Ever sat in a meeting and wondered if the person running it had actually lost their mind? We’ve all been there. You’re looking at a new slide deck or a "pivot" strategy, and it feels like the people at the top are playing a completely different game than the rest of us.
The truth is, decisions made by managers aren't always born out of some grand, data-driven master plan. Sometimes, they’re just the result of a bad night’s sleep, a weird ego trip, or—more often—a phenomenon called "choice overload." When you’re responsible for a P&L or a team of fifty people, the pressure to do something often outweighs the logic of doing the right thing.
It’s messy. It’s human. And honestly, it’s usually way more chaotic than the Harvard Business Review makes it sound.
The Cognitive Trap of The "Executive Gut"
We love the myth of the intuitive leader. We talk about Steve Jobs or Jack Welch like they had some magic compass. But relying on "gut feel" is where a lot of the worst decisions made by managers actually start.
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Psychologists like Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for this stuff, talk about "System 1" thinking. It’s fast, it’s emotional, and it’s frequently wrong. In a high-stakes corporate environment, a manager might feel like they’re being "decisive" by making a quick call on a product launch. In reality, they might just be falling for confirmation bias. They’ve already decided they like the idea, so they only see the data that says it’ll work.
Think about the Quibi disaster. Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg—two absolute titans of industry—poured nearly $2 billion into a short-form video platform that failed in months. Why? Because the core decisions made by managers there were based on how they thought people should consume content, not how people actually were consuming it. They ignored the "YouTube" reality for a "Hollywood" dream.
Why Consensus Is Often A Trap
You’d think getting everyone in a room to agree would fix things. It doesn't.
Groupthink is a silent killer in management. When a senior VP leans forward and says, "I think we should move into the crypto space," how many middle managers are actually going to tell them it's a terrible idea? Usually, zero. They want to be seen as "team players." This creates a feedback loop where bad ideas get polished until they look like gold, even if they’re still just lead.
The Difference Between Strategic and Tactical Choices
Not all choices are created equal. You’ve got your big-picture stuff—the strategic moves—and then the day-to-day tactical calls.
Strategic decisions made by managers involve things like market entry, mergers, or killing off a legacy product. These are high-stakes. If Netflix hadn’t decided to cannibalize its own DVD-by-mail business to focus on streaming, it would be a footnote in history alongside Blockbuster. That was a gut-wrenching decision. It cost them millions of subscribers in the short term (the "Qwikster" debacle of 2011), but it saved the company.
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Tactical decisions are the small stuff. How do we run this sprint? Who gets the Friday afternoon off? These seem small, but they build the culture. If a manager constantly makes tactical decisions that prioritize "butts in seats" over actual output, they’ll lose their best talent. It’s that simple.
The "Noise" Problem You’ve Never Heard Of
Kahneman’s more recent work focuses on something called "Noise." This is the variability in decisions that should be identical.
Imagine two different managers at the same bank looking at the same loan application. One says yes; one says no. Why? Maybe one manager just had a great lunch. Maybe the other one’s favorite sports team lost last night. Decisions made by managers are terrifyingly susceptible to these external factors.
Research has shown that judges give harsher sentences before lunch than after. Managers are no different. If you’re asking for a raise or a project greenlight, the timing of that decision might matter as much as the content of your proposal. It's kinda scary when you think about it.
Data Is Not A Magic Wand
Everyone talks about being "data-driven" now. It’s the big buzzword. But data is just a tool, and like any tool, it can be used to build a house or hit someone over the head.
Managers often use data like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination. They look for the metrics that prove they were right all along. If a marketing manager wants to keep a failing campaign running, they’ll find one "micro-metric"—maybe "engagement" is up—while ignoring the fact that actual sales are cratering.
How To Actually Make Better Choices
So, how do you stop making terrible calls? It starts with intellectual humility.
- Pre-mortems. This is a brilliant technique where you gather your team and say, "Imagine it’s a year from now and this project has failed spectacularly. Why did it happen?" It gives people permission to be "naysayers" without feeling like they’re attacking the boss.
- The "Rule of Three." Never bring just one option to the table. If you only have one choice, you don’t have a choice; you have an ultimatum. Always force yourself to look at three distinct paths.
- Decouple the process from the outcome. Sometimes you make a great decision and get a bad result because of bad luck. Sometimes you make a stupid decision and get lucky. Good managers focus on the process of how the decision was reached, not just whether it worked out this time.
The Cultural Impact of Management Choices
The biggest mistake is thinking that a business decision is just about business. It’s always about people.
When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he made a series of massive decisions to shift the company away from the "Windows-only" mindset. He embraced Linux. He embraced the cloud. But more importantly, he changed how decisions were made. He shifted the culture from "know-it-alls" to "learn-it-alls."
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That shift didn’t happen because of a spreadsheet. It happened because of a series of decisions made by managers at every level to stop rewarding aggressive internal competition and start rewarding collaboration.
Actionable Steps for Navigating Management Decisions
If you're in the hot seat, or you're trying to influence the person who is, here's the reality check you need.
- Check your "HALT" status. Never make a major strategic call if you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. It sounds like advice for toddlers, but it’s vital for executives.
- Assign a Devil’s Advocate. Literally. In every major meeting, appoint one person whose job is to find the holes in the plan. Rotate this role so nobody becomes the "office grouch."
- Write it down. Keep a decision journal. Record what you decided, why you decided it, and what you expected to happen. Six months later, go back and read it. You’ll be shocked at how much your brain "rewrites" history to make you look smarter than you were.
- Kill the "Sunk Cost." Just because you’ve spent $50,000 and six months on a project doesn't mean you should spend another dime. If the decision made by managers six months ago was wrong, the best time to fix it is right now. Not tomorrow. Not after the next quarterly review. Now.
The most effective managers aren't the ones who never make mistakes. They're the ones who have built a system that catches mistakes before they become catastrophes. They prioritize clarity over being "right," and they understand that their job isn't to have all the answers—it's to make sure the best answers actually make it to the surface.
Stop looking for the perfect data point and start looking at your own biases. That’s where the real leadership happens.