Why this idea means business : We explore the pros and cons of decisive leadership. Learn when it works and when it doesn’t. Read this to learn more about the consequences of leaders being decisive.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To learn the right times to be decisive in business. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – Innovation
- Skill area – Creativity
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. monthly purchases from innovation adoption = +40
- Est. sales increase = +$4k (monthly) | +$48k (annual)
Indecisiveness isn’t seen as a positive leadership trait. No one says, “Oh, I was inspired by the way they dithered over that decision.” There’s a base assumption that being decisive is a sign of strength. And avoiding decisions is a weakness.
However, assumptions are there to be challenged. While decisive leadership has its time and place, it doesn’t have to be the only option. In fact, in many cases, it’s often a bad move, leading to poor decisions, missed opportunities, and costly mistakes.
Why we value decisive leadership
When you think of decisive leadership, you probably have a few examples of people in mind, right? Maybe even yourself.
You also likely have lots of confidence in those people’s leadership abilities, right?
After all, they’re decisive.
However, it’s worth exploring why decisive leaders give us this confidence. Much of it is down to the fact that making decisions is hard.
Decision-making forces you to gather and compare options. This logical thinking drains your brain’s energy because it makes your brain cells spark more often. Thinking hard exhausts you. This is partly why many people avoid making decisions. Our lazy brains don’t like the effort involved in deciding.
Decisive leadership types seem more able to handle this. That’s typically why we value and have confidence in them. They take the effort away from us of having to make a decision ourselves.
When you need decisive leadership
This need for decisiveness has its roots in evolution.
When our ancestors came face-to-face with a sabre-tooth tiger, pausing to weigh up the options got you killed. You fight, or you run. The ditherers get eaten, and the deciders survive.
So, when there’s a burning need to do so, our brains are wired to make a decision.
It’s a survival instinct.
In the modern business world, this manifests as some pressing business need that demands immediate action. You haven’t hit this month’s number. Customers are complaining about your new advertising campaign. An innovation has flopped. These types of situations seem to say, something’s on fire here, and you need to act RIGHT NOW to deal with it.
Making decisions about what to do helps us resolve these tensions. Decisive leadership would say, Get a new sales promotion up and running ASAP. Fire the agency and get our old advert back on air. Pull the failed product, and fast-track the next one in the pipeline.
Decisions give everyone a plan for how to fix a pressing challenge.
The problem with decisive leadership
You might think this all sounds fine. But most people (including us) can see the big, worried-looking elephant sitting in the corner of the room when it comes to this sort of approach.
What if those decisions are wrong?
Just because someone “decides” doesn’t mean those decisions are good. In fact, there are many examples of decisive leaders who’ve made terrible decisions with hugely negative impacts.
Look at the worst leaders in recent history – Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Putin, Thatcher, Trump. You could argue that they all showed decisive leadership. “Strong” leaders, yes. But those decisions were consistently awful and destructive.
So, how do you avoid following the example of this roll call of political fuckwittery? Well, unless something’s on fire, and you’ve no choice but to be decisive, you start by buying yourself some time.
Buy yourself some time
Decisive leadership types are often ambitious and aggressive Type-As.
They climb the career ladder faster because they project confidence. People assume that makes them a stronger leader.
We’ve all run into people like this.
Always the first to speak. Interrupt others all the time. Rigid and relentless steamrollers, out to win every argument, no matter the cost.
The trouble is that they’re so keen on making sure their decision wins that they close their minds to what might be better options. They’ll often put others under unnecessary time pressure to force a decision. They create urgency, the modern business equivalent of the sabre-tooth tiger threat.
We’ll miss our number if we don’t do this today. We’ve already had hundreds of complaints about this advert; you need to pull it. The retailer has threatened to delist us; we need to get back to them with a plan today. These “crises” compel us to do something, right?
But are these actually crises? Maybe missing the number is down to a bad forecast? Maybe thousands of customers love your new advert, but you’ll only find out when they buy your product. And maybe your innovation is only a few weeks away from taking off – if only the decisive leadership team weren’t set on killing it stone dead.
So the first job in solving the decisive leadership dilemma is to ask why the decision needs to be made today. What’s the urgency? If nothing’s on fire, take the time to explore more options.
Use that time to be more open-minded
Ideally, everyone has an equal chance of becoming a leader. However, look around most boardrooms, and it seems there’s a particular “type” who’s more likely to get ahead.
