Why New Leaders Wait Too Long to Act

New leaders often put off decisions until they feel ready to make them, and the feeling of readiness they are waiting for comes mostly from making decisions. Confidence in a new role grows out of acting in it and seeing what happens. A leader who waits to feel sure before acting delays the one experience that would make them feel sure, and the team spends those weeks waiting along with them.

Where the Hesitation Comes From

Much of the hesitation comes from beliefs about the job that turn out to be wrong. Linda Hill of Harvard Business School has studied people in their first year as managers, and in her article "Becoming the Boss" she describes how many of them believe the boss is supposed to have all the answers. A new manager who believes that will treat every question they cannot answer as a sign they should not have been promoted. Hill found that new managers rarely ask for help, in part because they worry that asking will make them look like a promotion mistake.

The same managers often expected the new role to bring authority and freedom. They found themselves hemmed in by other people instead. Even their own direct reports could slow down what they wanted to do. One manager in Hill's research said, "The fact is that you really are not in control of anything." A person who expected control and found a web of other people's needs has good reason to move carefully, and caution can turn into a habit of not deciding.

From the outside, the waiting rarely resembles fear. A leader who is hesitating usually seems to be gathering more information or getting a second opinion from their own boss, and either can be a sensible thing to do. A new nurse manager could spend six weeks listening to complaints about the holiday schedule before changing anything. By then she would know a great deal about the schedule, and the nurses on her unit would have spent six weeks working under a schedule they had already told her was a problem.

Confidence Comes From Doing

Albert Bandura, the psychologist who developed the idea of self-efficacy, identified several sources of a person's belief that they can succeed at a task. The strongest of them is mastery experience, the direct evidence a person gets from taking on a task and handling it. Encouragement from others helps, and so does watching someone similar succeed. Neither does as much as a person's own record of attempts that went well. A new leader who has not yet made a hard call has no such record, and reading about hard calls will not give them one.

Herminia Ibarra of London Business School reached a similar conclusion about leaders. In Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, she argues that "people change their minds by first changing their behaviour." A person tries something new, watches how others respond, and only afterward comes to see themselves differently. Ibarra calls this outsight, the fresh perspective a person gets from doing different things, and she warns that "too much introspection anchors us in the past."

Our formula for how strength grows makes the same point from another angle. We write it as Talent × (Knowledge + Skill) = Strength. Knowledge is the insight an activity requires. A new leader can gain a good deal of it by reading and asking questions. Skill is the ability to perform the steps of the activity, and it grows only when a person performs them. A leader who prepares for months before making decisions ends up knowing a lot about decisions and having little practice at making them.

What the Team Sees While the Leader Waits

The team is learning about its new leader the whole time. Hill writes that a new manager's authority does not come with the title and has to be built with the people around them, by showing competence and character. People draw conclusions from what a leader does in the first months. When the visible behavior is delay, some will decide the leader cannot make up their mind, and others will keep making decisions without them, which leaves the leader with less influence than they started with.

Promotion from inside a team adds its own complication. Someone who was a peer a month ago is often unsure how much to direct their old colleagues. Waiting can feel like the kind choice toward old friends. To the team, it can look as though no one is in charge.

Michael Watkins, in The First 90 Days, describes a break-even point for new leaders, the point at which the organization needs the new leader as much as the leader needs the job. A leader who spends weeks waiting to feel ready reaches that point later, because the organization comes to depend on a leader once that leader starts deciding things.

Starting Before It Feels Comfortable

Some decisions do deserve the extra weeks, because letting someone go or restructuring a department is hard to undo, and a new leader who takes time to understand the situation first is being responsible with other people's jobs.

A new leader's early decisions are usually easier to change than those, such as how the weekly meeting runs or which of two reasonable projects goes first. Making a few of those in the first weeks gives the leader the mastery experience Bandura described. It also shows the team that someone is making calls.

Saying the reasoning out loud makes these early decisions easier. A leader can tell the team, "I'm changing the holiday schedule this way, for these reasons, and we'll look at how it went in February." That sentence makes a decision and asks for correction at once. It also fits Hill's finding about help, since it treats the team's input as part of how the leader decides, which is a far more comfortable way for a new manager to ask for help than admitting they are unsure.

This week, a new leader can look at their list and pick one decision they have been putting off that could be adjusted later if it goes badly, make it by Friday, and then ask two people on the team how it went.