When the decision doesn’t hold

Most leadership teams do not fail at deciding. They fail at committing. A topic is raised, discussion happens, the tone is respectful, and eventually someone says, “So, do we all agree?” Heads nod. The meeting moves on. And a week later, nothing has happened.

No one says they disagreed. But no one acts like they fully agreed either. The decision didn’t hold. And deep down, most people know it never really landed.

This is not rare. It is how most slow failure begins—not with drama, but with decisions that sound final but never become real.

The Lack of commitment

When the decision doesn’t hold

Most leadership teams do not fail at deciding. They fail at committing. A topic is raised, discussion happens, the tone is respectful, and eventually someone says, “So, do we all agree?” Heads nod. The meeting moves on. And a week later, nothing has happened.

No one says they disagreed. But no one acts like they fully agreed either. The decision didn’t hold. And deep down, most people know it never really landed.

This is not rare. It is how most slow failure begins—not with drama, but with decisions that sound final but never become real.

The comfort of vague agreement

Sometimes teams avoid commitment not because they disagree, but because it feels safer to keep things open. They want to be flexible. They want to leave room for nuance. So they talk around the issue. They agree in principle. They move on, without fully closing it.

In the moment, this can feel mature or even diplomatic. But the cost shows up later, when the teams beneath start asking what was actually decided, or when progress stalls because no one knows what is authorised. Sometimes, you realise weeks have passed, and you are still orbiting the same decision—just with better language.

False alignment is not harmless. It slows down the people trying to act. It makes the most motivated people stop pushing. And it teaches the company to wait until things change again.

When the team is fragmented

I once worked with a management team spread across geographies and disciplines. We were trying to align on shared direction, but the deeper truth was that we never actually committed to anything. We met regularly, we discussed the issues of the day, we shared updates, but nothing ever quite locked in. Week by week, things started to slide. Decisions did not hold. People interpreted outcomes differently. Everyone stayed polite, but no one truly moved forward.

Eventually, I realised that we could not commit without a stronger foundation. So I began organising twice-yearly summits. I looked for relevant conferences, booked meeting rooms in nearby hotels, and pulled the team together for several days at a time.

We used those meetings to hash out the big picture. Everyone’s local priorities had to give way to shared questions. And once we were in the same room, it became possible to ask each other directly, “Are we actually doing this, or are we just talking about it?”

That shift changed the tone completely. Without those summits, it was too risky for anyone to commit. But once we had shared space and shared perspective, the decisions began to hold. People acted. The drift stopped.

When the leader doesn’t transmit belief

Early in my career, I was not good at delegation. I would look around the table, assign tasks—“You take care of that, you handle this”—and then move on. I assumed, somewhat naively, that because I had said it, people would treat it as important.

Months later, I would look back and realise that many of those initiatives had gone nowhere. My first reaction was frustration. I had said it clearly. Why hadn’t anything happened?

Eventually I understood the problem. It was not that people had ignored me. It was that I had not made the work feel meaningful. If I was not showing that this mattered to me, that I would follow up, support it, and stand behind it—then why should they spend their time on it?

That was a turning point. You do not get commitment simply by assigning a task. You get commitment by treating the work like it matters. And if the leader is not carrying it with intention, no one else will either.

When the leader never holds direction

We have all worked with that kind of manager. High energy. Charismatic. More passion than structure. One week, they tell the team to go left. The next, they say it is right. The week after that, they point forward with complete conviction.

Always enthusiastic. Always persuasive. And never consistent.

When you work with someone like that, you learn to wait. Not because you are disengaged, but because you have learned not to waste effort. You start thinking, “Let’s give it a few days and see if it sticks.” You nod, but you do not move.

That becomes a management skill in itself—decoding what is serious, what is temporary, and what will quietly be forgotten by Friday. And slowly, commitment erodes. Not because people do not care, but because they have learned that nothing stays decided. And in that environment, the most logical move is hesitation.

When no one owns it

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, once said something that has stayed with me. “If you want something to happen, you point at one person and say, ‘You make it happen.’ Then you point to the rest and say, ‘You support him.’ But if you point to the whole group, no one will own it, and nothing will happen.”

You do not have to admire Kamprad to see the truth in that. I have seen teams agree on a goal, nod together, and even document action points—yet somehow never decide who is responsible. And so nothing moves. Everyone assumes someone else will lead. Everyone walks away with a different version of the plan.

Group ownership may feel inclusive, but without individual accountability, it becomes abstraction. And abstract responsibility is where commitment disappears. Leadership teams rarely fall apart from too much disagreement. More often, they unravel because no one is holding the decision tightly enough to see it through.

When it looks like strategy but isn’t

I remember watching Yahoo during the Marissa Mayer years. She had come in as the “wonder girl” CEO, full of energy, product intuition, and big strategic swings. I remember thinking at the time that all this motion, first mobile, then media, then acquisitions was part of an incredibly sharp long game. That there was some deeper logic holding it all together.

Later I realised it wasn’t strategy. It was drift dressed up as decisiveness. Each new decision replaced the last before it had been tested. Inside the company, people stopped trusting the direction. They started waiting to see what would stick. Teams became cautious. Projects became political. And slowly, the organisation lost its grip—not because it lacked ideas, but because no one stayed with any of them long enough to turn them into outcomes.

That is what happens when a management team makes decisions but never commits.

How to make commitment real

Clarity is the first test. At the end of a serious discussion, stop and ask, “What exactly did we decide?” Ask, “What happens next?” Ask, “Who owns what?”

Say it out loud. Write it down. Confirm it. Not for formality, but to remove ambiguity. Because most decisions fail not in execution, but in assumption.

Then comes reinforcement. The easiest way to tell whether a decision is real is to see what happens after the meeting. Do people act? Do they follow up? Do they hold others accountable? Commitment needs momentum. If the room goes quiet after the meeting ends, the decision was never alive in the first place.

You can also use structure. Some teams check decisions in the next meeting to see if they have moved. Some assign one person to do a written recap, with owners and timelines. Some ask every leader to say, in their own words, what they are doing now that this decision has been made.

These are not rituals for compliance. They are reinforcement. Commitment requires pressure, but also clarity. And that clarity has to be built and rebuilt, or it fades.

What it feels like when commitment holds

When a team is truly committed, you can feel the difference. People do not hedge. They do not test the air. They move. Even if they were not fully comfortable with the decision, they carry it. They communicate it with seriousness. They treat it as real.

That is what commitment looks like. Not agreement in the room, but motion afterward.

One book

If there is one book I would recommend on this topic, it is Peter Drucker – The Effective Executive. It is not new. It is not trendy. But it is serious. Drucker understood that most decisions fail not because they are wrong, but because no one makes them real. He wrote clearly about responsibility, follow-through, and the discipline it takes to turn a thought into an outcome.

What he says still holds: action without commitment is waste.