Managing Your Team When the C-Suite Isn’t Providing Strategic Direction

Summary:

Lauren, a VP of operations at a high-growth tech firm, was stuck. The C-suite kept stalling on key decisions, including product investments, organizational restructuring, and resource allocations. As leadership froze, accountability rolled downhill, leaving Lauren to manage confusion, stalled progress, and a restless team.

This scenario is all too common. During periods of economic uncertainty or transformation, executive indecision erodes momentum, weakens credibility, and drives high performers to disengage. While competitors move forward, stalled organizations lose time, trust, and market relevance. According to McKinsey, slow decision-making is a major driver of organizational underperformance and employee burnout. Gallup adds that unclear expectations are a leading cause of employee disengagement.

While Lauren and her peers were expected to deliver on ambitious goals, direction from above was vague or delayed. Her team began to lose steam, unsure whether to push forward or pause. “We’re driving in circles,” one team member said. “What’s the actual destination?”

In fast-moving industries and volatile markets, strategy is supposed to come from the C-level. But when it doesn’t, senior leaders must step up to translate ambiguity into clarity, maintain momentum, and keep teams focused. Because when decisions stall, it’s your leadership that keeps the organization moving forward.

Through our work advising dozens of companies in similar situations (Jenny as an executive advisor and learning and development expert and Kathryn as an executive coach and keynote speaker), we’ve identified four key strategies to lead effectively when the C-suite can’t decide.

1. Reframe requests.

Executives often hesitate and push back when faced with ideas and proposals that feel large, final, or irreversible. The hesitation usually isn’t about the idea itself, but the perceived risk of saying yes. Reframing a request as a low-risk, time-bound experiment is a powerful way to reduce that friction. This gives decision-makers the chance to approve something small, get feedback, and reassess—without committing to the full plan up front.

Instead of saying: “We need to approve the full plan now.”

Try: “Let’s launch a 30-day pilot to gather insights before scaling.”

We coached Lauren to use this exact approach when her customer retention proposal was met with executive resistance. Her original pitch felt too high stakes, so she repositioned it as a short, insight-driven pilot. That subtle shift lowered the psychological barrier and unlocked faster alignment.

To guide this shift, we leveraged Amazon’s Type 1 vs. Type 2 decision-making framework, a tool designed to accelerate progress while managing risk:

Type 1 decisions are high-stakes, irreversible “one-way doors” that require careful deliberation due to their lasting impact.
Type 2 decisions are low-risk, reversible “two-way doors” that can be made quickly, often by individuals or small teams, because they’re easy to revisit or revise.

The mistake many organizations make is treating the reversible as irreversible— overanalyzing, overprocessing, and slowing down unnecessarily. That’s when innovation stalls and agility dies. Shifting the narrative from “this is a commitment” to “this is a learning opportunity” reduces the perceived risk, restores momentum, and allows you to move forward without fear of long-term consequences.

2. Quantify the cost of inaction.

Indecision has a cost, and it’s often higher than the perceived risk of moving forward. According to McKinsey, slow decision-making wastes over 500,000 manager days annually, costing Fortune 500 companies around $250 million in lost wages annually.

Thus, one of the most effective ways to overcome hesitation is to make that cost visible. Use real data to demonstrate how delays are affecting business performance, employee morale, or competitive advantage. When you tie stalled decisions to measurable risks like missed revenue, rising attrition, or timeline slippage, you shift the conversation from fear of failure to fear of falling behind.

Instead of saying: “This delay is frustrating the team.”

Try: “Every month of delay costs us $200K in lost productivity and pushes our launch timeline out by six weeks.”

We helped Lauren put this strategy into action. As a result of shifting priorities, approval kept stalling on the high-impact customer retention plan her team had developed. Rather than escalate frustration, she came to the executives’ table with hard numbers: $180K in monthly churn losses and a 12% drop in engagement linked to the delay. By reframing the cost of inaction as the greater risk, she shifted the executives’ mindset and secured the green light within a week.

3. Keep your team moving and motivated.

When things are stuck at the top, your job is to keep your team energized and focused on what’s within reach. Don’t let indecision at the executive level create paralysis on the front lines. Shift your team’s attention to progress they can own. Prioritize operational wins, celebrate small victories, and be transparent about what’s delayed and why. In these moments, your role becomes translator, motivator, and shock absorber.

Help your team turn frustration into progress by setting clear, achievable short-term goals that connect to broader outcomes. Offer stretch assignments to challenge high performers and show trust in their growth potential. When roadblocks arise, use them as learning opportunities, encouraging experimentation, reflection, and upskilling. This approach keeps teams engaged, builds momentum, and turns uncertainty into meaningful development.

When the budget is frozen or projects are in limbo, pivot the team’s focus to low-resource efforts that can have big impacts. For example, a marketing team might boost engagement and retention by increasing the frequency of customer emails from biweekly to weekly, or an operations team could audit existing workflows to improve efficiency and readiness once company resources are more robust.

Momentum isn’t just about moving forward; it’s about finding meaningful ways to make progress even in uncertain times. Keep reinforcing the “why” behind your team’s work, and model resilience by helping them channel frustration into creativity.

4. Build influence up and across.

To accelerate decisions, start managing sideways and upward. Clarify how you’re positioned to influence behavior, even without final decision-making authority. Build coalitions with trusted peers and cross-functional stakeholders who share your concerns and may already have the ear of your boss or target leader. Align your messaging, elevate shared priorities through consistent, constructive communication, and avoid delivering open-ended problems. Instead, offer well-framed options with clear trade-offs, timelines, and resource implications.

Lauren rallied her peers in product and finance to align on a proposal before bringing it to the CMO. By showing unified support and presenting a single recommendation with data-backed rationale and clear resource implications, they accelerated buy-in and avoided another month of back-and-forth.

Your goal is to equip others ahead of key meetings so they can speak on your behalf and reinforce your point of view. Influence scales when you’re not the only voice in the room. Upward influence isn’t about control; it’s about clarity, credibility, and consistency. You may not own the final decision, but you can shape the conversation.

. . .

Strategic indecision at the top is a leadership stress test but also a proving ground. In these moments, your ability to stay focused, reframe risk, and keep the organization moving becomes your superpower. To lead through executive paralysis without losing momentum, you must do more than wait. You must connect the dots between commitments, actions, and outcomes. Help others see not just what’s stalled, but what’s still possible. Because leadership isn’t just about making decisions. It’s about how you lead through the space between them.

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