Last week, during a coaching session, a senior leader said something that, at first glance, sounded entirely reasonable:
“I’m not avoiding the decision – I’m just being careful.”
And they meant it.
This was someone thoughtful, diligent, and highly capable. A leader with experience, credibility, and a strong track record of making good decisions in complex environments. This wasn’t a lack of confidence or competence, and it certainly wasn’t disengagement.
But as we explored it further, it became clear that this wasn’t an occasional pause. It was a pattern – something that showed up reliably whenever the stakes felt higher, visibility increased, or the consequences felt personal.
What sounded like a small, sensible moment of caution had quietly turned into something else: chronic indecision.
And that distinction matters far more than most leaders realise.
How procrastination shows up in leadership
At senior levels, procrastination rarely looks like avoidance in the way we usually imagine it. It doesn’t look like disengagement, inertia, or a lack of care. More often, it looks like responsibility.
It shows up as asking for one more data point before deciding, waiting for full alignment before moving, revisiting decisions that have already been discussed, or delaying sign-off until things “settle”.
Individually, each of these behaviours makes sense. Many are actively encouraged in leadership cultures that value rigour, consultation, and risk management.
But when they start forming a pattern, they create something else entirely: progress slows, decisions hover and teams wait.
And because everything still looks sensible on the surface, it can be remarkably easy to miss what’s actually happening underneath.
Why procrastination turns into indecision at work
It’s probably no surprise that, as responsibility increases, decisions stop being neutral – they stop being simply about what to do and start becoming about what the decision says about me.
At senior levels, decisions often carry reputational risk, political consequence, and personal exposure. A wrong call isn’t just inconvenient, it can feel identity-threatening.
So procrastination becomes a way of managing that risk.
- If I delay, I reduce the chance of being visibly wrong.
- I avoid public failure.
- I protect my credibility.
This isn’t weakness, it’s a nervous system doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
The difficulty is that, over time, delay hardens into indecision. And indecision – whether intended or not – sends a signal.
The signal teams receive
When leaders remain in that grey area of indecision, teams tend to feel it almost immediately – not as overt frustration at first, but as a gradual shift. Confusion creeps in, hesitation follows, and there’s a growing reluctance to move things forward without explicit permission.
People start holding back. They wait. They second-guess themselves, and initiative begins to feel riskier without clarity from above. Not because leaders don’t care, but because uncertainty hasn’t been named or contained.
And the irony is that teams don’t actually need certainty. They need movement.
Why “be more decisive” doesn’t help
In these situations, leaders are often advised to “just be more decisive”, but that advice quietly assumes the issue is confidence or competence – and more often than not, it isn’t. What’s really happening is that confidence has become dependent on certainty, and certainty is rarely available in complex systems, ambiguous environments, or politically charged contexts.
More information doesn’t necessarily remove that pressure. More urgency often amplifies it. So leaders find themselves thinking harder, analysing more deeply, and still feeling stuck – not because the block is cognitive, but because it’s emotional.
A more useful leadership question
Instead of asking, “What’s the right decision?” – which quietly assumes there’s a risk-free answer waiting to be discovered – it can be more revealing to ask:
What feels risky about making one?
That question does something important: it separates the decision itself from the fear attached to it.
And once fear is named – rather than managed indirectly through delay – indecision often begins to loosen its grip. Not because the decision suddenly becomes easy, but because it becomes honest.
Decisiveness without pretending certainty
The most trusted leaders aren’t the ones who always get it right. They’re the ones who can acknowledge uncertainty, decide anyway, and course-correct without self-punishment.
That ability creates psychological safety – not just for them, but for everyone around them. It signals that movement matters more than perfection, and that learning is preferable to paralysis.
Decisiveness, in this sense, isn’t about speed, it’s about self-trust.
What procrastination is really asking for
When procrastination turns into indecision at senior levels, it’s usually pointing to something deeper – fear of consequence, over-identification with outcomes, or pressure to be right rather than responsive.
These aren’t leadership flaws, they’re signals. And leaders who learn to read those signals – rather than override them – tend to make clearer, lighter decisions, even in uncertainty.
If procrastination or indecision is quietly slowing things down in your leadership, or showing up across your teams, it may be time to look beneath performance and into confidence, safety, and identity.
I work with leaders and organisations to understand what’s really driving hesitation beneath the surface – and how to build decision-making confidence without needing certainty first.
If you’d like a confidential conversation about what you’re noticing in your context, you’re welcome to get in touch.
👉 Contact me: jo@joblakeleytraining.co.uk