When customers win, your business wins
Most Expensive Person in the Room
Mike Griggs
8/21/20262 min read
The Most Expensive Person on the Team Is the One Who Can't Make a Decision
Here's a hard truth about leadership that doesn't get talked about enough:
The most expensive person on your team might be the one who can't make a decision.
Not because they're paid too much.
Because their indecision creates a tax on everyone around them.
Think about what happens when an important decision gets stuck.
A project manager waits.
An engineer waits.
A customer waits.
Sales waits.
A partner waits.
Someone schedules another meeting.
Then another.
More people get pulled in to "align."
Someone creates a deck.
Someone creates a Slack thread.
Someone asks for more data.
And eventually, someone says:
"Let's circle back next week."
Meanwhile, the clock is running.
I've seen this happen at every level of an organization.
Sometimes it's an individual leader who doesn't want to make the wrong call.
Sometimes it's a culture where every decision requires consensus.
Sometimes nobody actually knows who owns the decision.
And sometimes leaders have accidentally created an environment where making a decision that turns out to be wrong is punished more severely than making no decision at all.
That's a dangerous culture.
Because indecision feels safe to the person making the decision not to decide.
But it's rarely safe for the business.
It's expensive.
It's frustrating.
And eventually, it becomes visible to customers.
🥃 Hard Truth
You don't need every decision to be perfect. You need the organization to be capable of making good decisions quickly, learning from them, and adjusting when necessary.
That's especially important in Services.
A customer issue doesn't always give you three weeks to gather consensus.
A production escalation doesn't care about your organizational boundaries.
A project that's already behind schedule doesn't benefit from another approval layer.
And a customer deciding whether to renew certainly isn't waiting for your next steering committee.
Good leaders create clarity around:
Who decides?
What information do they need?
When does the decision need to be made?
What happens if we get it wrong?
Then they let people decide.
That doesn't mean leaders should make reckless decisions.
It means we need to distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions.
If a decision is reversible, make it.
If it's wrong, learn.
If it's irreversible, slow down and get the right people involved.
But don't confuse thoughtful leadership with organizational paralysis.
🍻 Last Call
One of the best questions I've learned to ask in a stuck situation is:
"What decision are we actually trying to make, and who owns it?"
You'd be amazed how often that question gets a room unstuck.
Because sometimes the problem isn't that we don't have enough information.
It's that nobody is willing to make the call.
That's this week's Happy Hour & Hard Truth.
What's the biggest source of decision paralysis you've seen inside an organization?
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