Every board budget meeting I’ve ever attended has included at least one product that should have been killed two years ago.
Everyone in the room knows it. The margins tell the story. The team working on it is exhausted and demoralized because the market has moved on to something newer. And yet, every cycle, it shows up again in the strategic plan, right there between the growth initiatives and the innovation pipeline, like a guest who stays too late at the party.
Nobody says: “We’re keeping this because we don’t want to fire twelve people.”
Instead they say: “Let’s give it another quarter. Let’s see if the new pricing takes hold. Let’s be patient. Let’s add this to the agenda next time.”
Patience is one of the most respected words in leadership. It sounds like wisdom, steadiness, and the long-term thinking that separates great leaders from reactive ones.
Sometimes that’s exactly what patience is. There are good reasons to keep an unprofitable product. It grabs market share from a competitor, rounds out a product line, or is the entry point that makes clients want to upgrade. Those are strategic decisions, and they deserve patience to see if they are producing results.
But I’ve experienced another kind of patience that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with what you don’t want to face on the other side of the decision. The conversation you’ll have to have or person you’ll have to disappoint. It’s the scary problem that gets simple and ugly once you stop calling it complex.
That kind of patience is avoidance wearing an Armani suit.
It’s expensive because of what it teaches everyone around you, not to mention the opportunity cost of the investment. When a leader is “patient” with something that clearly isn’t working, the organization learns what’s tolerated. People calibrate to that and stop raising the flag because they’ve watched it get raised before and nothing changed. The leader’s patience becomes the ceiling on everyone else’s candor.
It’s tricky, I know. On the inside, both kinds of patience feel the same way. The leader who is being strategically patient and the leader who is avoiding a painful decision are having the same internal experience. They’re both waiting and telling themselves the timing isn’t right.
The difference I’m talking about is in the question that many leaders have asked themselves but rarely say out loud in public and try not to think about it their heads:
Am I avoiding this or waiting for the right moment?
If you can’t tell, that’s a struggle worth examining more carefully and more consciously.
So here’s a tool, and it’s blunt: Think consciously about what you’re protecting. What are you shielding by not deciding? Give it a name. Is it a relationship? Your comfort? Someone else’s feelings? A version of yourself that doesn’t make this kind of call?
If the answer is strategic, keep waiting. That’s judgment.
If the answer is personal, that’s not patience. That’s a toll you’re charging the whole organization so you don’t have to feel something unpleasant.
Leaders apply risk management to their businesses every day. They model downside scenarios and stress-test assumptions and plan for contingencies. But they rarely turn that lens on their own behavior. They rarely ask: what is my patience costing us?
The thing you keep doing more of, harder, again, hoping this time it’ll work? If it’s not the right thing, more and harder will never get you there. It just makes the waiting more expensive.
Patience is a virtue. Right up until it’s a hiding place.
You don’t need to struggle with challenges like these without a brainstorm partner who knows the struggle as well as you do: www.kathygledhill.com
And if you’d like to read a book about difficult leadership challenges, check out “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, by Ben Horowitz.
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