What does the research on 400 CEOs actually say about decisive leadership — and is indecision quietly costing you the respect you've earned?

Four hundred CEOs were asked a single question. Of all the decisions made in their organisations — by themselves or their senior management teams — what percentage would they consider to have been genuinely good decisions?

The answer, which emerged consistently across a large and diverse sample, was approximately fifty percent.

Half.

Now sit with that for a moment. These are experienced, capable, well-resourced leaders, operating in major organisations with access to data, advisors, and sophisticated decision-making processes. And by their own assessment, half of their significant decisions were wrong.

What the Research Actually Tells Us

The finding is simultaneously sobering and oddly reassuring. Sobering, because it means that even at the highest levels, decision-making is far less reliable than we assume. Reassuring, because it means that getting decisions wrong approximately half the time is apparently compatible with being a highly successful CEO.

The insight that the research really points to isn’t that good leaders make perfect decisions. It’s that they make decisions. They don’t avoid them, delay them indefinitely, or dilute them into indeterminate committee mush. They make a call, they communicate it clearly, and they move.

And when they get it wrong — which, by their own account, happens about fifty percent of the time — they’re willing to acknowledge it and course-correct. That willingness to decide, and then to reassess and adjust, is what distinguishes decisive leadership from reckless impulsiveness.

The Respect That Comes With Decisiveness

I’ve observed something consistent across decades of working with leaders: the leaders who are genuinely respected by their teams are almost always the decisive ones. Not because they’re always right. But because people know where they stand, and because the clarity of a decision — even an imperfect one — is almost always more energising than the paralysis of an endlessly deferred one.

When a meeting goes round and round without reaching a conclusion, the person chairing it loses credibility with every circuit. The group watches their leader fail to land the plane, and they draw conclusions — not necessarily conscious ones — about that leader’s capacity for the role.

Conversely, when a chair brings a discussion to a crisply managed conclusion and makes a clear, confident decision, the room feels it. Energy increases. People leave knowing what they’re doing and why. The leader gains standing, even if the specific decision later proves to have been imperfect.

Decision-Making as a Muscle

The leaders who make decisions well have usually developed it as a deliberate practice. They’ve thought carefully about their own decision-making style — their tendencies toward overcaution or premature closure, the triggers that lead them to defer when they should act.

They’ve also developed a toolkit. They know when a decision requires full data and when they need to act on the best available information. They know which decisions benefit from broad consultation and which are best made by the person with the clearest accountability and the most relevant expertise.

And they know how to close a discussion. This is a skill that’s underrated in its rarity. Moving a group from discussion to decision — gathering the sense of the room, framing the options clearly, calling the question, and making the call — requires both skill and nerve. It can be learned. But it must be practised.

The Perfectionism Trap

One of the most common obstacles to good decision-making isn’t poor judgment. It’s the pursuit of certainty that can never be fully achieved. Leaders who won’t decide until they have complete information, complete consensus, and complete confidence will find that the moment never arrives — because it never does.

Research, consultation, and analysis are valuable. But at some point they must give way to a decision. The cost of delay is real, even when it’s invisible.

Half your decisions will be wrong. So will everyone else’s. The measure is what you do when they are — and whether you had the courage to make the call in the first place.