Inventiveness and Leading

You can’t know everything.

No one should expect you to. As I’ve told different teams I’ve lead “We make the best decisions with what we know now.” Even in rocket science, you have to have some version of a “margin of error”. I mean, come on….how do you know what all can go wrong in space?

It’s a bad way to lead.

Getting stuck because you don’t know what will happen in the future isn’t a good idea. The reality is that not making a decision is still making a decision, albeit an unintentional decision. Unintentionality in leadership is always a bad idea.

Making decisions costs something, and that’s why you’re the leader.

Decisions cost. Making a poor decision costs something. This is why you’re the leader…or at least hopefully. Hopefully you’re the leader because you have a more trained gut about situations you’re leading. If you have a good grasp for the situation, then you’ll make a good decision. It’s one of the reasons that you’re there, to be the tie breaker for causing good decisions.

Develop others

Also, you should develop others. Let your ceiling be someone else’s floor. teach them what it took you years to develop. Start with low impacting decisions and delegate those. Teach others your decision matrix. Hopefully by the end of all that, you aren’t the only leader.