Good morning, Team! It’s Friday!

Every leader wants to be known as a great decision maker.

That sounds admirable until you realize the average person makes roughly 35,000 decisions every single day.

At my first CEO role, my Chief Administrative Officer once told me:

“You should probably only make six big decisions a year.”

At the time, I thought leadership meant making the call.
The call on strategy.
The call on people.
The call on growth.
The call on culture.

I assumed the seat required answers.

Experience taught me something different.

Some leaders make too many decisions because they believe leadership means control.

Others seek buy-in for every difficult issue because they fear getting it wrong.

Neither works for very long.

Strong organizations are not built by executives who dominate every decision.
They are also not built by leaders who crowdsource courage.

The best leaders seek perspective.
They ask questions.
They invite disagreement.
They listen longer than most people realize.

But eventually, the room gets quiet.

And somebody has to own the decision.

That is the part people rarely see from the front lines.

Executive leadership comes with perspectives that are not always visible throughout the organization.
Some information is confidential.
Some consequences are downstream.
Some risks are invisible until much later.

Yet decisions are still judged immediately.
Second guessed publicly.
Questioned confidently by people who only see part of the picture.

One of the hardest transitions in leadership is separating ego from stewardship.

Every leader has an ego.
Healthy leaders recognize it.
Unhealthy leaders are consumed by it.

And some suffer from hubris…believing the title alone makes them right.

That is dangerous territory.

Because stewardship is bigger than the individual leader.

It extends to employees.
Families.
Customers.
Culture.
Reputation.
Longevity.

A business is not a personal platform for ego validation.

It is something entrusted to your care for a period of time.

Healthy organizations should encourage rigorous debate.
Strong leaders should invite challenge.
The best executive teams wrestle through difficult decisions together.

But eventually responsibility settles somewhere.

One person usually carries the weight of the final call.

And that responsibility is often taken far more seriously than people realize.

From the outside, decisions can look cold.
Quick.
Calculated.

From the inside, many come with sleepless nights, pressure, risk, and consequences that affect real people and real families.

That burden changes mature leaders.

You begin to understand leadership is not about winning arguments.

It is about stewardship.

About getting it right more times than not.
About protecting the long-term health of the organization.
About making decisions based on what is best for the business…not what is best for your popularity, your comfort, or your ego.

And if you lead long enough, you learn something humbling:

Some of your best decisions will still be criticized.
Some of your hardest decisions will never be fully understood.
And some of your most important decisions will feel very lonely.

That comes with the seat.

But leadership was never supposed to be about comfort.

It was supposed to be about responsibility.

Have a blessed weekend!

Eric