I know this meeting. You probably know it too. The data is in. The options have been mapped. Every stakeholder has been consulted — at least twice. And still the meeting ends without a decision. Another working group is formed. Another round of feedback requested. Everyone leaves having agreed on exactly nothing.
The easiest thing to call this is caution. The honest name for it is avoidance.
The Room That Never Decides
Let’s be honest about what drives it. Not a genuine lack of information. Not real uncertainty about the right path. What drives the meeting-that-never-decides is, more often than not, the desire to be liked. To keep everyone comfortable. To avoid being the person who made the wrong call.
And here is the problem with that instinct: not deciding is still a decision – it just costs more.
McKinsey research puts a number on it — indecision can cost a Fortune 500 organization up to 530,000 days of managers’ time and $250 million in wasted annual wages. That is the bill for avoidance. Meanwhile, Gallup’s latest workforce trust data shows that only 21% of US employees strongly agree they trust the leadership of their organization. Think about that figure. The majority of the people you lead are watching you, and most of them are not yet convinced. That gap does not close by making people feel comfortable. It closes by making things clear.
Popularity Is Not Influence
There is a distinction I come back to often, because leaders so rarely draw it for themselves. Popularity is how people feel about you today. Influence is what they do because of you over time. These are not the same thing. And the leader who consistently optimises for the first will, over time, sacrifice the second.
I have sat across from brilliant leaders who struggled here. Their teams liked them. They ran thoughtful meetings, listened well, built genuine relationships. But when the moment came — to make the call, to commit to a direction, to tell someone their idea was not the right one — they circled. What I watched happen next was not that the team became upset. What I watched was that the team became anxious. And then disengaged.
The research confirms what experience shows. Gallup finds that 68% of workers disengage not when leaders make the wrong decision — but when leaders delay making any decision at all. Teams can recover from a wrong call. They cannot build on a non-call. And as I explored in Leading Into the Next Year, decision velocity is one of the capabilities that compounds most powerfully for senior leaders — not because speed is the goal, but because the ability to move clearly and without friction is itself a form of leadership strength.
What Your Indecision Is Telling Your Team
Here is what leaders often miss: your team is reading every signal you send — including the ones you do not intend to send. When decisions are repeatedly deferred, when meetings end with more questions than answers, when every path forward awaits one more round of input — your team does not conclude that you are thorough. They conclude that you are uncertain. Or that you are afraid.
The Leadership Circle’s research on decisiveness makes this concrete: indecision accumulates as a hidden tax on momentum and trust. High performers — the people every organization needs most — are less likely to stay and thrive under leaders whose direction feels provisional. They want to know where they are going. And they take their cue from the top.
Don’t get me wrong — this is not an argument for reckless speed or decisions made without proper thought. The best leaders I have worked alongside are deliberate. But they are deliberate in advance: they establish their decision-making criteria before the moment of pressure arrives, so that when the moment comes, the answer is already clear. There is a difference between a leader who thinks carefully and a leader who delays indefinitely. The first builds teams. The second loses them. Ruth Chang captures this well in her TED Talk How to Make Hard Choices — the act of deciding is itself an act of leadership. It is how you author who you are. As she explains:
Hard choices are hard, not because of us or our ignorance, they’re hard because there is no best option … what we do in hard choices is very much up to each of us … Reflect on what you can put your agency behind – on what you can be for – and through hard choices, become that person.
I love this thinking – but with a twist. Reflect on what you can act on to achieve your leadership ambition and through making hard choices, become that leader and shape your impact.
Nina Nets It Out
The leaders people remember are not the ones who made everyone comfortable. They are the ones who made the call – clearly enough that everyone knew what to do next. Popularity fades. Credibility compounds. If you want to build influence that lasts, start by separating the question “Will they like this?” from the question “Is this right?” One question manages your reputation in the room. The other builds your leadership for the long term.