Good Judgment Must Eventually
Become Organizational Practice
Some organizations appear strong because an experienced leader quietly compensates for their weaknesses. For 35 years, I have advised owners, chief executives, leadership teams, and senior government officials when the choices carried serious consequences. I have also been responsible for decisions and their results. That experience has taught me to look beyond immediate performance. Work may get done, difficult relationships may hold, and problems may remain out of public view while the institution depends heavily on one person’s judgment. That dependence usually becomes visible only when pressure increases, the leader is unavailable, or someone else takes the job.
The real measure of strong leadership is not how many problems one executive can solve. It is whether the institution becomes better at recognizing those problems, making sound choices, and acting without waiting for rescue. Good judgment has to change how the place works. Otherwise, the institution has benefited from the leader without learning from the leader.
Authority on paper. Power in practice.
Formal authority identifies who holds the office, who can approve a recommendation, and who will be accountable for the result. Practical power determines whether the decision can move and what happens after it is made. The two often sit in different places.
Kevin McCarthy became Speaker of the House, second in line to the presidency, in January 2023 after fifteen ballots. The concessions that secured the office also gave a small group substantial leverage over McCarthy, including the ability of one member to force a vote on his removal. Nine months later, eight Republicans joined Democrats and removed him. The terms required to obtain the title weakened the power he could exercise from it.¹
The lesson is institutional, not partisan. A title can assign responsibility without supplying the support, relationships, or operating control required to produce a result. Authority that cannot be exercised is a liability disguised as a promotion.
An organizational chart will not identify every person who can stop an initiative. Essential information may sit several levels below the executive team, while a longtime employee may carry more credibility with the workforce than anyone in the meeting. Experienced leaders read that terrain before they act. When their understanding of it remains in one person’s head, the institution has not developed a capability. It has borrowed one.
Information is not ownership.
General Motors gave memorable names to a different weakness. Engineers encountered problems with the ignition switch as early as 2001, but the company did not begin the major recall until February 2014. The report released that June described the “GM nod,” when everyone agreed to a proposed course and then left the room without acting. It also described the “GM salute,” the gesture of pointing toward someone else when responsibility became uncomfortable.²
The ignition-switch problem moved through an astonishing number of committees over more than a decade. GM had engineers, lawyers, investigators, reports, and meetings. It did not lack information or expertise. It failed to turn what it knew into ownership and action.
Once escalation happens often enough, it stops being an exception and becomes the operating model.
Every experienced executive has seen a less consequential version of that failure. A problem is widely understood, several groups are involved, and no one is required to close the discussion. The matter travels from meeting to meeting until a senior leader intervenes.
People adjust to that model. They learn to brief, defer, and wait because independent judgment is praised in conversation and challenged in practice. Senior management becomes the most reliable workaround, then wonders why initiative has disappeared. The institution taught the staff where real decisions are made.
Clear decision rights do not require centralizing every choice. They establish who will develop the recommendation, who should advise, who will decide, and who must carry the result into operation. Accountability without the authority to act is theater. Blame has been assigned in advance while control remains somewhere else.
More information will not correct that problem. Senior teams already receive more data, analysis, and opinion than they can use. The hard work is deciding what matters, what remains uncertain, and what happens after the meeting ends. Analysis identifies the pieces. Judgment determines how they fit and what to do next.
Effective external advisers sharpen that judgment. They test whether the question is complete, whether the assumptions survive contact with reality, and whether the proposed course can be carried out. Context comes before a solution because every institution has its own history, power structure, trust, and operating capacity. A strategy that worked somewhere else proves little until it fits here, now, with these people.
Pressure reveals what ordinary performance conceals.
Southwest Airlines showed how quickly hidden dependence can become public. A severe winter storm disrupted air travel in December 2022, but other carriers recovered while Southwest’s operation continued to unravel. Between December 21, 2022, and January 2, 2023, the airline canceled or significantly delayed more than 16,900 flights, affecting more than two million passengers.³
The storm started the crisis. It did not create the limitations that made recovery so difficult. Those became visible when the disruption exceeded the ability of established systems and manual workarounds to absorb it. An operation that had functioned every day could no longer restore the schedule or communicate reliably with customers.
Pressure removes the extra meeting, the informal accommodation, and the experienced person who usually repairs the process. It reveals whether responsibility is clear, difficult information can move, and the senior team has enough trust to act before certainty arrives. A crisis plan cannot create those conditions. By the time a crisis demands candor, authority, and reliable information, they already exist or they do not.
McCarthy, GM, and Southwest operated in entirely different settings, but each exposed a gap between formal structure and the actual capacity to act. That pattern produces five lessons worth carrying into ordinary leadership work.
Five lessons worth carrying forward
- Read the real power structure. The organizational chart identifies formal responsibility. It does not tell you whose cooperation, credibility, information, or consent will determine whether the work moves.
- Give every consequential decision an owner. Participation can improve a decision, but a crowded meeting does not create accountability. Someone must have the authority to close the discussion and the obligation to carry the result into operation.
- Make the reasoning transferable. Most organizations preserve the final document and lose the judgment that produced it. Others need to understand what was noticed, which assumptions changed, why one stakeholder mattered, and why an apparently reasonable option was rejected.
- Treat repeated rescue as evidence. When the same executive keeps repairing recommendations, relationships, or processes, the immediate problem is not the only problem. The recurring intervention identifies where the institution has failed to learn.
- Test capacity before pressure does it for you. Leaders should know which processes depend on manual intervention, individual memory, or the availability of one experienced person. Capacity that has never been tested is only an assumption.
What strong leadership leaves behind
The answer is not a larger manual. Circumstances change too quickly, and judgment will always require experience. The work is to make important facts easier to surface, responsibility harder to avoid, and authority clear enough to use. An institution does not need a script for every choice, but it must know how a sound choice gets made.
That work receives less attention than rescuing a project or settling a dispute. It asks a successful executive to stop being the organization’s most convenient solution. Every rescue that leaves the underlying weakness untouched makes the next rescue more likely. Strong leaders solve the problem without becoming the permanent process for solving it.
I judge leadership partly by what happens when the top leader is not in the room. Problems should be recognized earlier, difficult facts should arrive without being softened, and others should make consequential choices without waiting for permission that was never supposed to be required. That is the difference between an organization that follows a strong leader and one that becomes stronger because of that leader.
A strong executive will always be difficult to replace. That is not the problem. The problem is an institution that has to rediscover how to think when the replacement occurs. Good judgment becomes organizational practice when it changes what others notice, how they exercise responsibility, and what the organization can do without waiting for the person at the top.
Sources
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “Speaker Elections Decided by Multiple Ballots” and “Speakers of the House in Numerical Order”; Congress.gov, H.Res. 5 and H.Res. 757. View source
- Anton R. Valukas, Report to the Board of Directors of General Motors Company Regarding Ignition Switch Recalls, June 5, 2014, available through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. View source
- U.S. Department of Transportation, Order 2023-12-11 and “DOT Penalizes Southwest Airlines $140 Million for 2022 Holiday Meltdown,” December 18, 2023. View source