Fractional Leadership & Culture Partner | TEDx Speaker | Helping Executives & Teams Reduce Friction, Build Feedback Loops and Trust That Drives Growth
A leadership team told me recently,
“We’re making decisions. It just takes longer than it should.”
That’s the pattern. Nothing looks broken. The team is smart.
Meetings are thoughtful. People are engaged.
And still, things feel heavier than they should.
Decisions take longer. Work gets revisited.
Leaders stay closer to problems than they expected to. Not because people aren’t capable. Because something in the system is slowing decisions down.
I think of that as decision drag.
Decision drag rarely shows up as dysfunction.
It looks reasonable. More discussion. More alignment. More careful thinking.
Teams tell themselves they’re being thorough. And sometimes they are.
But over time, the pattern shifts:
That’s when speed starts to drop.
In most teams, decision drag starts in one of three places.
Someone sees the problem early.
But waits.
Maybe they want more data. Maybe the timing feels off. Maybe it’s just easier not to say it yet.
So the team moves forward without it. By the time it comes up, the cost is higher.
The conversation feels productive. People nod in agreement.
The room moves on. But no one has said clearly:
So different people move in different directions. They think they’re all aligned, and many (if not all) truly believe they are.
The team feels aligned. But no one owns the next move, which is key.
So work stalls, or gets revisited, or quietly shifts upward.
That’s where a lot of drag lives.
This shows up most in capable teams. Because the behaviors that look professional don’t always create clarity.
You can have:
And still leave without a clean decision.
That’s when leaders start asking for more accountability.
But accountability breaks down when decisions weren’t clear, ownership wasn’t named, expectations were softened.
People can’t execute cleanly on something that was never fully defined.
There’s usually something underneath all of this.
Not dysfunction.
Politeness. And not the good kind.
The version that softens concerns, expectations, pushback.
So the room can keep moving. It feels efficient in the moment.
But it’s expensive later. Because now the team is working around ambiguity instead of removing it.
Watch this short (5 min!) talk on how this politeness, this silence suffocates your culture.
Left alone, decision drag becomes a pattern.
People check more, escalate more, hedge more.
While leaders stay too involved, revisit decisions, and lose confidence in follow-through. And the organization starts to feel slower than it should.
Teams don’t need more process. They need clearer decisions.
That means:
It may not be elegant. But it is effective.
Most teams don’t realize they have a decision problem. They think they have a speed problem.
If execution feels slower than it should, look at how decisions are being formed, not just how fast people are working.
That’s usually where the drag is.
If this feels familiar, it’s usually worth looking more closely at where decisions are getting heavier than they need to be.
That’s often where I start with leadership teams.
Julie Holunga is a Leadership Trainer, TEDx Speaker, Coach, Author—on a mission to rid the world of Lazy Leadership and develop more Deliberate Leaders. For a deeper dive into the everyday language that weakens your leadership presence, watch her TEDx talk, Don’t Let Your Words Sabotage Your Career. You can also DM her or reach out via her site if your leaders and team are ready to raise the bar.
This article is provided as a complimentary resource by Julie Holunga. Statements of fact and opinion are the authors’ responsibility alone and do not imply an opinion on the part of CPA Crossings officers or members. The information contained herein does not constitute accounting, legal, or professional advice. For actionable advice, you must engage or consult with a qualified professional.