What Do Leaders Change When the Old Way Stops Working?
The hours still work. The discipline still works. The results start to slip anyway.
When the old way of operating stops working after a long season of load, the returns I have studied involved two kinds of change: something small and daily that belongs to the leader, and a different relationship to the load itself.
I am Sahar Andrade, MB.BCh, a Neuroleadership Coach and Forbes Coaches Council member. Executive decision fatigue is real as a symptom: decision quality can drift across a long run of decisions. What leaders change in response is where the story turns.
What does it look like when the old way stops working?
One leader's story, as it was told: he had run companies for twenty years. He had never once gone for a run. The second one started after the first one stopped working.
Most leaders never say "my old way stopped working." They say it in smaller pieces. The fatigue reaches the smallest choices: what to eat, which email to open first. Or, twenty months into a senior role, they notice that what carried them in month one no longer does.
The old way did not fail on day one. Push harder, stay later, answer faster, carry more. It worked for years. So when it stops working, the leader rarely blames the method. They blame themselves.
That is the misreading. This is not a discipline problem. It is a load problem.
What does executive decision fatigue actually do to judgment?
The part that holds up is behavioral. In a study of financial analysts who issue several forecasts in a single day, Hirshleifer, Levi, Lourie and Teoh (NBER Working Paper 24293) found that forecast accuracy declined over the course of the day as the number of forecasts already issued increased. The more forecasts an analyst issued, the more likely they were to take shortcuts: herding toward the consensus, reissuing their own earlier forecasts, rounding the number.
The part that does not hold up is the fuel-tank story. The idea that willpower is a tank that every decision drains was tested in two large replication efforts, one with 23 labs and 2,141 participants and one with 36 labs and 3,531 participants. Both found effects near zero for that depletion idea. What survives is the drift, not the tank.
The analyst study measured one day. Leaders live seasons. My inference, labeled as inference, is that when the long run of decisions stretches across months, the drift and the shortcuts can quietly become the new normal. And it does not stay in one head. Decision load rises, a leader's openness drops, the team goes quiet, information stops flowing, and decision quality can drop further.
Is the answer to start running?
No. The running is the entrance to the story, not the lesson.
Nothing in the decision research says a run fixes judgment drift, and I am not claiming it does. What the story shows is that something changed. The run did not replace the companies. It replaced a way of operating that had run out. Then one part of his day belonged to something else.
In my experience, when the old way stops working, pushing harder with the old way is rarely the move that helps.
What do leaders actually change?
Here is what I see in the leader accounts I study. I am naming what leaders did, not handing out a routine.
The first change is small and daily. A walk. A pool. A few quiet minutes before the day begins. A run, for one leader who had never run. The activity matters less than three things about it: the leader chose it, it happened every day, and it did not belong to the work.
The second change matters more. The returns that seemed to hold changed something in the structure of the work, or in how the leader related to it. How much they carried alone. Which decisions were theirs. What they stopped calling an emergency.
Say a leader has approved every client proposal personally for ten years. The company is five times bigger now. Changing the relationship to the load might mean deciding that this decision no longer belongs to that leader.
And in the middle of a long day, when the drift shows up, one slow breath before the next decision. Then decide.
Where does AI fit into the load?
The load is not standing still. According to the KPMG 2025 U.S. CEO Outlook, "50% of CEOs agree managers in the business will be primarily responsible for managing the performance of AI agents rather than HR and IT departments."
In my opinion, the leaders to watch are the ones who decide on purpose which outputs they check personally, which they trust, and which they hand back. The tool can add decisions or remove them. The leader's relationship to the load decides which.
Where does this go next?
For the anchor on judgment under load, read Why Do Smart Executives Stop Trusting Their Own Judgment?
The full episode is on AI Café Conversations: listen here. The next episode asks what happens when a leader's judgment runs on a system that has been under load for a season.
Talk it through
If you want to think through what your old way is and what might need to change, book a Clarity Call. 30 minutes. No pitch. Just clarity. Book here.
#DecisionFatigue #LeadershipUnderPressure #Neuroleadership #ExecutiveLeadership #AICafeConversations
Frequently Asked Questions
What is executive decision fatigue?
Executive decision fatigue is symptom language for what many leaders notice after a long run of decisions: choices that used to be easy start to cost something, and quality can drift toward shortcuts. In a study of financial analysts, forecast accuracy declined over the day as the number of forecasts already issued increased, and shortcuts became more common. The term describes the drift. It does not prove a single mechanism behind it.
Is decision fatigue real?
The drift appears real in some studies; the popular explanation does not hold up. Analysts' forecasts grew less accurate and more heuristic across a day of forecasting. But the idea that willpower is a fuel tank each decision drains was tested in two large multi-lab replications, with 23 labs and 2,141 participants, and 36 labs and 3,531 participants, and both found effects near zero. So decision quality can drift, but the tank story is not supported.
Does exercise fix decision fatigue?
This piece makes no such claim, and the decision research discussed here does not test it. The leader in this story started running after his old way of operating stopped working, but the run was the entrance to his change, not proof that running fixes anything. What the story shows is a change in his relationship to the load. For any health or exercise question, the right person to ask is a licensed professional who knows your situation.
Why does the old way of working stop working for leaders?
In my opinion, the old way stops working because it was built for a load that no longer exists. Pushing harder, staying later, and carrying more can work for years. Then the load changes: more decisions, more scale, more outputs to check. Across a long run of decisions, quality can drift. The method did not get worse. The conditions it was built for changed, and the leader is still running the old method on new load.
What do leaders change when the old way stops working?
In the leader accounts I study, two kinds of change stand out. The first is something small and daily that belongs to the leader, such as a walk, a pool, or a few quiet minutes. The second is a change in the relationship to the load: how much they carry alone, which decisions are theirs, and what they stop calling an emergency. These are descriptions of what leaders did, not a prescribed routine.
How is AI adding to executive decision load?
AI adds a new layer of decisions: which outputs to trust, which to check, and which to redo. According to the KPMG 2025 U.S. CEO Outlook, "50% of CEOs agree managers in the business will be primarily responsible for managing the performance of AI agents rather than HR and IT departments." Each output a leader reviews is another decision. The tool can reduce the load or add to it, depending on how deliberately the leader decides what is theirs to review.
Author's Bio
Sahar Andrade, MB.BCh, is a Neuroleadership Coach, Forbes Coaches Council member, and host of AI Café Conversations podcast (top 2% globally in search visibility). Teaching executives how the nervous system shapes leadership under pressure.
Comments