The Leadership Skill Nobody Teaches You: Knowing When Your Own Reactions Are Influencing Decisions

You have been trained to make decisions, weigh the evidence, consider the downside and consult the people who know. Somewhere along the way, you got good enough at it that people started handing you the decisions nobody else wanted to make.

But, here’s what almost nobody teaches leaders: how to tell the difference between a decision you reasoned and responded to and a decision you reacted to. They feel identical from the inside. That is the whole problem.

Both come with confidence. Both come with clean rationale — because the mind is exceptionally good at building a sound-looking argument for a conclusion it already reached. Leadership self-awareness is the skill of catching yourself while it is happening, not three weeks later when the consequences appear.

Why reactions are so hard to see in the moment

A reaction does not show up expected. It arrives disguised and leaves you surprised. And, when something happens this way, you end up blindsided — a challenge in front of your peers, a project slipping again, a person who has used up your patience — something in you shifts before you have consciously assessed anything. Then stinking thinking tends to explain things away.

The explanation is usually reasonable. We need to move faster. She is not ready for that scope. This is a pattern with him. Every one of those might be true. The question leaders need to ask themselves to ensure self-awareness is: would I have reached this same conclusion on a different day, in a different mood, after a better week?

If the honest answer is “probably not,” the reaction is interfering with your judgment.

This is not about being calm all the time. Reactions are information — sometimes the most useful information in the room. A flare of frustration often means a boundary got crossed that genuinely matters. The goal is not to eliminate the signal. It is to read it before it drives decisions.

The Four Signs of Reacting, Not Responding

I help the leaders I coach watch for these signs. They are unique to each person, but the categories are common.

Speed. You reach a conclusion faster than the situation warrants. High-quality well-formed judgment on a complex issue rarely arrives in seconds. When it does, something else is happening.

Certainty that resists questions. Not confidence — confidence welcomes a good question. This is where a reasonable challenge feels annoying rather than useful. That irritation is a sign — and it compounds, because the higher you rise, the harder it becomes to receive honest feedback.

Escalation of language. Listen for absolutes in your own sentences. Always. Never. Everyone. He constantly. Reasoned judgment tends to sound specific and bound to the specific person, place and time. Reaction sounds over-generalized and sweeping.

The person, not the problem. You have moved from evaluating a decision to evaluating a character. When your internal sentence shifts from “this approach is not working” to “he/she is not working”, check that timing of that conclusion. It usually precedes the evidence. This is also why feedback lands better when it speaks to behavior rather than character.

A client story: the executive who almost lost his best engineer

The story below is a composite drawn from many leaders I’ve worked with — details changed, patterns real.

I worked with a senior technology leader — thoughtful, well regarded, the person the executive team trusted with the hardest calls.

He came into a session having nearly made a decision he could not fully justify. His most  technically capable engineer had pushed back on a timeline in a leadership meeting, in front of the COO. Publicly, specifically, and — he admitted when we slowed it down — correctly.

By that afternoon he had drafted a plan to move her off the project. He had reasons. She was “not collaborative.” She “did not read the room.” He was going to frame it as a development opportunity.

When we met for his coaching session, I asked him: if she had said exactly that to you privately, in your office, would you be moving her?

He sat with it for a while. Then he said no. He would have thanked her. The decision was never about collaboration. It was about being contradicted in front of the COO — and the discomfort of that moment caused him to look for a justification and find a plausible one. His rationale was internally consistent.

He did not move her. What he did instead was harder and much better: he went to her and said that she had been right, that he had been uncomfortable being corrected in front of his boss, but that the discomfort was his to manage, not hers.

That engineer is now leading a team of her own. He told me later it was the single most useful thing he had done that year — not the decision he made, but the one he caught himself about to make.

The skill was not restraint. It was noticing it in time to allow harm prevention.

How to build leadership self-awareness in practice

This is trainable. It is not a personality trait you either have or do not.

Install a delay on consequential decisions. Not every decision, and not forever — just a gap between the reaction and the action. Overnight is usually enough. If the decision still looks right in the morning, it probably is. If it looks slightly embarrassing, you just saved yourself something expensive. A mantra I often repeat to myself is “Respond rationally … rather than react personally.”

Ask the transposition question. Would I decide this the same way if it came from someone else? On a different day? If nobody had been watching? Three questions, ten seconds, and they catch a mistake before it happens.

Know your own weather. Most leaders have a small set of recurring situations that reliably pull them off center (their “buttons”). This could include being interrupted, being second-guessed publicly, a specific person, or the last hour of a long week. Identifying them in advance is most important work. You cannot manage what you have not first uncovered.

Practice composure before you need it. Steadiness under pressure is not a trait you are born with; it is a practiced state. That is exactly why I recorded Calm Confident Composure as part of the Relax & Succeed series — a guided audio program for building practiced calm before the high-stakes moment, so it is available to you when the moment arrives.

Get an outside read. The moments where your reaction is loudest are the moments your judgment is least able to pause. That is not a flaw in you; it is how it works for everyone. Which is why leaders who make consistently good calls tend to have one person they can think out loud with — someone with no stake in the outcome.

Harvard Business Review’s research on self-awareness found that although most people believe they see themselves clearly, only a small percentage actually do — and that external perspective, more than introspection, is what closes the gap. Work from the Center for Creative Leadership points the same direction: the leaders who assess themselves most accurately are the ones who have built deliberate mechanisms for it. In my coaching practice, I use the DiSC, Leadership Strengthsfinder, and the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) as well as an individualistic 360-Feedback Survey customized to their particular leadership situation.

What this protects

Every leader I have worked with can name a decision they made in a reactive moment that cost them something — a person who left, a relationship that never fully recovered, a strategy pushed through past the point where the evidence supported it.

And almost every one of them will tell you that at the time, it felt right and justified.

Leadership self-awareness is what stands between a bad hour and a decision you spend two years unwinding. It is not softness. It is the most practical protection available to someone whose judgment other people depend on.

If you want to work on this deliberately, my book Leadership Success in Spite of Stress: 20 Powerful Questions is structured entirely around this kind of inquiry. And one-on-one leadership coaching gives you the outside read that self-examination alone cannot provide.

You can book a complimentary consultation — no cost, no pressure, and you will leave with something useful either way.

Your judgment is good. This is about making sure it is your judgment doing the deciding.