How Do You Make Decisions Faster as a CEO?

A CEO Jerry coached had a VP of Sales who proposed a new compensation structure. Good proposal, clear thinking. The CEO said, “Let me think about it.” That was in March. By June, nothing. No yes, no no, just silence. The VP stopped bringing ideas. Stopped pushing. Started updating his resume. He was gone by August.

She never rejected his idea. She did something worse. She made him wait in a room with no door.

This guide is about getting out of that room. It covers what indecision actually costs, why delay so often passes for diligence, how to sort a decision before you make it, a twenty-minute audit that clears the backlog, how to deliver a fast no, and the one caution that keeps speed from becoming recklessness.

Indecision Costs a Person Before It Costs a Dollar

Most CEOs who ask how to make decisions faster are counting the wrong cost. They think of the delayed decision as a delayed outcome: the comp plan launches a quarter late, the hire starts in the fall instead of the summer. Those costs are real. But the first cost of a slow decision isn’t on the balance sheet. It’s in the person who asked.

When you say no quickly, your team grieves for about fifteen minutes. Then they redirect. They find another path and move. A fast no is clean. It respects the person enough to tell them the truth, and it frees their brain for the next problem. A long maybe keeps them checking their email, rethinking the pitch, wondering what they did wrong. You haven’t saved their feelings. You’ve trapped them in limbo and called it kindness.

Do that a few times and the requests stop coming. Not because the ideas ran out, but because your team learned the exchange rate: an idea costs them weeks of waiting and returns nothing. Leaders who move fast, even when the answer is no, have teams that bring more ideas. Leaders who sit on decisions have teams that stop asking, and then wonder why everything still runs through them. Speed of decision reflects trust.

Delay Is Not Diligence

Most leaders who sit on decisions think they’re being thoughtful. Careful. Measured. They ask for one more data point. They table it for the next meeting, then the next one. They believe delay is diligence. Jerry’s word for it is less polite: cowardice wearing a suit.

The polite name is analysis paralysis, and slow decision-making almost never comes from too little analysis. Diligence has a shape: a named question that more information would answer, a date by which the information will arrive, and a decision that follows on that date. Delay has no shape. It’s Stealth Stalling, and every one of its disguises feels like work. None of them is a decision.

The test is simple. Ask what specifically you’re waiting for. If the answer is a fact you could have by Friday, set the date and decide on Friday. If the answer is a feeling, you already have the decision and you’re avoiding delivering it.

Sort the Decision Before You Make It

Not every decision deserves the same speed. A CEO who gives a pricing test and a ten-year lease the same three meetings has set the whole company’s pace to their own caution. Two sorts, in order.

Is this a one-way door or a two-way door? The two-door test settles it fast. If the decision can be walked back at tolerable cost, make it today with the information you already have and learn from the result. If it can’t be walked back, it earns real rigor: a date, the specific questions that must be answered first, and a small number of people in the room. Most of what lands on a CEO’s desk is a two-way door dressed up as a one-way door by someone who didn’t want to own it.

Is this even yours to make? A large share of a slow CEO’s backlog is decisions that should never have reached them. Somebody has the responsibility for the outcome but not the authority to decide, so the decision commutes upward. That gap is the Decision Delta, and closing it is how a company gets faster without the CEO getting any faster at all. Pick three decisions this week that your team can make without you. Tell them what success looks like, not how to get there.

Jerry saw the other side of this at NFFS: managers freezing on decisions he would have made in thirty seconds, not because they lacked judgment but because nobody had told them the decision was theirs, and the one time somebody moved without asking, they got asked why they didn’t check first. You trained them to wait.

The Open Decision Audit

Here is the twenty-minute version of everything above. If your team has stopped bringing you ideas, check your open list before you check their initiative. Pull it up right now. Every proposal you haven’t responded to. Every “let me get back to you” that you never got back to. Every request that has been sitting for more than two weeks. If you don’t keep such a list, build it from the last two weeks of email and your last three leadership meeting notes. That’s the first ten of the twenty minutes.

Put each one in one of three buckets.

• Fast no. You already know the answer is no. Say it today, with the reason in one sentence.
• Fast yes. You already know the answer is yes and you were waiting to feel certain. Say it today, with what success looks like.
• Genuinely open. Something specific would change the answer. Name the thing, name the date it will be known, and tell the person both. If this bucket holds more than three items, you’re stalling inside the audit.

Most CEOs who run this find that the third bucket holds two or three items and the first two hold everything else. That ratio is the whole diagnosis. The backlog was never a thinking problem. It was a delivery problem.

Then say yes or say no. Today. Not next week. Your team doesn’t need you to be right every time. They need you to be clear.

How to Deliver a Fast No

A fast no that lands badly teaches the team to stop asking just as surely as a slow maybe does, so the delivery matters. Three parts, in this order, and none of them long.

The answer first. Not the context, not the appreciation for the effort. “No, we’re not changing the comp plan this year.” Then the reason, in one sentence, honest enough that the person could repeat it to someone else. Then what would change it, if anything would: “If we miss the Q3 number with the current plan, bring it back.” That last part is what separates a no from a door slammed. It tells the person the idea was heard and where it lives now.

Don’t soften the answer into a maybe to make the conversation easier. That’s how the room with no door gets built. A no with a reason is a gift. A maybe with a smile is a trap.

Fast Is Not the Same as Rash

One caution, because this page can be misread as “decide everything immediately.” The counterpart to the slow maybe is the panic-fueled pivot: a drastic move made from emotional overwhelm after one bad month. Speed is a discipline about reversible decisions and about delivery. It isn’t a license to make irreversible ones in a mood.

The check is one question: would this decision still make sense on a good month? If yes, make it now. If the answer depends on how the last thirty days felt, it isn’t ready, and the honest move is to name the date and the information that will make it ready. That’s the third bucket of the audit, used correctly, and it’s the only place a long deliberation belongs.

What Your Team Learns From Your Speed

Every decision you make quickly teaches the company two things: that decisions get made here, and how. Every decision you sit on teaches the opposite. Over a year, the second lesson produces the leadership team that keeps having the same conversation and a founder who is the only person who ever concludes anything.

The way out isn’t to become a faster bottleneck. It’s to flood the zone with clarity and context so that everyone can make better decisions faster: what we’re trying to do, what good looks like, which doors are one-way. Great leaders don’t make people line up for answers. Jerry has worked this problem in public since at least 2023, when he spent an episode of his Best Places to Lead podcast with Clint Rusch on making the right decisions as fast as possible. The private version of that work, on your actual backlog, is what coaching is for.

And if you’re still holding a maybe from March: a long maybe is just a no that hasn’t found its spine yet.

The open decision audit is the twenty-minute version of what a coaching engagement does every week: your actual backlog on the table, sorted, with someone holding you to the dates. Executive Coaching is priced on the page. If you’d rather start with one conversation about the maybe you’re holding, book it here.