Extraverts tend to win out over introverts, for example. Agreeable types win out over disagreeable types. But when it comes to decisiveness, it’s the Openness (to new experiences) which is the most divisive of the Ocean Big 5 personality variables. (See our brand personality article for a fuller explanation of these).
Personality types who are less open to new experiences are good at focusing. They like routines, consistency and predictability. For market leader brands that want to stay that way, these all make sense as leadership attributes.
However, challenger brands need leaders who are more open to new experiences, because they want to challenge the status quo. They’re happy to explore other options, experiment and take more risks.
However, many would say these behaviours are the opposite of decisive leadership. People who want to keep their options open as long as they can. People who change their minds as they gain new insights and who are OK with unpredictability and uncertainty. This type of decision behaviour usually helps you make better, longer-term decisions.
Being open-minded helps you explore longer-term options
Why does this more open-minded approach work better for long-term decisions?
Well, it gives you the time to put deeper thought into where your brand is going.
It gives you time for discussion and debate, and those help you explore more options and better understand the consequences of each.
That’s how you make better decisions.
Example - Staying consistent and fresh
Let’s look at an example. There’s a regular debate among marketers about keeping your brand communications consistent.
Those who argue for consistency say it helps you build a stronger brand identity in the customer’s memory. However, others often argue for refreshing your brand communications so that it doesn’t get taken for granted by customers.
Decisive leadership types usually argue for this “refresh” option.
Let’s act now. Make the change. Update the advert. They say these things to show that they’re bold decision-makers, confident enough to make the tough calls.
However, most brand refreshes have little impact. (e.g. see the recent fuss over US restaurant chain Cracker Barrel’s new logo)
The brands that do it best are subtler and cleverer about how they do it. And subtlety and cleverness are some of the benefits of following a more open-minded leadership approach.
For example, McDonald’s consistently uses the golden arches in its advertising. But it often plays around with how those arches are depicted. Consistent, but staying fresh.
Kit Kat is another good example. They’re consistent with “Have a break, have a Kit Kat”. But they let their creative agencies play around with how that’s depicted.
Some of these ads work better than others. However, the longer-term impact is that these brands strike a successful balance between consistency and staying fresh without any disruptively bad decision-making.
Example - evolutionary vs revolutionary innovation
Another good example is long-term innovation planning. When you think about the products and services, you can add to give yourself a stronger competitive advantage.
Decisive leadership types focus on short-term and obvious wins in innovation. Refresh the packaging. Launch a new variant. Take what we’ve already got and tweak it. This gets you an evolutionary style of innovation, with frequent minor changes.
Now, this can work. Plenty of examples of brands doing this to grow.
For example, new Volkswagen Golf models rarely appear very radical. But there can often be thousands of barely noticeable innovations built into each update.
However, open-minded types look beyond small changes. They’re more revolutionary and seek out more breakthrough ideas. They look for disruptive ideas that will turn the market on its head.
For example, Netflix challenged the way Blockbuster delivered the at-home movie experience. Short-term decisive leadership types would have focused on building a better video shop. But being more open-minded led Netflix to experiment with DVD postal delivery and video streaming to get movies into people’s homes. But they only got to that point because their leadership team was willing to explore options and not rush into immediate decisions.
Conclusion - Decisive leadership? When it works and when it doesn’t
It may sound like we’re against decisive leadership. But we’re not.
When you absolutely, positively need to make quick business decisions, decisive leadership is the right way to go.
Our argument is that it’s often overused.
Decisive leadership types like to pressure more open-minded leadership types into making decisions by over-inflating the urgency.
They argue, “strong” leaders are good at making quick decisions. And that taking time to explore different options is somehow a sign of “weak” leadership.
But is leadership really a test of strength? Surely better for it to be a test of smartness? Brains over brawn.
The best leaders make the best decisions, and that’s because they can judge the urgency well. They can decide quickly when action is needed. But they’ll take time to explore options when there’s a less immediate need for action. They recognise that there’s a time and a place for decisive leadership, but that it’s not the only option in their leadership toolbox.
Check out our marketing leadership article for more on this. Or get in touch if this has set off any ideas for you about the pros and cons of decisive leadership.
Photo credits
Legal scales : Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
Newspaper on fire : Photo by Elijah O’Donnell on Unsplash
Surprised Monkey : Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash
Hand / Stop : Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
Man looking at ceiling (adapted) : Photo by Anton Danilov on Unsplash
Person holding compass : Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
McDonald’s : Photo by Jurij Kenda on Unsplash
Volkswagen : Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash
