Why Good Leaders Make Worse Decisions Than Their Teams

One of the most common myths in leadership is that the higher you rise in an organisation, the better your decision-making becomes. The reality is often the opposite.

Why position distorts decision-making

Leaders in senior positions receive less honest feedback. The team filters information — partly for political reasons, partly out of a desire to protect the leader from uncomfortable news. The result is that the leader makes decisions with an incomplete picture, while being convinced they see the full picture.

There is another factor at play: success creates confidence, which can become a vulnerability. Leaders who have been making the right decisions for years begin to trust their intuition more — precisely at the moment when the context has changed and the old patterns no longer hold.

The best leaders I have met are not those who know the most. They are those who know exactly what they do not know.

Three mechanisms working against you

The first is confirmation bias — the tendency to seek information that confirms a decision already made. The second is overconfidence, which grows with experience and becomes especially dangerous in unfamiliar situations. The third is the status effect: the higher the position, the fewer people will openly challenge your judgements.

All three are normal human reactions. None of them are character flaws. But when they go unrecognised, they become systematic blind spots.

What a leader can do

The first step is a structured dissent meeting — a practice where someone on the team is given the explicit role of playing devil’s advocate, looking for arguments against a decision. Not to be critical for its own sake, but to test the decision’s resilience before it is made.

The second is keeping decision logs. Not outcome logs, but reasoning logs. When you look back at what you thought at the time versus what actually happened, patterns emerge that you would otherwise never see.

The third — and this is the hardest — is actively seeking out people who think differently from you, and creating conditions where they feel safe to express that.