By Chally Kacelnik
Decision-making fatigue can be a gradual beast. You can show up with energy and acuity, and end up reactive and less precise than you’d like to be. It’s because there’s too much of the wrong kind of work demanding attention.
When leaders are required to make a constant stream of decisions that are not at their role’s level of work, their capacity for good judgement erodes, whether over the course of the day or more chronically. The human brain simply can’t maintain high quality decision-making indefinitely. That’s just part of being a person, no matter how good the leader.
Some organisations are tempted to view this as an individual performance issue. It’s a systems issue, and one that comes at a significant cognitive and organisational cost.
Leaders end up making too many decisions when authority isn’t clearly set out, when people lack the confidence to act, or when the organisation has developed an unspoken rule that “important” decisions must be signed off at the top. The cumulative effect is that leaders are pulled into approving matters that add little value at their level, while genuinely complex judgement calls receive less attention than they deserve.
This has flow-on effects. Teams wait longer for answers and work slows down. People become hesitant, not because they can’t decide, but because the system has taught them that decisions made without approval are risky for them personally. Over time, initiative drops and frustration rises. You lose the good candidate because you can’t get recruitment processes across the line before your competition, and you lose the customer because they can’t get the result they need in time.
Reducing decision-making fatigue isn’t about leaders becoming tougher or more disciplined. It’s about designing work so that decisions are made at the lowest possible level where the information sits. Clear accountabilities, agreed decision authorities, and visible support for reasonable judgement all reduce the volume of decisions that unnecessarily land on one desk. They also help team members to get their work done with confidence.
At LKS Quaero, we work with leaders to help them work at the right level and empower their teams to make calls. When leaders are freed from constant low-level decision-making, their judgement improves, their energy returns, and the organisation benefits from clearer thinking where it matters most.
At LKS Quaero, we help leaders to do the right work. For more information, visit us at lksquaero.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.
