By Valeria Torres, Corporate Psychologist
The first thing I noticed was that he had stopped asking questions.
Not entirely, of course. He still asked about revenue, deadlines, performance, and execution. He still reviewed the numbers and challenged his leadership team when something didn't make sense. From the outside, very little had changed. He was running a successful company, making important decisions, and carrying the same level of responsibility he had managed for years.
But something about the way he approached uncertainty had become different.
He was reaching conclusions faster. He had less patience for explanations that challenged his initial interpretation. Decisions that once deserved a thoughtful conversation were now settled within minutes. When someone brought him an unexpected problem, his response was increasingly shaped by irritation rather than curiosity.
During one of our conversations, I asked whether he had noticed any changes in how he was making decisions.
He thought for a moment.
"I think I've just become more decisive."
That was certainly one possibility.
But as we continued talking, another explanation began to emerge. He had been operating under sustained pressure for so long that the psychological habits helping him survive his workload were beginning to influence the quality of his judgment.
He wasn't becoming less intelligent.
He was becoming less available to his own intelligence.
And that distinction matters enormously for leaders whose decisions influence companies, employees, families, and sometimes millions of dollars.
Judgment Rarely Disappears All at Once
When we imagine a leader making a poor decision, we often picture something dramatic: an impulsive acquisition, a public confrontation, a failed investment, or a strategic mistake that becomes impossible to ignore.
But executive judgment usually deteriorates more quietly.
It begins with small changes in how information is processed.
A leader becomes less interested in opposing perspectives. He starts interpreting questions as obstacles. He relies more heavily on previous experience, even when circumstances have changed. He becomes impatient with ambiguity and increasingly attracted to solutions that provide immediate relief.
None of these changes necessarily looks alarming in isolation.
In fact, some can resemble the qualities we admire in successful executives: confidence, decisiveness, speed, and the ability to act under pressure.
That is what makes the erosion difficult to recognize.
The behaviors that once contributed to success can gradually become exaggerated versions of themselves.
Confidence becomes certainty. Efficiency becomes impatience. Experience becomes rigidity. Decisiveness becomes an inability to tolerate complexity.
And because the leader continues functioning, everyone assumes his judgment remains intact.
The Mind Begins Protecting Efficiency at the Expense of Perspective
The executive brain is constantly managing competing demands.
There are financial decisions, personnel issues, negotiations, client expectations, strategic priorities, and problems that require immediate attention. For many senior leaders, the working day is not simply long. It is cognitively fragmented.
Every interruption requires a shift in attention. Every difficult conversation demands emotional regulation. Every major decision requires the mind to evaluate information, anticipate consequences, and tolerate uncertainty.
Under sustained pressure, the brain naturally begins looking for ways to reduce that demand.
It relies more heavily on familiar patterns. It favors information that is easier to process. It becomes attracted to quick conclusions because quick conclusions create a temporary sense of control.
This is not a character flaw.
It is a human response to prolonged cognitive and emotional demands.
Research on stress and executive functioning has shown that elevated stress can interfere with the cognitive processes involved in working memory, flexible thinking, and deliberate decision-making. The very capacities executives depend on most can become harder to access when pressure remains high without sufficient recovery.
The danger is that this shift often feels like increased clarity.
A complicated situation suddenly seems obvious.
An opposing argument feels unnecessary.
A decision that previously required reflection now appears straightforward.
Sometimes that clarity is genuine.
Sometimes it is the mind reducing complexity because it no longer has the capacity or patience to engage with it.
The Most Dangerous Decisions Can Feel Completely Reasonable
One of the most important things I explain to executives is that poor judgment rarely announces itself as poor judgment.
It usually arrives accompanied by a convincing explanation.
The CEO who dismisses a valuable employee may believe he is protecting accountability when he is actually reacting to accumulated frustration. The founder who refuses to change strategy may believe he is demonstrating conviction when he is protecting himself from the discomfort of admitting that his original assumptions were wrong.
An attorney may become increasingly aggressive in negotiations and interpret that aggression as competitive strength. A senior executive may stop consulting his team because he believes he has finally developed the experience to make decisions independently.
Each explanation can contain some truth.
That is precisely why these situations require psychological awareness.
Human beings are remarkably capable of constructing rational explanations for decisions influenced by emotional states. Intelligence does not eliminate this tendency. In some cases, it simply makes the explanation more sophisticated.
For a high-performing executive, the question is not whether he can justify a decision.
He almost certainly can.
The more valuable question is whether he can recognize what may be influencing his judgment before the justification begins.
Success Can Hide the Early Warning Signs
A struggling leader receives feedback quickly.
Results decline. Employees leave. Clients complain. Financial pressure becomes visible. The organization begins signaling that something needs to change.
Successful executives often have a different experience.
Their organizations can absorb the consequences of deteriorating judgment for a surprisingly long time.
A strong leadership team compensates for inconsistent decisions. Experienced employees learn to anticipate the CEO's reactions. Financial success creates room for mistakes that would be devastating in a smaller company. Long-standing relationships continue functioning even when the quality of communication begins to decline.
From the outside, the leader remains successful.
Internally, the organization may be working increasingly hard to accommodate him.
