How to Make Better Decisions Under Pressure When You're Running on Empty

"Decision fatigue is real. And it is worse the more senior you are. When every call feels high-stakes and your bandwidth is already stretched, even straightforward choices start to feel impossible. This post is for leaders who are still showing up — but are not firing on all cylinders. You do not need a complete picture to decide well. You need the right foundation."

Note: Throughout this post, resilience is defined as "Springing Forward with Learning" — a deliberate move away from the idea of simply recovering to where we once were. We move forward, and we take the learning with us.

Why Does Decision-Making Get Harder the More Senior You Are?

There is a cruel irony at the heart of leadership. The more accountable you become — the more people, budget, and strategic direction sit on your shoulders — the harder sound decision-making gets.

It is not a competence issue. It is a cognitive load issue.

Research on decision fatigue is well established. The brain treats each decision as a withdrawal from a limited daily resource. Early in the day, choices feel manageable. By mid-afternoon, after back-to-back meetings, competing priorities and people needing answers, the quality of those choices starts to deteriorate — often without the leader being aware of it. You start to default to the safest option. Or you defer. Or you decide quickly just to end the discomfort of having to think.

For senior leaders, this plays out at scale. Your decisions affect more people. The stakes are higher. The visibility is greater. And ironically, the pressure to project certainty — to appear decisive, confident, in control — adds a further layer that makes genuine clarity harder to access.

The leaders I work with who are most depleted often describe a particular feeling: "I know what I should probably do, but I just can't seem to get there." That gap — between knowing and deciding — is where decision fatigue lives.

For L&D professionals:  Decision fatigue is one of the most underdiagnosed performance problems in senior leadership. Before designing a leadership intervention, it is worth asking: are your leaders running on empty? The most sophisticated frameworks in the world do not help a leader whose cognitive capacity is already compromised. Wellbeing, energy management and thinking time belong in your programme design — not as optional extras, but as prerequisites for effective learning.

What Does Poor Decision-Making Cost Your Team and Organisation?

Delayed or poor decisions do not stay contained. They ripple.

When a leader hedges, stalls, or consistently defaults to "let me come back to you on that," teams feel it. They begin to fill the gaps themselves — often with anxiety, speculation or assumption. Trust erodes, subtly at first. People start working around the leader rather than with them. Morale follows.

There are also harder costs. Projects stall. Opportunities are missed. The team begins to slow down to match the pace of the person at the top. In a persistently changing environment — a VUCA world — the cost of delayed decisions compounds fast.

I have sat with senior leaders who describe the Sunday evening dread not just as anxiety about the week ahead, but specifically about the decisions they know they have been avoiding. Those decisions do not disappear over the weekend. They sit there, getting heavier.

There is also a cultural dimension. Leaders who are chronically indecisive — for whatever reason — create cultures of permission-seeking. Teams stop trusting their own judgement because the leader's judgement is itself unreliable. High performers, who could be making good decisions autonomously, instead wait. And eventually, they leave.

For L&D professionals:  If you are seeing patterns of escalation — where decisions that should be made at team level are consistently landing on senior desks — that is worth exploring. It may not be a delegation skills problem. It may be that your senior leaders are so overwhelmed that they have inadvertently created a bottleneck. Understanding the decision-making environment is as important as developing the decision-making skill.

Decision Fatigue vs Decision Avoidance: Are You Dealing with the Same Problem?

These two things can look identical from the outside, but they need different solutions.

Decision fatigue is physiological and cognitive. It is the result of too many choices, too much mental load, insufficient recovery. The fix is structural: better management of cognitive resources, deliberate rest, clearer prioritisation, reducing the number of decisions the leader actually needs to make.

Decision avoidance is something different. It is rooted in fear. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of the reaction. Fear of accountability. In my coaching work, I encounter this most often in leaders who have been burned before — publicly criticised for a call that did not land, or who work in environments where blame flows upwards freely.

The distinction matters because a leader experiencing decision fatigue needs rest and structure. A leader experiencing decision avoidance needs to address something at a deeper level — often their relationship with failure, with confidence, or with the internal storytelling that says "if this goes wrong, it means something about me."

My Resilience Wheel framework addresses both — but through different dimensions. Decision fatigue lives in the Energy and Attitude spokes. Decision avoidance tends to show up in Confidence and Meaning — the stories we tell ourselves about what our decisions say about us.

