Leading Greats #175

January's decision that turns out wrong reads as information. But by July:

Author

Ronnie Kinsey, MBA
July 28, 2026

The same mistake stops reading as timing and starts reading as a pattern. I've watched this with nearly every executive I've coached this year.

A miscall in April gets a shrug and a plan to correct course. The same size miscall now gets a closed door. Nothing about the decision changed. The runway did.

I coached a client who missed a quarterly target early in their career and got a five minute check-in, nothing more.

Later, during this same stretch of the year, they missed by roughly the same margin and ended up in a two hour review with people who don't usually weigh in on a single quarter.

Same math, same variance, different tolerance for how much time was left to fix it.

Nobody explains this part when you're coming up. Judgment doesn't get graded on its own. It gets graded against the clock.

Right now, every call carries that weight whether anyone names it or not. The plan you approve this month has fewer quarters left to absorb a miss.

Sign off on a number now, and there's less runway to fix it if it's wrong.

I've sat across from executives who kept making the same quality of decisions they'd made all year, and started getting a different reaction from their board, their peers, their team.

Their judgment hadn't moved at all. What shifted was how much time was left to be right.

Ask yourself this before your next sign-off. If you'd made this exact call in March, would anyone have questioned it?

When the answer is no, the decision was never the issue. The clock is.

If your next decision is one you'll have to defend with less runway to fix it than you had in March, let's talk.

I've coached executives through exactly this stretch of the year. I can help you make the call the timeline now demands.

I have been there. I can help.

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Founder | CEO | Executive & Leadership Coach, MBA, PCC

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