I have seen teams spend enormous amounts of energy preparing information in ways that will be easiest for an executive to receive. They delay difficult conversations until he appears to be in a better mood. They avoid presenting alternatives that might create unnecessary conflict.
Eventually, the leader begins receiving less complete information.
And incomplete information creates the conditions for even poorer judgment.
This is how a psychological pattern can become an organizational problem without anyone identifying the moment it began.
The Loss of Curiosity Is Often the First Real Warning
There is one change I pay particular attention to when working with experienced leaders.
Curiosity begins to disappear.
The executive still wants answers, but he becomes less interested in understanding.
He asks why something happened, but only long enough to identify who is responsible. He requests feedback, but responds by explaining why the other person has misunderstood the situation. He invites ideas, but quickly redirects the conversation toward the approach he already prefers.
Over time, people begin offering less.
The executive interprets the resulting silence as alignment, while his team experiences it as the safest way to operate.
A related reflection, Why Emotional Intelligence Quietly Outperforms Raw Authority, explored why leadership effectiveness depends on understanding and managing the psychological experience of the people around us. That same capacity is essential for protecting executive judgment. When a leader loses awareness of his emotional state, he may also lose awareness of how that state is shaping the information he receives, the questions he asks, and the decisions he ultimately makes.
Curiosity interrupts that process.
It creates a moment between the initial interpretation and the final conclusion.
And sometimes that moment is where good judgment survives.
You Cannot Protect Judgment Without Protecting the Person Making the Decisions
Many executives approach decision-making as a purely intellectual responsibility.
They invest in better information, stronger financial reporting, experienced advisors, and sophisticated strategic frameworks.
All of those things matter.
But the person interpreting that information is not separate from the conditions in which he lives.
A leader who has slept poorly for months, carries unresolved stress, rarely disconnects, and feels responsible for every important outcome is not approaching decisions from the same psychological position as someone with adequate recovery, emotional stability, and room for reflection.
That does not mean exhausted executives are incapable of making good decisions.
It means they are asking their minds to perform demanding work under conditions that may make that work more difficult.
I often remind high-performing men that protecting their judgment is not an indulgence. It is part of their professional responsibility.
If your decisions affect hundreds of employees, substantial financial resources, and the long-term direction of an organization, the condition of the mind making those decisions deserves the same seriousness you give to the financial health of the business.
Recovery is not simply about feeling better.
It is about remaining capable of seeing clearly.
The Discipline of Questioning Your Own Certainty
One of the executives I worked with developed a simple practice after recognizing how much his decision-making had changed under pressure.
Before making an important decision, he began asking himself three questions:
Am I responding to the actual situation, or to how I feel about the situation?
What information would make me reconsider my current position?
Would I make this same decision if I were rested, calm, and under less immediate pressure?
These questions did not eliminate difficult decisions. They did not remove uncertainty or guarantee that every outcome would be successful.
What they did was create a small amount of psychological distance between his internal state and his professional judgment.
He became more aware of when urgency was real and when it was emotional. He noticed when frustration was influencing how he interpreted another person's behavior. He became more willing to postpone decisions that did not genuinely require an immediate answer.
Most importantly, he stopped assuming that feeling certain was sufficient evidence that he was thinking clearly.
That is a form of executive discipline we rarely discuss.
Not the discipline to work harder.
The discipline to examine the mind that is doing the work.
The Decisions That Reveal What Is Happening Inside You
Executive judgment is not measured only by the quality of major strategic decisions.
It is revealed in ordinary moments.
How you respond when someone disappoints you. Whether you can listen to an explanation without preparing your rebuttal. How quickly you become defensive when challenged. Whether you recognize when a difficult day is influencing your interpretation of a person who has done nothing wrong.
These moments matter because they reveal the psychological conditions under which larger decisions are being made.
The executive who repeatedly loses patience with small problems may eventually make an unnecessarily harsh personnel decision. The leader who has become intolerant of uncertainty may prematurely commit to a strategy. The CEO who no longer feels comfortable admitting doubt may continue defending an initiative long after the evidence suggests reconsideration.
The consequences become visible later.
The psychological pattern usually begins much earlier.
The Most Important Decision May Be to Examine Your Own Judgment
I returned to the executive I mentioned at the beginning of this article several months after our initial conversation.
He had made some changes to his schedule, delegated decisions he had been unnecessarily controlling, and become more intentional about creating space before responding to difficult situations.
But the most meaningful change was something he said during one of our sessions.
"I used to think being a good leader meant trusting my judgment. Now I think it also means knowing when not to trust my first reaction."
That distinction captures an important part of executive maturity.
Experience should increase confidence, but it should also increase awareness of the conditions under which confidence becomes unreliable.
The goal is not to second-guess every decision or become hesitant in moments that require leadership.
It is to recognize that judgment is a capacity that must be protected, not a permanent quality that success guarantees.
Because the erosion of executive judgment rarely begins with a catastrophic mistake.
It begins when a capable leader stops noticing the subtle changes in how he thinks, listens, reacts, and interprets the world around him.
And by the time the consequences become obvious, the most important warning signs may have been present for years.