As the year draws to a close, many leaders push to finish strong – it’s ‘instinctive’. But truly effective leaders know that genuine progress is based on perspective. There’s another instinct that governs the behaviour of good executives at this time of year: taking time to pause – reflecting, resetting priorities, refocusing on what’s important. This helps us start the new year with intention, clarity and energy. A thoughtful break today can fuel stronger decisions tomorrow.
The Undervalued Art of Slowing Down
Great leadership encompasses many qualities: clear vision, effective communication, strategic thinking, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. However, one of the more undervalued behaviours is the ability to pause; to step back and stay calm under pressure. This critical yet often overlooked skill of leadership reflection allows executive to block out the noise, chaos, and competing opinions of others to identify the best way forward.
“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Emotions can escalate in the workplace, especially during volatile, complex, and ambiguous periods. When anxiety peaks, it’s natural for people to react impulsively. But leaders who react too swiftly risk making suboptimal decisions. The power of the pause is about recognising your state, taking a deep breath, slowing down, and deciding how to proceed. In the eye of the storm, leaders need to identify a calm centre where clarity emerges, or they cannot navigate the storm at all.
Pausing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, countering the fight-or-flight response and shifting behaviour from reactive to responsive.[1] Instead of making impulsive, emotion-driven decisions, a pause allows for calmer assessment and intentional action. Purely and simply, it’s a process of executive renewal which leads to better decisions, reduced biases, and more creative solutions. As if that wasn’t enough wins, it also improves communication, Calm leaders clearly express needs, concerns, and plans, fostering better engagement and buy-in, creating better outcomes.
Why Slow Decision-Making Improves Outcomes
Whilst speedy decision-making may seem advantageous, a slower, more deliberate approach can often be more effective. Taking time for careful consideration allows leaders to analyse all available options thoroughly. When decisions are rushed, it’s easy to overlook important factors or potential pitfalls that may cause problems later. By carefully examining alternatives, leaders make more informed decisions that are less likely to result in negative consequences.
Slow decision-making offers several compelling advantages: [2]
- Enhanced Collaboration: A deliberate approach ensures all voices are heard and all perspectives considered, leading to better-informed and more widely accepted decisions with stronger stakeholder engagement
- Better Support: When team members feel included in the process and understand the rationale behind decisions, they feel heard, valued, and invested, leading to buy-in
- Long-term Excellence: Whilst rapid decisions may address immediate needs, deliberate decisions allow for thorough problem analysis and comprehensive evaluation, ultimately leading to better outcomes with fewer regrets
- Stronger Negotiation Foundations: Allowing ample time for thoughtful consideration and collaboration creates the groundwork for successful negotiations that drive the organisation towards its goals with confidence.
Of course, emergency situations often require quick action. The key is striking a balance between urgency and deliberation, assessing each situation to determine the appropriate level of speed and consideration required.
How Top CEOs Integrate Intuition and Analysis
Research into how chief executives manage complex situations reveals that the most effective leaders don’t substitute intuition for rational analysis – they combine the two. A study of oil company CEOs identified two processes used by top performers: integration by essentials and spiralling. [3]Integration by essentials involves identifying fundamental cause-effect relationships and forming guiding principles based on such relationships. This governs intuitive storage and retrieval of all relevant knowledge bearing on a decision. Spiralling involves rapidly evaluating decision alternatives by zooming in on the most feasible option using identified principles, then testing and adjusting the decision before committing.
The effective CEOs focused on what was essential: those factors that most fundamentally affected their companies’ success. Their purposeful leadership and decision-making demonstrated constant interaction between intuition and rational analysis, rather than using intuition only occasionally. This integration allowed them to cope with complex decisions under time pressure whilst guarding against cognitive biases.
“The goal shouldn’t be to make the perfect decision every time but to make less bad decisions than everyone else.” ~ Spencer Fraseur
The Science Behind Decision Timing
Recent research (still awaiting peer review) into group decision-making reveals fascinating insights about when to decide. [4] Studies of large groups of independent agents accumulating evidence show that the first to decide are those with the strongest initial biases, and their decisions align with those biases regardless of underlying truth. In contrast, agents who decide last make decisions as if they were initially unbiased, and hence make better choices. We could label this ‘mindful’ leadership.
Though early decisions aren’t always necessarily less accurate, this work identifies a clear case in which hasty choices tend to be the most unreliable. The findings suggest that in large groups, decisions reflect the most extreme initial states rather than accumulated evidence if activity is uncorrelated. Thus, initial biases can implement population-level trade-offs between speed and accuracy.
This underscores why pausing matters: it allows leaders to move beyond their initial biases and make decisions with strategic clarity, based on accumulated evidence rather than gut reactions shaped by pre-existing inclinations.
Mastering the Pause: A Practical Method
The AHA method provides a practical framework for implementing purposeful pauses:
Awareness: Recognise your current state by tuning into internal signals: frustration, anxiety, racing thoughts, tension, or pressure. Self-awareness is a cornerstone of leadership, and identifying your early warning signs is the first step.
Halt: Stop what you’re doing, take a deep breath, and centre yourself. This allows you to step out of reaction mode and into reflection. Depending on the situation, halting might mean pausing to gather thoughts, asking for a moment to process, stepping away briefly, or taking abundant time for solitude and deeper thinking.
Act: Once you’ve paused and evaluated options, act with clarity and confidence. The pause doesn’t mean inaction – it ensures that when you do act, your response is thoughtful and deliberate rather than reactive.
The AHA process can take as little as a minute or as long as a day or more in complex situations. Like any skill, the more you practise, the more automatic and effective it becomes.
Leading with Strategic Clarity
As year-end approaches, make pausing productive. The most effective leaders recognise that sustainable success requires periodic renewal – think of it as your end-of-year strategy. By embracing the pause, you’ll strengthen your leadership, build better relationships, and increase your overall effectiveness. Whether navigating complex situations, managing challenging conversations, or creating space for clearer thinking, this tool can transform how you lead and live.
Leadership resilience isn’t built through constant action; it’s forged in the thoughtful spaces between decisions. A year-end reflection today sets the stage for strategic clarity tomorrow, ensuring you and your team enter the next year with renewed energy and direction.
Sources
[1] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/04/02/power-of-the-pause/
[2] https://www.pmtoday.co.uk/why-slow-decision-making-can-improve-outcomes/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024630109000387
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10802676/
