Leadership Lounge: Why Decision-Making Is Becoming Harder for C-Suite Leaders—and How You Can Overcome It

As you move into the C-suite, the decisions landing on your desk become harder. You’re dealing with situations you haven’t encountered before, where information is incomplete, and every available option comes with a trade-off. At the same time, you’re making more decisions, often at greater speed. The pressure to remain constantly available can leave little space to think.

So, how can you make better decisions when the stakes are high and the path forward isn’t always clear?

Why does decision-making become harder when you reach the C-suite?

Ilana Abramowicz, Leadership Advisor, RRA: What we find with C-suite leaders, especially those stepping up to either an enterprise role or a first-time regional role, is that the advice they get from their board or their chair is: you're going to be faced with decisions that you've never seen before. You have no information, no context, no pattern recognition, and no playbook. You don't necessarily know where to get the support from to make the decisions. It can be overwhelming for leaders.

They've got multiple stakeholders to appease and appeal to. So, they can fall into one of two extremes: analysis paralysis, where they are trying to boil the ocean, or making rapid decisions based on intuition without giving themselves enough time for reflection.

How can being ‘always on’ affect the quality of your decisions?

Ilana Abramowicz, Leadership Advisor, RRA: Being ‘always on’ is going to cause burnout and cognitive overload. The brain is like any other muscle in the body. It needs space and time to rejuvenate, regenerate, and calibrate. Without intentional pauses in your day or week to reflect and allow different stimuli in, your brain doesn’t have the opportunity to recalibrate. You are going to experience decision fatigue.

How can your values help you make difficult decisions?

Henryk Krajewski, Leadership Advisor, RRA: Values are hugely important in decision-making. Values matter when the decision gets messy, where the facts are incomplete, and every option has a cost. That's when a leader needs guardrails.

A tool I like is the non-negotiables test. A C-suite leader we recently worked with wrote down three things she was unwilling to trade away when the heat is on. For her, it was transparency with the employee base, a no-blame culture, and protecting customer trust at all costs, even at the cost of margin in the short term. Then, when the tough call came, she asked: which of these options keeps me inside these value guardrails that I've defined, even if it hurts a little bit?

How can you stay objective when you’ve already backed a decision?

Henryk Krajewski, Leadership Advisor, RRA: Leaders need conviction, no question. But once a leader sponsors an idea, it can become very personal. That's normal. After all, it's your reputation, your board slide, your political capital. But that’s when sunk cost bias can take over. We become moored in our original idea and less open to ideas that come afterwards.

Before we launch an initiative, we agree upfront on what must be true by a certain date for us to consider it successful. What adoption or retention rate do we need to see? What integration milestones need to have been reached? Whatever matters for that particular decision. If those things aren't true, we stop, resize, or pivot.

This takes ego out of the moment. You're not admitting failure; you're honoring the rules you set when everyone was still clear-eyed. Good leaders know when to push and when to stop digging.

About the authors

Ilana Abramowicz is a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates. She is based in London.
Dr. Henryk Krajewski is a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates. He is based in Toronto.