Hey Reader - Did you know that organizations spend billions of dollars each year developing leaders?
In 2025, U.S. organizations spent an estimated $102.8 billion on workplace training. Leadership training was also the most common career-development practice identified in LinkedIn Learning’s 2025 report.
We are clearly investing in leadership.
The question that's bugging me is: When are leaders taught how to decide?
We teach leaders to communicate, manage conflict, develop people, establish goals, execute strategy, and lead change. Every one of those responsibilities requires decisions.
Some decisions determine how resources will be allocated. Others shape workplace culture, influence who feels welcome, and affect whether people feel safe enough to speak.
Yet decision-making is often treated as an instinct leaders should already possess.
We trust leaders to decide. We give them the authority to decide. We hold them accountable for the consequences.
But we rarely give them a shared practice for making those decisions.
The Cost of Deciding Again
In a global survey of more than 1,200 business leaders, McKinsey found that only 20% of respondents believed their organizations excelled at making decisions.
McKinsey also estimated that ineffective decision-making consumed approximately 530,000 days of managers’ time each year at a typical Fortune 500 company. In wages alone, that represented about $250 million annually.
That is human capital being spent.
It is paid time spent reconsidering what people thought had already been settled. It is the cost of redoing work, revising plans, repairing communication, resolving confusion, and recovering momentum.
There are relational costs too. Frustration. Disengagement. Diminished trust. People quietly carrying consequences they had little opportunity to help shape.
These expenses may appear under payroll, operations, project management, or retention. They rarely appear on a budget as decision debt.
But organizations are paying them all the same.
Decision debt is the accumulated human, operational, and relational cost created when decisions leave important considerations unresolved.
I don't mean to imply that every decision must be made once and preserved forever. Conditions change. New information emerges. Reconsidering a decision can be wise and responsible.
Decision debt grows when something that could have been surfaced, considered, communicated, or owned earlier creates avoidable work or harm later.
What truth did we avoid?
What pressure did we mistake for urgency?
Whose perspective did we overlook?
Who had responsibility without authority?
A more intentional decision-making practice cannot remove uncertainty. It can help us recognize more of what deserves consideration before the cost begins accumulating.
Organizations are already paying for how decisions are made.
What might change if we invested in helping leaders make them more intentionally?
