From Doubt to Discipline: A New Year’s Framework for Stronger Leadership Decisions

The core function of leadership can be found in three words: Make a decision.  

Regardless of industry, position, team size, or title, the de facto leader of any group is the person who chooses the next step. Yet the simple act of making a choice stymies many leaders, with one study finding that nearly 60% said the decisions they faced were “more complicated and difficult than they expected.”

Considering these complexities often leads to paralysis. Fear of a misstep can cause decision-makers to second- and third-guess themselves on key issues. Or the wide range of available options can lead to over-analysis, where options that may be adequate are passed over in search for the perfect solution. This indecision from the top can trickle down to infect everyone, as employees opt for one of two simple explanations: Either the leader doesn’t know what to do, or they don’t care enough to make a decision.

The good news is that most cultures approach the New Year as an intentional period of evaluation designed to re-frame the next year for better outcomes. What better time to take a look back at how you’ve been making (or avoiding) decisions, then put some structure in place to make 2026 your year of confident decision-making?

Dr. Sam’s Five Tips as Mindset Shifts

1. Choose, Don’t React: A reflex is not a choice. Yes, a leader must respond to evolving situations — but it should be done consciously on your terms, not reflexively just to “do something.” Reactive leaders become ping-pong balls, bouncing helplessly between things they don’t control. In reality, almost no situation where those around you demand an immediate response actually requires one; even EMTs responding to critical medical situations take the time to put on gloves and ask critical questions before acting.
2. Impose Limits: The most important limit is the timeline. In fact, this principle already showed up in the introduction: January 1 is a time constraint, which means you’re on the clock to have a plan in place by a fixed date. For any decision, the first decision is “When will I make a decision?” (That’s admittedly a repetitive way to phrase it, but it hammers home the point quite nicely.)

   Beyond the timeline, it’s important to delineate the other necessary constraints: budget, vital stakeholders, regulation, capacity — the list will be context-dependent, but the leader’s job is to identify the minimal constraints required by each decision, shifting the situation from an infinite “What if?” list to a more manageable list of “What matters?”

3. Decide Now: Admittedly, “now” covers a pretty broad range here. The timeline for deciding a new factory’s location will be much longer than the timeline to decide who should cover the reception desk. “Decide now” is really just about sticking to the timeline established. Permitting yourself to punt a timeline signals that time constraints aren’t real, provides a permission structure for employees to behave similarly with their timelines, and generally creates an environment of uncertainty. When a decision day is established, the decision must be made that day. John Lasseter at Pixar famously created an environment where employees were expected to “Be wrong as fast as you can,” on the premise that a decision is better than no decision, because the act of making a decision changes the list of available options — while doing nothing keeps all options stagnant.
4. Hold On: Context matters here. If you’re hanging off a cliff, “Hold on” means “Don’t dare let go!” On the other hand, if you’re interrupted in the middle of sending an email, “Hold on” just means “Wait a second.” This makes it the perfect phrase to describe a manager’s proper post-decision strategy; there are times to dig in, and times to re-evaluate. The key is learning to distinguish between useful information and emotional noise. You must hold the decision long enough to see its effect — not second-guess before the results come in. If those results include actual information that’s new, objective, and relevant, it’s certainly wise to re-calibrate the decision. That’s precisely the situation “Be wrong as fast as you can” is designed to create! Shifting the approach here isn’t second-guessing; by definition, waiting for data to come in first means it’s now a decision, not a guess. In fact, you can even build review thresholds into the constraints as you build them: things like “If costs go up by 20% we revisit this,” or “We’re going to let this process run for three months before we touch it.”
5. Recognize Real Intuition: By the time you’ve reached a leadership role, you’ve made thousands of decisions in your field; you’ve seen thousands of disparate situations and absorbed each one’s outcome. Like any coach who has evaluated athletes for years, there are things you know that you can’t really articulate. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real. So while you should never be chained solely to your intuition, you should trust it within the constraints you’ve established for any decision. If your gut insists on an option, and there’s no compelling data to explain why it won’t work, remember: Any decision is better than no decision, because it creates a new playing field to respond to.

The SHIFTS Model: The Architecture of Change

Each of the steps above fits handily into my SHIFTS model, a leadership framework that is simple to communicate and replicate.

1. See and Hear the situation as it is, the constraints that govern the path forward, and — most importantly — the desired success state. Keep it consistently flooding your eyes and ears (and those of your team).
2. Reach for Insight, informed by both hard data and your own hard-won instincts, as you settle on a range of workable solutions that fit the defined constraints.
3. Formulate the next step forward out of the available options, without becoming paralyzed by the false need to see the entire path at once. In this step, intention becomes direction, and direction requires movement.
4. Understand that success will require Transformation and, potentially, retransformation as new data emerges and each step leads to more forks in the road — but each decisive step moves the ball forward and establishes your credibility as a leader.
5. You Succeed not when the goal is reached — although that’s certainly a nice outcome. But there will always be new challenges, new goals, and new teams to motivate. Success, in this sense, is simply the act of overcoming decision paralysis by teaching yourself — and your workers — a framework for approaching decisions.

Decisive Mind, Decisive Year

Following this framework, you can enter January with a sharply-honed decision-making process — and as colleagues and employees notice your new, decisive approach, you’ll be prepped to share these tools with them as well. Make 2026 your most decisive — and most successful — leadership year yet!

Written by Dr. Sam Adeyemi.