Hard Decisions You Need to Make
Tough calls you need to make as a leader on growth, quality and stability.
As a leader, the most important aspect of your role will be knowing when and how to make critical decisions for your team. These decisions will shape your team and define the everyday reality of your culture.
When you step into a leadership role managing ICs and managers, you need to build your own leadership team. This will help you approach leadership as a team sport. This group will become your core mechanism for facilitating the decision-making. It will help you facilitate healthy debate around hard choices, gather input from diverse perspectives and bring clarity to next steps.
A sign of maturity in your leadership is your ability to hold multiple truths at once. To accept that competing truths can coexist and to keep moving forward without getting stuck in indecision. Emotional granularity will help you hold space for paradox.
This is a 2 part article where I’ll address how to navigate decisions as a leader:
Part 1: Decisions That Shape People & Teams
Part 2: Decisions That Shape Culture & Your Leadership
Part 1: Decisions That Shape People & Teams
1. Deciding whether to let someone go or not
Letting someone go is never easy. The reasons are rarely black and white. Sometimes you have a team member with a great attitude who tries hard but cannot meet expectations. Other times you have someone delivering top-tier work who damages team dynamics. And sometimes people are in personal situations that make this decision feel even heavier.
Still, this is your job. You are responsible for the health of the entire team, not just one person. That responsibility of your team’s health sits with you.
Here is how to navigate it:
Give direct feedback with specific examples. Avoid vague terms like "be more proactive." Instead, say what was missing and what good looks like.
Always follow up in writing. Keep a log of all key moments, feedback given, and changes observed.
Set a clear time-bound improvement plan. Outline what success looks like and when it must be visible.
Keep the performance improvement window short. 6 to 8 weeks is usually enough.
Gather peer feedback. Use 2 or 3 trusted peers to evaluate the individual’s progress.
Support them early, but have a plan to taper it. Ongoing handholding is not sustainable.
If improvement is visible but not enough, ask:
Is someone else in the team paying the price by covering for them?
Will they reach the expected level in the next month?
If the answer is no, make the call. The longer you delay, the more it costs the team.
Communicate clearly at every step. Be honest and kind. Let the person own their story and exit with dignity. Align with them on timing and messaging so the team is not left in the dark or blindsided. A great read on this is Kim Scott’s Radical Candor.
2. Deciding on how high to hold the quality bar
— Without burning people out
Your job is to show what great looks like. To do that, you must set and protect a quality bar while making sure your team can meet it. This takes judgment, care and clarity.
Here are some tips:
Learn people’s working styles and where they shine. Notice when detail adds value, and when it delays unnecessarily. Call out inefficiency kindly and clearly.
Make sure you don’t do unfair comparisons between different types of talent, coach people to use their strength and improve on their goals.
Set expectations that match business context. Coach prioritisation, scoping and parallelising work.
Always develop and improve your taste, look for examples of excellent work.
Share and show these examples of excellent work. Do not assume people know what “great” means.
Celebrate improvement. Let people know you see their growth.
Be clear about what needs to improve next. Make the path visible.
Align expectations with skill levels. Push people beyond their comfort zone.
Never lower the bar to protect feelings. Raise the support instead.
Treat your team like professional athletes. Pressure applied with care elevates performance. Too much pressure however, causes injury. Balance quality with pacing, health boundary setting and recovery time. Here is a great podcast episode on this topic.
Coach your team to set clear boundaries, coach them on how to manage their workload and make smart tradeoffs. To do this, understand their context and capacity, how they pace their work. Show them how to reset priorities when things pile up. If they are managers, teach them to do the same for their team members.
3. Deciding whether to promote someone or not
Promotions are signals to your team of what you value. They affect the individual and the team. In some cases, saying “not now” is a hard conversation you will need to hold.
Here is how to handle it:
Make sure your expectations for career steps and promotions are written and visible. If they are not, fix that first.
Track behaviour and outcomes over time. One good project does not equal readiness.
Be honest and explain the gaps with clarity.
Do not tie promotion to effort or tenure. Tie it to scope, outcomes and consistency. Repeated success over time.
Create a growth plan. Offer a timeline and targets that are fair and actionable.
Your team should know you’ll give them every opportunity to grow and also that you don’t promote lightly. Reward readiness, not just effort. If handled well, this builds trust. If handled poorly, it builds resentment.
4. Deciding how to lead though uncertainty
There will be moments when you know things your team doesn’t: financial risks, restructuring, shifting priorities. The decision you must make is how to carry that weight without destabilising your team. In moments of uncertainty, how you show up will shape how safe, confident and resilient your team becomes.
You will want to show transparency, meanwhile you cannot flood people with uncertainty they are not equipped to act on. Your role is to be honest, steady and clear; without oversharing or creating insider circles.
Here are some tips on how to lead it for better clarity:
Share what you know, and name what you don’t.
Don’t form secret circles. Avoid insider loops, do not drip-feed information to a few. It erodes trust.
Instead, align leadership on what can be shared and say it clearly.
Explain the why behind structural decisions clearly.
Say how it aligns with company strategy or product shifts.
Don’t draw boxes until you clarify the strengths you want to optimise for.
Preserve anchors where you can. Stability matters.
Build autonomy, not dependence.
Coach your team to know their value as individuals beyond their immediate job.
Invite feedback before final decisions. Adjust when it’s wise to do so.
Communicate clearly. People fill in the gaps of silence with fear.
Your honesty and calm is what builds resilience. Your clarity is what helps people face reality without spinning. And your care is what turns change into progress.
Final Thoughts
These are the people centred decisions that shape your leadership more than strategy decks or all-hands speeches. They are where your values turn into action.
In Part 2, I will share the other half of these decisions: the ones that shape your culture and your sustainability as a leader. We will explore:
When to challenge up and when to commit
What to celebrate vs what to tolerate
When you must be the one to decide
How to take care of yourself as a leader