Beyond the Data

The Practice of Good Leadership Judgment

We have seen this more than once. Leaders make up their minds about a decision, believe they have thought it through and are ready to take action.

In one instance, a hospital CEO colleague had decided to replace his contracted group of anesthesiologists and sought input about the decision. This is not a small move. Replacing a contracted hospital-based group of doctors is one of the most consequential and politically charged decisions a hospital leader can make. But this CEO was confident in his choice. When pressed on whether he had the organizational alignment he needed, whether his medical staff leadership was fully behind him and the groundwork had been laid, he went quiet. “Probably not,” he said. To his credit, he waited, did the work that was needed, and a year or two later made the change successfully. This was a judgment call, and it turned out to be the difference between a potentially disastrous situation and success.

For decades the assumption in most organizations has been that better information produced better decisions. Build the right systems, hire the right analysts, get the right data to the right people and good outcomes would follow. Today, we see artificial intelligence (AI) taking this assumption to its logical extreme. Huge amounts of information are now available and arriving faster than most leaders can meaningfully absorb. This has exposed something that the best leaders have always known: Data and information are not judgment. The person making the call must decide what all the information means, what may be missing and what needs to happen.

A More Complicated Story

One of the reasons the judgment of leaders is so important these days is because AI is not delivering the bias-free information originally predicted. It is well documented that humans are biased decision-makers. Our emotions can interfere with our judgment. We also have tendencies that shape our perceptions and decisions. So, it is no surprise that some of the early promise of AI was appealing. We could remove or at least reduce the biases in decision-making if we removed the human from the equation.

But the research is telling another story.

AI is demonstrating biases in its own decision-making. For instance, when AI systems have been fed information generated by another AI along with information generated by a human and asked to combine the data and draw a conclusion, the AI places a greater value on the information generated by the other AI. This may just be the tip of the iceberg. Bias may be lurking within AI systems in ways we do not yet understand. Leaders handing over decision-making to AI, assuming the output is cleaner than their own thinking, may be magnifying the bias problem.

What Good Judgment Actually Requires

In our view, good judgment is not a personality trait or some inherent quality built into one’s DNA. It is a discipline developed through practice. What follows are the core components of good judgment. Rather than a formula, this is a way of thinking that the best leaders build into how they work.

The basis of good judgment starts with trust. Every decision a leader makes either builds or erodes the confidence of the people around them. Leaders who understand this treat every call, large or small, as a moment that adds to or subtracts from the trust placed in them. Trust is built through consistency over time. Keep your word, be honest about what you do and do not know, and be transparent with people even when the news is hard to deliver.

Good judgment is also inextricably linked to an organization’s mission. Is what we are about to do consistent with why this organization exists? That question alone eliminates a surprising number of bad ideas before they gain momentum.

Part of what anchors good judgment to mission is the discipline of thinking through consequences before acting. Who will be affected by this decision and how? What is the sequence of events that follows once we commit? What are the unintended consequences we have not yet considered? Leaders who ask these questions before they move are not being indecisive. They are doing the work that separates a good decision from one that simply felt right in the moment.

Consider, for instance, a merger situation. While the instinct here is often to move fast and sort out the impact on people later, this is a common formula for exactly the kind of instability that leads to failed mergers.

Good judgment also lives in the relationships you hold with the people around you. The leader who makes every significant call in isolation is making decisions, but not necessarily exercising good judgment. Getting honest input requires that the people around you feel safe enough to give it. If your team is telling you only what they think you want to hear, the problem is not them. Leaders create a safe environment by making it clear through their own actions that disagreement is welcome and contrary views are not only tolerated but necessary. There is a meaningful difference between building consensus and managing by consensus. The first makes you better informed. The second leaves you waiting for the group instead of leading it.

None of this can be fully learned from a book or a framework alone. Judgment improves with experience. Leaders get better at making decisions over time because they have lived through enough consequential choices to recognize patterns, anticipate reactions and catch themselves before they repeat old mistakes. There is no substitute for that and no shortcut to getting there.

That is what the CEO with the anesthesia group skipped. He had information and a seemingly solid rationale, but he had not considered the full organizational landscape he was about to change. Because his medical staff leadership was not aligned, the groundwork had not been laid. Moving forward would likely have triggered exactly the kind of institutional crisis that could cause a CEO to lose their job and potentially disrupt patient care. It only took a few well-pointed questions to redirect his attention toward better understanding the situation and what he needed to do in advance to be successful. This kind of perspective shift caused him to question his confidence and pause before moving forward. Unchecked confidence of this sort is one of the most common roots of poor leadership decisions.

When Emotion Takes the Wheel

Another factor that derails even the most experienced leaders is emotion. While our feelings and reactions and those of our team can provide information, we need to be wary of when our judgment is being distorted. Anger can limit openness. Fear can trigger a need for action. A sense of urgency can push someone to act impulsively. In the middle of a crisis, the mood of the room can feel like a signal when it is nothing more than noise.

Leaders must have the discipline to step outside their impulses and treat a situation as an observer would rather than as someone caught in the middle of it. We need to ask ourselves, What am I not seeing here? Situations often are not as they first appear. Leaders who have learned to pause before that first impulse hardens into a decision make better calls and have fewer calls they later regret. Emotion can activate the very distortions in thinking that careful judgment is designed to prevent.

None of this means AI does not have a place in our organizations. It does. In health care, we are already seeing what it can do when it is used well. The nursing shortage is real, and AI is helping expand what clinical staff can accomplish in ways that benefit patients. What matters is how leaders engage with it. We want our physicians to consider what AI has to say, but we want the doctor making the final call. A physician who weighs what an algorithm recommends and then decides differently based on what they know about a patient is using technology instead of being used by it. That distinction applies to every leader in every organization. Using AI well is itself a judgment call, and the leader is the one who has to make it.

What we have described here is not a new idea. Great leaders have always needed to know their people, stay anchored to their mission, manage their own emotions and build the kind of trust that makes honest input possible. What is new is the environment they are operating in. Leaders now have more information, more speed and more complexity than any previous generation faced. That knowledge of how to navigate it lives in the leader and in the relationships and experience they built over time. In the end, good judgment and the integrity that goes with it is not a feature of a system or an output of an algorithm. It is, instead, the most essential thing a leader offers the organization they serve.

Categories: Business