Take a look at the last few decisions your leadership team had to revisit. Maybe a quarterly priority kept changing shape after the team started executing. Maybe a customer complaint turned into a debate about pricing, product, and positioning all at once. Maybe a Scorecard number dropped, and the team moved straight into solution mode before anyone fully understood what changed.
As founders, we know some decisions need to happen quickly. We can’t afford to overanalyze everything, and leadership teams shouldn’t turn every issue into a long strategy session. But when teams keep reopening the same decision, it usually means that decision was made before the issue was fully understood. Different leaders may have been reacting to different interpretations of what was happening, and the team may have moved into action before they had enough shared context to make a clean call.
Teams make better decisions when they stay with an issue long enough to understand what’s actually going on.
PERSPECTIVES
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all." — Steve Jobs
MARK MY WORDS
As founders, we feel pressure to move quickly, especially as our company grows and complexity increases. I understand that instinct. Speed matters, but so does knowing what we’re actually solving.
When a decision keeps coming back, I’ve learned to look upstream. Did we have the right information? Were we all looking at the same issue, or were different leaders solving different problems? Sometimes the team is debating solutions while still reacting to completely different interpretations of the issue.
Those conversations can feel painful in the moment, but they help prevent teams from changing direction three weeks later.
This is one reason I believe in shared operating systems and consistent meeting rhythms. When priorities, Scorecards, and issues live in one place, leadership teams spend less time debating what’s happening and more time solving the actual issue. That source of truth helps everyone stay aligned, especially when the business gets more complex.
The healthiest leadership teams I know stay with the issue long enough to understand what really deserves attention before they commit the company to a direction.
TUNE IN
Founder’s Framework Podcast
Building a company gets more complicated as it grows. More people are involved, decisions carry more weight, and leadership teams have to work harder to stay aligned.
On the Founder’s Framework podcast, I sit down for honest conversations about what founders are actually dealing with while building, running, and scaling a company. We talk through the decisions, tensions, and operating rhythms that shape how leadership teams grow stronger over time.
Stop Doing the Work That Drains You Live Webinar • May 29 at 12 p.m. ET
When the same work keeps landing on the same plates, meetings won’t solve the issue. In this webinar, Kris Snyder and Jenifer Warburton will show you how to make Delegate and Elevate® a daily habit so leaders can create capacity and spend more time on Work that matters.
In case you missed it, here’s more from Founder’s Framework:
How AI Can Help Founders Truly Level Up
Execution can carry a company for a while, but growth eventually asks more of its leaders. In this piece, I break down what Level 7+ leaders do differently and why building stronger systems, clearer agreements, and better leaders is essential as complexity increases.
Strong leadership teams don’t just react to what’s in front of them. They learn how to read the signs, separate what matters from what doesn’t, and understand what’s really happening before they make the call.
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