I joke that “wait” is the only four-letter word that offends me in business. The others don’t bother me a bit. “Wait” is soul-crushing, because waiting costs far more than it appears to, and it never introduces itself as waiting. The bill lands on the people waiting on you, and they pay it in trust before you ever see it in dollars.
Waiting shows up wearing a suit, and it sounds responsible, which is exactly why nobody challenges it.
Why does waiting feel like the responsible choice?
Because fear shows up as quality control: “Let me sleep on it.” “I want to talk to a few more people first.” “Let’s revisit after the busy season.” Each of those sounds like good leadership, and sometimes it is. When the same decision has been almost final for three months, though, it’s avoidance with a professional vocabulary.
Perfectionism makes a good hiding place, because nobody argues with “I just want it to be great.” It gives the fear of reversing course in front of your team somewhere respectable to sit.
Learning needs contact with reality
You don’t think your way to success. You act your way to success.
That’s uncomfortable to hear if you run a company, because somewhere along the way you were rewarded for being thoughtful and strategic. Thinking matters. The pattern I see in coaching is a leader so nervous about making a mistake, so worried about having to walk it back, that nothing moves, while they tell themselves and their team that they’re thinking, discerning and learning.
Learning requires contact with reality. You learn when you ship something and a customer tells you what’s wrong with it. You learn when you make a hire and watch how that person performs under pressure. You learn when you launch the campaign and the numbers come back ugly. Everything before that is guessing with extra steps.
A plan can’t fail, so your brain will keep you in planning mode for as long as you let it, and every meeting about the new hire will feel like progress.
The question I ask a stuck CEO is this one: “What are you afraid will happen if you launch it right now?”
The room goes quiet, because the honest answer is about being wrong in front of people. Once the fear has a name, you can weigh it against the cost of another month of waiting.
Who pays for the wait?
Your team does, and you rarely notice. While you’re thinking it through, they can’t move because you haven’t moved, and they can’t commit because you haven’t committed. Your time is the smallest part of the bill. Everyone’s time goes with it, and eventually their trust does too.
That’s the hidden cost of waiting: everyone who’s waiting on you pays it before you do. If the waiting has already piled up into a backlog of maybes, the open decision audit and the fast no in How to Make Decisions Faster as a CEO will clear it.
Is this quality control, or is this fear?
I’m not telling you to be reckless; you do need to think and weigh the consequences. Some decisions do deserve the wait: a decision you can’t walk back earns real rigor and a date, and The Two-Door Decision Test, built on Jeff Bezos’s one-way and two-way doors, tells you which kind you’re holding.
When I name this pattern in a coaching session, I rarely get surprise. I get a shrug, and some disappointment the leader aims at themselves, because somewhere in their gut they knew they were stalling. What they didn’t have was someone close enough to ask that question. That’s what a mirror is for: a coach or a leadership team strong enough to look you in the eye and say, “You’re stalling, and it’s costing us.”
Try this: four questions for the decision you’ve been sitting on
Pick the one decision that has been “almost final” the longest. Take thirty minutes, alone, and write down your answers. These are the four questions I walk leaders through.
- What is the specific, painful problem we’re trying to solve? Name the specific thing that’s costing you money or people right now.
- What is your hypothesis? If we do X, then Y will happen. Say it out loud and write it down. If you can’t form a hypothesis, you don’t understand the problem well enough yet.
- What are the alternatives? At least three real ones. What else could you do, and what would each one cost?
- What needs to be true? List the conditions that have to exist for your hypothesis to work and the assumptions you’re making. Mark the ones you can test before you commit, and test those first.
Then act. Don’t go back to question one, and don’t run another scenario. Put the decision and its first step on the calendar for this week. Act, reflect on what happened, adjust, and go again. You’ll learn more in the first week of doing than in the third month of planning.
For a decision you can’t walk back, the same discipline, with a red team and tripwires, is in A Decision-Making Framework for Leaders.
Your hopes and dreams have to be bigger than your fears
If they aren’t, fear wins by default, and it wins quietly: no dramatic failure you can point to, just one more quarter of “we’re working on it,” then one more year of “almost,” and a slow drift toward irrelevance.
You always have a choice. You can keep waiting, but that choice comes with a receipt, and the receipt gets more expensive every day.
If you want that mirror every week, it’s what Executive Coaching is for: weekly one-hour sessions, $3,000 a month, month to month, and it won’t make the call for you.
Discern. Then choose wisely. Do it quickly, not recklessly.