Leaders today are not struggling to make bad decisions. They are struggling to make any decision at all. I have spent years working with senior leadership teams, watching the same pattern emerge across organisations of every size and sector. What I see with increasing frequency is not recklessness or poor judgement at the top. It is paralysis. Decision fatigue is quietly dismantling the effectiveness of leadership teams, and the cost is far greater than most organisations will acknowledge.
In this latest episode of the Impactful Teamwork podcast, I joined forces with Carrie Gallant, host of The Tall Poppy Revolution Radio Show. Together we explored decision fatigue, emotional intelligence, energy, intuition, and the culture conditions that either enable or destroy a team’s capacity to decide. What emerged was a candid, commercially grounded dialogue about one of the most pressing and least-discussed challenges facing leadership teams right now.
When the Leader Stops Deciding, Everyone Pays
The most expensive decision in any organisation is often not the wrong one — it is the one nobody ever made. When the sheer volume and velocity of decisions presses down on leaders, many do not prioritise or delegate. They simply stop. And when the person at the top stops deciding, the entire organisation stalls with them: suppliers wait, customers grow impatient, and team members — already aware that something is wrong — disengage further.
The Gallup data tells us that only around 20% of employees are fully engaged at work. The majority show up in body only, moving through their days without genuine investment in outcomes. And the leaders who abdicate their decision-making authority — however unwittingly — drive that disengagement significantly. When people cannot see the rationale behind a decision, feel no ownership of the direction, and watch their leader defer and delay, they stop bringing their full intelligence to the table. They become, as I described in our conversation, a bit like someone walking through the day with a blindfold on.
No Decision Is Still a Decision
One of the sharpest insights from this conversation with Carrie was the reminder that inaction is not neutral. Not making a decision is itself a decision — the decision to abdicate power, to hand agency over to circumstances, to let the situation resolve itself by default rather than by design. I have seen this play out in teams where a leader avoided a difficult people decision for months. Tensions built beneath the surface. What began as a manageable conversation became a structural rupture that consumed months of leadership time and energy to repair.
The instinct to avoid a decision usually comes from fear — fear of getting it wrong, fear of conflict, fear of being visible and accountable when economic conditions already feel precarious. Yet avoidance does not eliminate the fear. It compounds it. And it sends a clear signal to the team: if the leader does not trust their own judgement, why would anyone else trust theirs?
Decisions Are Emotional. That Is Not a Weakness.
For decades, the dominant assumption in business was that good decision-making was rational. That logic provided the correct filter and emotion was interference to manage and suppress. Neuroscience has now comprehensively dismantled this view. We now know that emotion shapes virtually every decision we make, with logic arriving later to provide the rationale. This is not a design flaw — it is how human cognition actually works. The question is not whether emotions influence your decisions, but whether you notice them and factor them in deliberately.
This matters enormously for leaders. A team member who carries mixed feelings about a direction but has never voiced them will not bring full commitment to its implementation. Carrie’s work confirmed what I observe in the field consistently. When people feel heard in the process — when the decision feels fair and considered rather than imposed — they will often support an outcome they never personally argued for. The process itself builds the trust. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics illustrates this precisely: a divisive, high-stakes decision that became a city-wide rallying point because the consultation process gave people genuine voice.
Intuition Is Not Soft. It Is Inner Tuition.
During our conversation, I shared something that a Canadian equine teacher once passed on to me, and that has stayed with me ever since. If you break the word intuition into its two component parts, you get in and tuition — inner teaching. Your intuition is not a vague feeling or a mystical sense. It is your inner knowing: the accumulated intelligence of everything you have observed, learned, and processed, operating below the threshold of conscious thought.
Most leaders live almost entirely in their heads. Embedded in analysis, in the next meeting, in managing their own anxiety, they effectively sever the connection to that inner intelligence. I have made that mistake myself. I once hired someone who met every logical criterion for the role. My gut told me clearly it was wrong. The hire was a disaster — and it cost my team significant time and emotional energy. The data from the competency framework was right. The somatic intelligence I ignored was righter.
What the Horses Know About Undecided Energy
The horses I work with at Business HorsePower are not training props. They are diagnostic instruments, and they detect the energy of indecision with a precision no coaching tool can replicate. A horse whose leader carries an uncertain internal state will simply stop. It does not experience confusion — it accurately reads the signal it receives and responds honestly. During our conversation, Carrie described exactly this dynamic. She was leading a horse at liberty — no rope, no halter — when someone asked her a question mid-exercise. Her internal state became unclear for a moment. The horse stepped directly in front of her and refused to move.
This is not a quirk of equine psychology. It is a precise mirror of what happens in organisations. Team members read the energy of their leaders constantly. A leader whose internal state broadcasts uncertainty — even when the words say otherwise — will find that the team slows, second-guesses, and waits. The horses show this dynamic with an immediacy and an honesty that no 360 feedback process can match. And once a leader has experienced it in the field, they cannot unsee it at the board table.
The Culture That Makes Decisions Possible
The structural solution to decision fatigue is not for leaders to become faster or bolder individually. It is to build culture conditions that distribute decision-making appropriately across the organisation. Leaders make the decisions only they can make. Teams take the decisions they are closest to. When JFK walked through NASA and asked the janitor what his job was, the answer stopped him cold. “To put a man on the moon.” That was not just inspirational. It was evidence of a culture where every person understood their role and the authority they carried within it.
The concept I call “reward the try” is central to this: create an environment where team members know their leader will back a thoughtful decision that does not go to plan, not punish it. When people know their leader has their back, they decide. When they do not, everything escalates upward. The leader becomes the bottleneck — overwhelmed, isolated, and unable to focus on the strategic work that only they can do. This is the pattern I see most consistently in teams operating in what I call the Turbulent or Tolerable culture zones. The gap between their potential and their actual output is significant — and it is growing.
Listen to the Episode
This conversation covers far more than any blog post can contain. Carrie and I explore Human Design as a framework for understanding your own decision-making style, the role of stillness in accessing intuition, and the neuroscience of flow state — which arrives only after we step away from the very problem we are trying to solve.
If your leadership team is experiencing decision drag, if decisions pile at the top and slow the organisation, or if you suspect the culture conditions for genuine teamship are not yet in place — this episode is worth your time.
Show Notes
02:10 Decision Fatigue Today
03:50 Doubt and Agency
05:48 Engagement and Ownership
10:50 Consultative Decisions
16:09 Context and Buy In
17:14 Emotions Drive Choices
20:14 Gut Instinct Hiring
23:07 Energy and Culture Fit
25:11 Horses Sense Energy
25:45 Firefighting Leadership
26:37 Laser Focus Purpose
27:23 Undecided Energy Lesson
28:25 Human Design Blueprint
30:41 Intuition Inner Teacher
31:29 Stillness And Flow
34:22 Decision Speed Myth
39:51 Psychological Safety Culture
42:48 Adapting In Change
44:04 Closing And Resources
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