Respected leaders are decisive

There is a really interesting piece of research that was done with 400 CEOs.  This is what they were asked….. “Of all the decisions that have been made in your organization, either by themselves or their Senior Management team, how many ended up being successful?” Amazingly the results were almost universal, and that is, about 50% of the results were successful and about 50% of the results were not successful. But that’s not all. There is another interesting piece of research that shows that leaders who are decisive get far more results on the board.  But there’s a sting in the tail – Decisive Leaders do more, but they also make more mistakes.  Not more than other leaders, just more because they do more.  In other words, at the end of the day, Decisive Leaders tend to get more runs on the board.  They achieve more results. Decisive Leaders have another interesting phenomenon about them :- “It’s much better to have a Decisive Leader who makes decisions than a Leader who doesn’t make any decisions at all.” After working with many CEO’s and Senior Managers for over 30 years, I’ve observed another interesting aspect of Decisive Leadership, and it is this :- “Making a decision and implementing that decision is able to be fixed. But when there is no decision, there is nothing that can be fixed.” The cherry on the top of all this is really interesting. Team members respect decisive leaders. They know where they stand and so they get loyalty and productivity. I had a friend who worked closely with a government minister. The minister was well known for being a straight shooter and calling a spade a spade. But the thing people of differing political persuasion admired and respected is that she made decisions. She was decisive. It’s sometimes hard to make a decision if you know there’s a chance that it may turn out to be the wrong decision. But better to have made a decision and learn from it than not make a decision at all.