A director I worked with had a call in front of her that she was completely equipped to make. A vendor had blown a delivery date, the contract spelled out the penalty, and she knew the clause cold. She also knew that two of her peers liked this vendor, that her own boss had brought the relationship in, and that enforcing the term would put her crossways with people who outranked her everywhere except on this one decision. So she did the careful thing. She wrote up the situation, pushed it one level higher, and waited. The answer came back a week later, after the leverage to do anything with it was already gone.

On paper that looks like a person who hesitated. Her review will say she needs to be more decisive, or that she should work on her executive presence, and she will get sent to something that promises to fix it. The program will treat the freeze as a flaw she carries around inside her. It almost never is.

Some recent numbers make the point in a way that is hard to wave off. Interactive EQ, a firm that sells behavioral assessment and so has its own reasons to find behavior interesting, ran more than 1,700 professionals across 46 organizations through over 5,000 role-based workplace simulations between April and December of 2025. Middle-management performance dropped by as much as 70 percent once a scenario carried reputational exposure or peer conflict. Roughly one in four people stalled when the authority for a decision turned unclear partway through. Executives acted decisively more than 90 percent of the time, while frontline and customer-facing roles managed it 58 to 62 percent of the time.1

The easy reading of that spread is that executives are braver or more seasoned. The reading the data actually supports is duller and more useful. Decisiveness tracks authority. An executive rarely hits a moment where it is unclear whether the call is hers to make, because her authority is broad and rarely questioned. A director or a frontline lead hits that moment several times a day. The same person who looks bold in the corner office would stall in the middle layer, because the middle layer is where authority is thin, contested, and prone to evaporate the instant a decision gets uncomfortable.

A capable person who escalates a decision they are equipped to make is usually telling you something accurate about the system. Owning the call costs more than deferring it.

The standard fix raises the cost of the thing you want

When performance stalls, the reflex is to tighten. More monitoring, firmer targets, a harder line about who will answer for what went wrong. Kendra Okposo argued in Harvard Business Review this spring that this instinct backfires, that forcing accountability through control produces compliance without commitment rather than the ownership leaders are actually after.2 Run it through the director and the mechanism is plain. Every turn of the control screw raises the personal cost of a visible wrong call, and a rational person answers by escalating more, hedging more, and putting their name on less. You wanted ownership and you built a machine that pays out for deferral.

The same study found that only 3 to 4 percent of participants could cleanly separate a critique of a decision from a personal attack.1 That one figure explains most of the freezing. In a place where challenging someone's call reads as challenging them, every real decision becomes a referendum on the person who made it, and people guard themselves accordingly. They are not short on nerve. They have priced the risk correctly.

Authority is a design problem, not a personality trait

The lever here is not a seminar. It is the design of who decides what, settled before the pressure arrives and built to hold once it does. Most organizations name decision rights loosely and let them dissolve the moment a senior person frowns. If the authority you handed down cannot survive disagreement, you did not delegate it. You lent it, and everyone watched the loan get called. Real decision rights have an owner, a scope, and enough durability that the owner can be wrong inside that scope without it ending them.

The other half is making a wrong call in the open survivable. Not free of consequence, survivable. People will own decisions when the worst case is a hard conversation and a correction, and they will route around ownership when the worst case is a quiet mark against their name that trails them into the next cycle. You can publish whatever values you like about empowerment. The organization learns what is actually true from what happens to the first person who owns a call that goes sideways.

None of this is soft, and clarity is not the same as comfort. The most decisive teams I have worked with were not staffed by unusually bold people. They had been handed authority they could rely on and an intent clear enough to act against, and they had learned through experience that a good-faith call inside that authority would not be turned into a personal liability later. The nerve everyone wants to train showed up on its own once the conditions stopped punishing it.

So before the next round of decisiveness coaching, it is worth asking a harder question about your own shop. When one of your capable people sends up a decision they could have made, are they failing a test of character, or passing a test of how your system treats the people who own a call? And what would have to change for them to stop sending it up?