How to Strengthen Your Decision-Making Skills

For women in leadership, decisions are rarely judged purely on substance.

The leader’s confidence, tone, timing, or perceived authority all shape how the decision is portrayed. Acting quickly can be interpreted as aggression, while taking time can bring questions about her judgment. Alternatively, consultation can be seen as hesitation, but deciding independently can be seen as an unwillingness to collaborate.

This double bind shapes how many highly capable women experience the act of making decisions.

Much existing guidance on decision-making assumes stable authority, neutral audiences, and clear mandates. However, many women lead in environments where authority is partial, scrutiny is high, and they have conflicting directives.

Strengthening decision-making skills in these environments requires women to navigate the tension between making sound decisions and establishing their authority.

How Excellence Can Become a Constraint

Early in my career, while clerking at the Australian High Court, the judge I worked for made an observation that stayed with me.

He noticed that the women barristers appearing before him were consistently exceptionally well prepared. When a woman stood to argue a case, he could rely on her command of the details. Yet many of them were advancing more slowly than their male peers.

In his view, the difference lay in how time and energy were being allocated. The men were building relationships within the profession and becoming comfortable operating under uncertainty. However, women’s preparation left little room for improvisation.

What he described was a difference in how each practiced authority.

For women, preparation was a source of authority and a form of protection. However, that safeguard eventually does stop being helpful, and instead crowds out necessary skills like improvisation, relationship-building, and sound judgment.

This pattern is a common pattern for women leaders. Over-preparation was rewarded early in their careers, but later, it becomes a constraint. As responsibility increases, the ability to think clearly in the moment and remain composed without complete information is as important as technical mastery.

This means that to strengthen decision-making skills, we first need to release the assumption that certainty must precede authority.

When Consultation Can Undermine Authority

In my first formal leadership role, I inherited a small team with a complicated history, including unresolved dynamics around my appointment. I was quickly told that I was too decisive.

We got into a consistent pattern. We would discuss a goal. Team members would explain why it could not be done. I would push back, confident it was achievable. Over time, I began to micromanage, convinced execution was the issue.

Then, a leadership coach emphasized inclusion, listening, and ensuring all voices were heard. Guidance that is valuable, but it did not address the central dynamic within this team. Instead of helping to strengthen decisions or build alignment, consultation became a mechanism for resisting the direction I was setting.

Over time, because of this advice, I learned to soften my decisions, entered repeated cycles of consultation, and distributed responsibility so that no one felt overridden. For years afterward, I was hesitant precisely when I needed to be decisive.

Building consensus can often seem like good leadership, particularly for women. Over time, however, it can become a way of avoiding the discomfort of standing alone in a decision.

Decisive leadership requires clarity about when to ask for consultation and when to take responsibility for decisions.

How to Avoid Analysis Paralysis

Sometimes leaders hesitate because they are uncertain about their authority.

Women leaders are often expected to seek input while being decisive, exercise authority without appearing controlling, and demonstrate confidence without being seen as arrogant. In that environment, hesitation becomes understandable, because each decision carries consequences.

This became evident years later, when I was running my own firm. I delayed certain decisions because I knew they would disappoint people I respected.

Eventually, senior colleagues pointed out that by avoiding difficult decisions, I was creating more uncertainty and frustration than the decisions themselves would have caused.

Avoiding a decision doesn’t eliminate its consequences. Instead, it shifts uncertainty onto others and weakens authority.

Data, Intuition, and Judgment

Much advice aimed at women encourages them to trust their intuition, often positioning it as if intuition and rigorous analysis are competing approaches. However, intuition is a product of experience.

Data-driven decision making and risk assessment are an essential part of any leader’s decision making process, and so is judgement. Part of exercising good judgment is knowing when you have enough information to make a decision and when further analysis is necessary.

Instead of asking, “Do I have enough data?” ask yourself:

What additional information would materially change this decision?

Sometimes the answer will be clear, and gathering more information is the right course of action. At other times, no amount of additional analysis will eliminate the uncertainty, and the leader must decide whether to move forward with what they know.

In those cases, I rely on a decision discipline called the FOG FILTER, designed for moments when leaders must act without clarity, consensus, or complete information.

These questions can help you determine when to move forward and when further reflection is warranted:

• Does waiting reduce the fog, or deepen it?
• Is inaction already shaping the system?
• Will movement generate learning unavailable through further analysis?
• What signal does delay send about authority and accountability?
• Does this decision preserve future optionality?
• How reversible is this decision?

Communicating Decisions

For women leaders, the scrutiny surrounding a decision often continues after it’s made. How they communicate that decision can influence how the decision is received. This makes it particularly important to communicate decisions clearly, without feeling compelled to justify every aspect of the reasoning behind it. Effective communication of a decision involves four key elements:

Lead with the decision

Name trade-offs without defensiveness

Acknowledge uncertainty directly

Invite input on execution, with the decision itself settled

Over-explaining often signals unease. Deliberate restraint can carry authority.

The Work Beneath the Decision

Improving decision-making skills involves continuing to take responsibility for decisions when certainty is unavailable and scrutiny is high.

For women leaders, that can involve leaving room for improvisation, recognizing when consensus-building becomes a substitute for decisiveness, making decisions with incomplete information, and taking ownership for the decisions you make.

The double bind will not disappear. However, practice gives the leader more opportunities to work within it.