There’s a line from Game of Thrones that has stayed with me over the years. Ned Stark said “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”
A brutal image. But an important lesson nonetheless.
Ned made sure that if he condemned someone to their death, he was the one who carried it out. He didn’t outsource the hard part.
I think about this whenever I see leaders disconnected from the impact of their own decisions. It happens at every level – a country that wages a war the leader won’t fight, a large organization that hands down a mandate it won’t implement, and another where a leader makes a difficult call affecting real people by firing off someone else’s shoulders.
Sometimes, the test of a decision maker isn’t just about the calls they make.
It’s whether they are willing to be on the front line when it lands.
A Learning a Day 