When capable leaders start making smaller decisions: The cost of ‘compression’

Some of the most consequential changes in leadership are almost invisible.

The leader is still experienced. They are still attending meetings, making decisions and carrying responsibility. Performance may remain strong. From the outside, there may be little reason to think anything has changed.

But the decisions have started getting smaller.

Not necessarily less important. Smaller in another sense.

The time horizon has shortened. Fewer perspectives are being sought. Immediate problems are consuming more attention. Decisions that once warranted discussion are being made quickly. Reflection is increasingly displaced by urgency.

The leader has not suddenly become less capable.

Their available leadership capacity has begun to narrow.

I describe this as Compression.

And in organisations operating under sustained pressure, it deserves far more attention than it receives.

Pressure is not the problem

Public-sector leaders are expected to operate under pressure.

Budget constraints, ministerial expectations, workforce shortages, regulatory scrutiny, community expectations, reform programs and increasing service demand are not temporary features of public administration. In many organisations, they are simply the operating environment.

Good leaders can carry considerable pressure.

The problem is not pressure itself.

The more important question is what happens when pressure becomes sustained and the mechanisms that allow leaders to regulate themselves within it begin to weaken.

Under normal conditions, effective leadership contains space.

Space to think before reacting.

Space to hear competing views.

Space to ask whether the immediate problem is actually the most important problem.

Space to consider consequences beyond the next reporting period.

Space to disagree.

Space to change one's mind.

Under sustained pressure, that space can gradually contract.

That is Compression.

Compression can look like efficiency

This is partly why it can be difficult to recognise.

In its early stages, Compression may look like decisiveness.

Meetings become shorter. Consultation becomes tighter. Decisions are made faster. Fewer people are brought into discussions. Leaders become more directive. Immediate priorities receive sharper focus.

In the right circumstances, every one of those behaviours can be appropriate.

Leadership sometimes requires speed.

The danger emerges when a temporary response to pressure becomes the leader's normal operating mode.

A leader who once asked, What are we missing? increasingly asks, What do we need to get done?

A leader who once invited challenge increasingly seeks certainty.

A leader who once considered the next three years becomes consumed by the next three months.

A leader who once had time for informal conversations increasingly interacts with colleagues through agendas, actions and deliverables.

None of these changes necessarily constitutes poor leadership on its own.

What matters is the pattern.

Because when several begin occurring together, something more fundamental may be changing: the leader's available cognitive and relational bandwidth is becoming compressed.

Capable leaders remain capable

This distinction matters.

Compression is not the same as incompetence.

A highly capable executive experiencing sustained pressure does not lose decades of experience or professional judgement.

But they may have less capacity available to exercise those qualities fully.

Think about the difference between capability and available capacity.

Capability is what the leader knows how to do.

Capacity is how much space they currently have to do it well.

An executive may remain capable of strategic thinking while having almost no uninterrupted time in which to think strategically.

They may remain capable of listening while entering every conversation with six unresolved issues already competing for attention.

They may value consultation while feeling that consultation is something the organisation no longer has time for.

They may understand the importance of relationships while increasingly prioritising transactions because transactions feel more immediately manageable.

This is why telling leaders simply to become more resilient can miss the point.

The issue may not be whether they can withstand more pressure.

It may be whether the environment around them is allowing them to continue leading well while carrying it.

Organisations can reinforce Compression

Compression is rarely an individual phenomenon alone.

Organisational systems can amplify it.

Consider the executive whose diary is filled from early morning until evening, whose inbox continuously replenishes, who moves between operational escalation, budget review, workforce issues, governance meetings and stakeholder demands with almost no transition between them.

Then consider what the organisation often does when that executive begins struggling with capacity.

It adds another dashboard.

Another reporting requirement.

Another meeting.

Another approval process.

Another priority.

Each addition may be entirely rational when viewed independently.

Collectively, they can create an operating environment in which senior leaders spend increasing amounts of time processing organisational activity and decreasing amounts of time thinking about the organisation.

That distinction should concern boards, secretaries and executive teams.

Because organisations need more from senior leaders than throughput.

They need judgement.

The cost appears later

One reason Compression receives little attention is that organisations tend to monitor what can be measured.

Financial performance. Service delivery. Workforce metrics. Risk indicators. Project milestones. Complaints. Incidents.

These are important.

But many are lagging indicators.

The narrowing of leadership capacity can occur well before any of them deteriorate.

A leader can continue delivering while becoming increasingly reactive.

An executive team can continue meeting targets while becoming less curious.

An organisation can continue performing while challenge is quietly disappearing from important conversations.

By the time performance consequences become visible, the behavioural changes that contributed to them may have been developing for months or even years.

This is the broader argument behind the Leadership Drift Framework.

The progression is not:

Pressure → failure.

It is more gradual:

Pressure → Compression → Leadership Drift → Cultural Drift → Performance Consequences.

And importantly, that progression is not inevitable.

Recognising the earlier stages creates the opportunity to interrupt it.

Boards should pay attention to the space around decisions

Boards and senior executives understandably spend considerable time examining the decisions leaders make.

There may be equal value in examining the conditions under which those decisions are being made.

How much genuine thinking time exists in the executive system?

Has consultation narrowed?

Are difficult views still reaching senior decision-makers?

Are leaders spending most of their time responding to immediate operational demands?

Has urgency become the dominant justification for bypassing normal challenge?

Are executive conversations becoming increasingly transactional?

Are important decisions repeatedly being made at the edge of deadlines?

These are not measures of executive wellbeing.

They are questions about decision quality and organisational governance.

Because when the space around decisions contracts, the quality of judgement can eventually contract with it.

The answer is not simply to slow down

Public institutions cannot respond to every period of pressure by doing less.

Nor should leaders use complexity as an excuse for indecision.

The objective is not slower leadership.

It is deliberate leadership.

Sometimes the deliberate decision will be made in minutes.

Sometimes it will require weeks.

What matters is whether speed has been consciously chosen because the circumstances require it, or whether speed has simply become the organisation's default setting.

The same applies to consultation, reflection and challenge.

The question is not whether every decision involves everyone.

It is whether leaders retain enough capacity to recognise when broader thinking is required.

Before leadership drifts

Leadership failures attract attention because they are visible.

Compression usually does not.

It occurs earlier, while the leader still looks capable and the organisation still appears to be functioning.

That is precisely why it matters.

The opportunity for organisations is not simply to become better at responding when leadership performance deteriorates.

It is to become better at recognising the conditions that precede deterioration.

Because sometimes the first sign of trouble is not that capable leaders start making bad decisions.

It is that, under sustained pressure, capable leaders gradually start making smaller ones. As featured on The Mandarin