It’s not the decision. It’s carrying it.

This week with CIOs

It’s not the decision. It’s carrying it.

You’ve got tough decisions to make, some carry an awful lot of emotional weight with far greater consequences than others.

We recently talked about these kinds of decisions and the conversation that followed was less about budgets, or cost reduction and much more about being human, i.e., what it feels like to make decisions that affect other people’s lives.

Organizations experience difficult decisions as business events. A restructuring. A budget cut. An efficiency initiative. An AI program. For the leaders responsible for implementing those decisions, however, they’re rarely just numbers on a spreadsheet. They affect peoples lives.

Carrying competing responsibilities

What emerged from the discussion was the reality that technology leaders are often forced to hold two truths at once. The business needs results. And, the people impacted by those decisions matter. There are rarely perfect choices. Only trade-offs.

That tension may be one of the least understood parts of leadership. Most stakeholders see the outcome. Few see the weight of making the call.

Varied approaches to difficult decision making

Not everyone approached the discussion from the same angle.

Lance Roberts, CTO at Century Capital, put it best: “Difficult decisions should not become comfortable decisions.” And that’s where the discussion ultimately landed.

The challenge is not whether leaders should make difficult decisions. Of course they should.

The challenge is whether they can continue to feel the human impact of those decisions while still making them when necessary.

If leadership ever stops feeling the weight of those choices, is that experience or something else?