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Once I found myself in a pickle, a situation that looked simple from the outside but was complicated on the inside.
I got some work approved with clear direction on how to move it forward. We were ready to make moves! Until… someone with fresh eyes looked at it and saw a hole the size of Texas. The hole was so big that moving forward would have been irresponsible for the business and for the people I was trying to protect.
So I changed course even though I had both approval and direction. I knew this could be problematic and that people would be annoyed.
Afterwards I sat with a question I couldn't quite shake: did I fail the process, or did I exercise judgement?
There’s a pattern I've noticed underneath that question, one I think a lot of people carry but rarely say out loud. When something goes sideways with an executive, the instinct is to go back to the last time it worked, naturally. What did they want before? What was the process? And when the executive responds differently this time, the quiet conclusion is often that they're being inconsistent. The process broke because they changed and that's on them.
That's the wrong read almost every time and I think that kind of thinking costs people more than they realize.
The way an executive made a decision at a given moment was shaped by everything present in that moment: the stakes, the relationships in the room, the political context, what else happened that day, what the work actually was. Those variables never hold still. Context moves constantly. So when the same leader responds differently to a seemingly similar situation, it's usually not inconsistency. It's that the situation was never actually the same situation.
The first cost of getting this wrong is personal. When you explain away a miss by calling an executive inconsistent, you've handed the variable to someone else. And the moment you do that, you stop learning. Extreme ownership is the idea that the variable is always you, always your read, always your judgement; it’s a competitive advantage. People who operate with extreme ownership improve faster too because they refuse to outsource the lesson.
The second cost is one I think about a lot. Executives are humans too! This makes them capable of absorbing feedback about how they're perceived, just like you and me. If the quiet narrative in the organization is that they're inconsistent, I wonder how much of that lands. And if so, that means you've handed a good leader a label they didn't earn, one that might make them second-guess a perfectly sound call the next time the context (or the process) genuinely requires something different. They should be free to make the right decision in the moment. If that looks like inconsistency from the outside, who cares? That's an outside problem, not a leadership problem. I often think (worry) about how much damage that pressure causes.
Great operators I admire stop treating an executive's previous preference as the answer and start treating the current context as the path. Given what I know right now—about this work, this moment, these stakes—what does good judgement look like here? That question is the only one that serves the leader in front of you, rather than the version of them that existed six months or six days ago.
Senior leaders don't need obedience. They need judgement that travels with them as context changes. I think that’s the difference between a Chief who moves forward and one who's still looking into the rearview mirror, making decisions based on a road they already traveled.
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