Seduction of Bad Decisions

Leaders are often put in a position where they must make difficult decisions on the fly. Many of those decisions have the potential to derail the upward climb of the person making the decision. We have a naive expectation that those in power will make the RIGHT decision-do the RIGHT thing.We are often outraged when we find they did not.

Try to remember a circumstance in your own life where perhaps you bumped a car in a parking lot where no one was around, forgot to do something important for someone who trusted you, or did something inadvertently that set off a chain of reactions that were unexpectedly negative. Do you remember how instinctive it felt to do the EASY thing, hide the truth, or attempt to distance yourself from the situation that went bad?

Now, imagine that the stakes are much higher. Your career, personal worth, reputation are on the line. How low would you go to protect yourself and what you hold dear?

Even if you know that YOU would do the right thing, you simply cannot count on others to be equally strong. And you should not be surprised when they are not strong. Being judgmental of weakness in others is also unproductive and somewhat hypocritical unless you have been tested in a like situation.

It might be more productive to identify the skill set that enables some extraordinary people to wrestle with their conscious before they act.  If we can follow those thought processes of the brave and ethical,  we should teach and re-teach those thought processes to everyone.

Confronting a fear and working through the issue almost always creates a better outcome than sweeping it under the rug and acting as though nothing occurred. But, we need to learn that repeatedly before we trust it on the big issues, and even then, we will be challenged. 

Many of the global challenges we are facing now are a natural result of the kind of fear that causes leaders to make really bad, short sighted decisions in order to protect something that might seem in retrospect to be inconsequential. The most important thing each of us can do to build a different kind of future is to learn how hard it is to be brave and to practice on the little things until we get it right.