The Real Cost of Making Important Decisions Alone

Research & Sources / Leadership & Decision-Making

Try to look at the back of your own head. Turn left, turn right, turn faster. It does not work. You need a second mirror or a second person. Every important decision has a back of the head: a part you simply cannot see from where you stand. When you decide alone, that part stays invisible, and you pay for it later.

The spinach in your teeth

Everybody knows the moment. You come home after a long day of meetings, look in the mirror, and there it is: a green piece of spinach between your front teeth. It was there all afternoon. Twenty people saw it. Nobody said a word.

Now think about how that happened. You could not see it, because it was on your own face. The others could see it, but saying something felt awkward. So the one person who needed the information was the only one who did not have it.

That is exactly how many big decisions in a company go wrong. Not because the leader is not smart, but because the mistake sits in the one place the leader cannot look, and the people who can see it do not say so.

It really is lonely at the top

The higher you climb, the fewer people tell you about the spinach. That is not a feeling, it has been measured.

The leadership consultancy RHR International surveyed chief executives about isolation. About half said they experience loneliness in the role, and most of those said it hurts their performance. Thomas Saporito, who led the firm, wrote about it in Harvard Business Review under the title “It’s Time to Acknowledge CEO Loneliness”.¹

The CEO peer network Vistage explains why. Everyone acts a little differently around the boss, often without noticing. And leaders feel they must look confident all the time, which makes it hard to say “I am not sure” out loud. So the people around you choose their words carefully, and you keep your doubts to yourself.²

For entrepreneurs it is often even more extreme. There is no board that meets every month, no boss, no peer in the next office. Your partner at home hears the worries, but cannot judge the pricing strategy. Your team hears the plans, but cannot tell you that the plan is the problem.

Why your own brain will not warn you

You might think: “Fine, then I will just be extra careful.” Unfortunately, careful is not enough.

Psychologists at Stanford ran a series of studies on what they called the bias blind spot. People were happy to admit that others are influenced by things like self-interest or wishful thinking. But they rated themselves as much less affected. Even after the researchers explained the bias to them, most participants still insisted their own judgement had been fair and objective.³

In other words: the feeling “I have thought this through properly” is not proof that you have. It is just how thinking feels from the inside.

Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his work on human judgement, put it plainly together with his colleagues in Harvard Business Review: leaders can find biases much more easily in the proposals of others than in their own reasoning. Their advice is to build checks into the way decisions are made, because willpower alone will not catch them.⁴

The real costs nobody puts on the invoice

Deciding alone rarely causes one big disaster. It causes many small, quiet costs that add up.

Decisions take longer. Without anyone to think with, a question goes round and round in your head for weeks. “Should I hire a sales lead?” stays open for half a year. That half year is the most expensive part.

Decisions get narrower. Alone, you tend to compare two options: do it or do not do it. A second person often brings the third option you had not even seen.

Decisions are harder to undo. When nobody tested the idea before, you only learn about the weak spot after the money is spent, the person is hired or the client is signed.

And you get tired. Carrying every open question alone is heavy. That weight follows you home, into the weekend, into the night. You might not notice it any more, the way you stop noticing a backpack you have worn all day.

What helps

The answer is not to make every decision in a committee. Committees have their own problems. The answer is to give every important decision a second mirror before it is final.

That second mirror can be a trusted peer, an experienced mentor, a coach or a thinking partner. What matters is less the title and more three qualities: they are outside your daily business, they do not depend on you, and they are willing to say the awkward thing.

You do not have to give away the decision. You only have to show someone the back of its head.

What this means for you this week

• List the decisions only you are carrying. If you are the only person who knows a decision is pending, it goes on the list.
• Ask the spinach question. Pick two people you trust and ask: “What do you think I am not seeing at the moment?” Then stay quiet and listen.
• Name one person outside the business who could be your second mirror on a regular basis, not only in a crisis.
• Put a date on one open decision. Choose the oldest one and decide by Friday, after one outside conversation about it.

Strong leaders are not the ones who never need a mirror. They are the ones who know where their blind spot is and put someone there.

Sources

1. Saporito, T. J. (2012). It’s Time to Acknowledge CEO Loneliness. Harvard Business Review, 15 February 2012. hbr.orgReports RHR International survey results: about half of CEOs experience loneliness in the role, and most of them say it hinders their performance.
2. Vistage Research Center (2021). Why Many Leaders Feel Lonely at the Top. vistage.comWhy leadership gets lonely: hierarchy and power dynamics, the pressure to always look confident, and the weight of carrying decisions alone.
3. Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y. & Ross, L. (2002). The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369-381. doi.orgPeople rate themselves as less biased than others and keep doing so even after the bias is explained.
4. Kahneman, D., Lovallo, D. & Sibony, O. (2011). Before You Make That Big Decision. Harvard Business Review, June 2011. hbr.orgLeaders spot biases in others’ proposals more easily than in their own; decision checks have to be built into the process.