For L&D professionals:  A diagnostic conversation before any decision-making intervention is worth its weight. Leaders who need permission to rest and simplify are not the same group as leaders who need to work on their relationship with failure. Designing a single programme to address both without distinguishing between them risks missing both. Assessment tools, coaching conversations, or even well-framed reflective exercises at the start of a programme can make this distinction visible and actionable.

What enables you to find some headspace and clarity? Photo Arnaud Mesureur Unsplash

How Do You Create Space for Better Thinking When Time Is the Thing You Don't Have?

This is the question I hear most often. And the honest answer is: you create it deliberately, or you do not have it at all.

Thinking time does not appear organically in a packed calendar. It has to be defended. That feels uncomfortable for leaders who are conditioned to equate busyness with productivity. But the data on this is clear: leaders who build in structured reflection time — even short, regular windows — make better decisions than those who do not.

In practical terms, the approaches that work most consistently with the leaders I coach include:

•       Protecting a 20-minute window at the end of each day — not for email, but for reflection. What decisions am I carrying? What do I actually know? What do I need to think through before I can decide?

•       Reducing the number of decisions by designing better defaults. Not every choice needs to reach the leader. Building team capability to decide within agreed parameters frees the leader's attention for the decisions that genuinely need it.

•       Using the three Resilience Wheel reflective questions regularly — not monthly, but weekly: What have I been doing that has been serving me well? What hasn't been serving me? How do I do more of the first?

•       Walking before deciding. Sounds simple, and it is. Physical movement genuinely shifts cognitive state. Some of the most useful insight leaders get in coaching comes from a question asked mid-walk. You cannot be in fight-or-flight and think clearly at the same time.

The leaders who struggle most with this are those who believe they cannot afford the time. They are typically the ones who need it most.

Can Your Values Actually Help You Make Faster, Clearer Decisions?

Yes. And this is one of the most underused tools in leadership.

When decisions are murky, when the data is incomplete, when there are competing priorities and no clear "right" answer — values are a filter. They cut through.

Purpose-led leaders — those who have done the work of clarifying what they stand for and why they lead — make faster, more consistent decisions. Not because they have more information, but because they have a framework for prioritising. "Given what we are here to do, and given what matters to us, which of these options is most aligned?" That is a simpler question than "what is the objectively right answer?"

I work with leaders on this explicitly. Clarity of purpose — one of the seven dimensions of the Resilience Wheel — is not just a philosophical exercise. It is a practical performance tool. When you know your leadership purpose, ambiguous decisions become less ambiguous. When your team knows your values, they can make more decisions without you. That is the real leverage.

One leader I worked with described the shift like this: "I used to agonise over decisions for days. Now I ask myself: is this consistent with what I said I was here to do? If yes, I move. If not, I do not." Simple. But that simplicity took months of coaching work to build.

For L&D professionals:  Purpose clarification work is often positioned as a "feel good" module in leadership programmes. It should be positioned as a performance module. Leaders with clear purpose not only decide faster — they also communicate more consistently, lead with more credibility, and create teams that can operate more autonomously. That has measurable outcomes. Make the ROI case accordingly.

What Do Leaders Actually Say After Working on This? From Hesitation to Clarity

The shift that leaders describe after sustained resilience coaching work is not dramatic. It is not a personality transplant. It is more like a dial being turned.

Where they previously described being "stuck in their head," they describe being able to access what they actually think more readily. Where they used to second-guess and loop, they describe being able to make a call and move on. Where they experienced the weight of accumulated unmade decisions, they describe a clearer sense of what actually needs their attention and what does not.

One phrase I hear consistently is "I feel lighter." Not because the work got easier, or the problems went away. The environment often gets harder. But because the internal resource available to meet that environment has increased.

That is what resilience looks like in practice. Not armour against difficulty. Not the ability to push through regardless. The genuine ability to think clearly, decide with confidence, and spring forward — with the learning from everything that came before.

If any of this resonates — if you recognise the gap between knowing what you should probably do and being able to get there — it might be worth having a conversation.

Ready to Think More Clearly Under Pressure?

If decision fatigue, avoidance, or simply the relentless cognitive load of senior leadership is getting in the way, resilience coaching can help you build the foundation to think and lead more effectively.

Start the conversation at www.theresiliencecoach.co.uk or email russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk