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Okay, this episode’s going to be a little bit different. The last few episodes were a bit more structured, a little more scripted. This one, I’m working to be closer to a conversation, just you, me, and the microphone. Because today, I want to talk about decisions. Most engineers don’t think of themselves as slow decision makers. We think of ourselves as responsible, professional, thoughtful and careful. That works extremely well in technical environments. But in leadership, the cost of waiting is often higher than the cost of being wrong. And that’s the shift. As engineers move into leadership roles, many run into something I’d call decision stall. Decision stall isn’t procrastination. It’s not fear and it’s not incompetence. Decision stall happens when you’re waiting for information that will never arrive. When you’re seeking certainty where none exists.

Here’s the part that matters most about that. Often the delay isn’t about protecting the outcome. It’s about protecting your reputation, your identity as the person who’s always right, who’s accurate, who’s prepared. But in leadership, not making a decision is a decision. You just don’t own it. And when you don’t own it, someone else does or the situation does or time does.

Let me say something that usually lands a little sideways with engineers. Most of the decisions you’re stalling on aren’t actually that dangerous. They just feel dangerous because engineering trains you to assume decisions are one way. That’s how we’re taught to think. But there’s really two types of decisions we face in our careers. One way decisions that I just mentioned and two way decisions.

One-way decisions are hard to undo. They’re expensive, sometimes irreversible. They deserve rigor, analysis, deliberation. But two-way decisions are different. They’re adjustable, learnable, safe to test. You make a call, you observe the outcome, you correct course.

The problem is that engineering trains you to treat most decisions as one way. So you gather data, you analyze, you prove the decision before acting. When you step into leadership, you carry that mindset with you. But leadership contains far more two-way decisions than most engineers expect.

Here’s where this shows up most clearly. Think about a conversation you’ve been delaying. Not because you’re afraid, not because you don’t care, but because you’re trying to be professional, respectful. You don’t want to micromanage and you don’t want to be that person. So you wait. Early on, that conversation is a two-way decision. You could have it, you could adjust, you could course correct.

But the longer you wait, the more the path narrows. The behavior continues. The expectations are set. The cost of speaking up increases. Eventually, what was reversible becomes locked in. And now, the conversation feels risky. Not because it always was, but because you waited too long. The same thing happens with boundaries. With a boss, with a client, with your team, you want to be helpful, accommodating. You want to be a good player. So you delay setting the boundary. And while you’re waiting, the other person learns. They learn what seems to be acceptable. They learn what you’ll tolerate. They learn what the standard operating mode is. What was once flexible becomes assumed. The decision becomes one way because you delayed it when it was still two way This is where engineers misread what’s happening. They tell themselves, I just need a bit more information. I’ll deal with it the next cycle. Once things settle down, I’ll address it. But what’s actually happening is this, time is making the decision for you. So before you delay again, ask yourself a few simple questions.

What happens if I’m wrong? How fast could I correct this? Who is actually impacted by this decision?

What signal would tell me it’s time to adjust? Notice what these questions do. They don’t eliminate risk, they classify it. They help you see whether you’re treating a two-way decision as if it were one-way This isn’t about moving fast for the sake of speed, but it’s about appropriate speed. Leadership requires action to generate information.

You don’t get clarity first, you get clarity from movement. Here’s the part that most engineers miss. You don’t build self-trust by being right every time. You build it by recovering well when you’re wrong. You’ll learn far more from correcting course than from perfect execution. In engineering, you don’t learn much about a plant when everything is running smoothly.

You learn when it’s quiet, when something breaks and you have to make it work again. Leadership works the same way. As you move away from individual contribution and deeper into leadership, there’s a few things that change. Judgment replaces correctness. Calibration replaces certainty. And action precedes confidence. You don’t act because you’re confident. You become confident because you acted, adjusted and learned.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with. Where were you waiting for certainty when what you actually need is a first move?