my request would be approved.

As I analysed what transpired the previous day – and they don’t call it, 'in the cold light of day', for nothing, I realised that the client had managed to stir up my emotions… Suddenly there was an ‘I’ who wanted to help, there was a tribe member, calling out, there was quick, thinking, and there was optimism bias at play.

Can you see how many distorted beliefs paraded as facts in my head, in those few moments?

What I could’ve done in that moment, before my client’s session ended, was to have listened to their request, recognised that I was under time pressure and feeling aroused emotionally, and perhaps promised to have considered it, but not acted out of a sense of urgency. Again, that’s why the aphorism ‘haste makes waste’.

So, to summarise, our thoughts and our emotions are extremely useful to create concepts in this world and to tell us what’s important to us. But they’re not necessarily the only narrative, not always true, and can often be subject to several biases.

Our wisdom comes from listening to these, but exploring around them, running them by our council members - whether these are in our head or, even better if they’re actual people outside our heads! Slow down our thinking, as Daniel Kahneman says. Get out of this sense of constant urgency.

I’ll leave you with wise words from Mae West, who said:

“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.”