- Dan McKee
- May 13
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 1
Leadership Isn’t a Mystery. It’s a Discipline.
Ask 10 executives what the primary role of a leader is, and you’ll get 10 different answers:
“Set the vision.”
“Motivate the team.”
“Drive results.”
+6……
All good answers, but not the game changing answer we were looking for.
Steve Bennett, a long time direct report to Jack Welch and the former CEO of Symantec and Intuit taught us this leadership first principle. It’s become the cornerstone principle for High Achiever.
Steve taught us:
“The primary role of a leader is to make great decisions—and to teach others how to make great decisions.”
It’s a simple yet profound principle that when understood and internalized will radically impact how you lead and the results you deliver.
Steve’s logic is this:
“Show me a leader who makes good decisions and I will show you a leader who produces good outcomes.”
“Show me a team that makes good decisions and I will show you a team that produces great outcomes at scale.”
It’s sound logic that has radically impacted our lives in a positive way.
Why Decision-Making is the #1 Job of a Leader
There is a direct correlation between decisions and outcomes. Strategic decisions create a ripple effect through the entire company. Some good, some bad!
Who gets hired
What gets prioritized
Where resources flow
How culture evolves
🔗 Learn to mitigate the bad ripples: Check out Shit Rolls Down Hill
Producing better outcomes is about creating a decision-making ecosystem that works.
Decisions have intended and unintended consequences. How leaders and teams decide is the difference between good and bad consequences.
Why Do Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions?
It’s not intelligence. It’s not experience.
It’s lack of context.
As leaders rise in the org chart, they often drift away from the realities on the ground. They operate on sound bites and assumptions, instead of proximity.
"A game of telephone" is a metaphor for the unreliability of information passed through multiple sources and how it can become distorted through repeated retellings. Context is commonly corrupted through chains of communication.
The Result: (Poor Decisions)
Decisions that look good on a slide deck… but fall flat in execution
A lot of unintended consequences
Strategic plans that ignore operational constraints
Team frustration that leads to disengagement
Erroding confidence
Unreliable Context = Bad Decisions
How to Close the Context Gap
The answer isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to build systems that bring context to you.
That’s where Context Loops come in—a structured method for continuously collecting, refining, and acting on relevant insights from your organization.
🔁 You can learn more about the full loop system in The Power of Context Loops
Our context loops are built within The Operating Cadence which drives rigor, discipline and repeatability.
As we capture context we move through a Strategic Decision Making process that helps us make great decisions, prioritize actions and manage them to outcomes.
Here you can see an overview of The Operating Framework we leverage to make great decisions and teach others how to make great decisions.
We cover how to do this is in detail in our Leadership Development Experience
The Two-Part Job: Decide Well + Teach Decision-Making
Decide Well: Most executives understand their job is to make decisions. Yet, when we ask most executives how they make decisions they can rarely articulate a good answer.
Teach Others: It’s very rare for us to come across leaders who teach their teams how to make great decisions. Leverage comes from each discipline but the leverage you need to rapidly scale comes from teaching the team:
As the CEO of GE and one of the greatest CEOs in history Jack Welch spent a week a month traveling around the company teaching.
Jack understood that having great intuition as a leader is helpful, but understanding and teaching first principle frameworks is scalable. You can’t teach intuition.
So, Jack taught first principles.
Great leaders don’t tell people what to do, they teach people how to decide what to do based on the unique context of their roles and organizations.
When your team knows how:
To decide, they are not dependent on you
To interpret the business context they can communicate it to others
To make defensible calls on their own, they increase the pace to outcomes
To be accountable, because they can tell you how they made decisions
...you stop being the bottleneck.
You become the multiplier.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
Let’s say you’re a COO scaling from $10M to $25M to $50M to $100M.
At $10M, you're in most of the big decisions. But as you grow, complexity increases and your time fragments. Capturing context gets really hard.
If you still decide in the absence of context you're likely to make poor decisions.
If your team still depends on you to decide everything, you stall.
BUT- If they understand how to integrate first principle frameworks with their own talents they make smart decisions without you.
This is where real leadership kicks in: You shift from being the decision-maker to being the decision-making architect.
How to Operationalize Great Decision-Making
This isn’t about genius. It’s about structure.
You must work to build Context Loops into an Operating Cadence. This is the key to capturing context at scale.
You must understand the best practices of Strategic Decision Making
You must learn how to leverage The Operating Framework not only to decide what to do but to drive those decisions into measured outcomes.
Why this is the Cornerstone of High Achievement
Every major leadership failure we’ve seen traces back to one of two issues:
❌ Poor decisions
❌ No team of leaders who can decide well
If you want to scale sustainably, your org needs both:
✅ You making consistently great decisions
✅ Your team learning how to do the same
🔗 Learn more about the process of decision making in our three part series:
Want to Build a Team That Can Think, Decide, and Win?
If your team executes well but can’t navigate ambiguity, you don’t need more frameworks—you need decision-makers.
Our High Achiever Leadership Development Experience installs the mindsets, models, and systems that help leaders:
Make better calls
Transfer decision power without losing control
Create scalable clarity in fast-moving orgs
🎯 BONUS: Want to fix decision gridlock in the middle of your org? Download “The Secret to Scaling” and learn why decision velocity—not just alignment—is the bottleneck for most growing companies.
