How to recover from a bad leadership decision

Have you ever made a bad decision? I know I make plenty of them…every day… sometimes all before breakfast!

The trick is to figure out how to move on. Bad decisions are rarely fatal, unless they get you stuck in a place where you feel all your options are gone and you can’t bring yourself to partner with the Holy Spirit and others to find solutions that move you forward.

In Acts 27, Paul is telling the crew of the ship he is on that they could have avoided the disaster they were facing had they done something different in the first place. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. How easy is it to look backwards and say, “could’ve—should’ve—would’ve”? A decision that is originally made with gusto might later cause us to assess the negative impact of that decision with fear and trepidation.

Honest assessment, of course, is healthy, but debilitating fear over poor choices is not! Even if you have steered your boat into a shipwreck, there is still the need for courageous leadership that will keep everyone on board not only alive, but also still heading in the same direction.

So if we discover we have made a bad leadership decision that has become a catastrophe, how do we respond?

1. Assess reality (vs. 17-21): Faith and reality are not in opposition; faith is the ability to believe God’s word in the middle of reality. There is no way to recover from a bad decision if you can’t see that it was bad! Embrace the full impact of your choices; then trust that God has a redemptive way forward and look for what that is.
2. Take courage (vs. 22, 25 & 36): Hope is built on the foundation of character that comes from the perseverance required to get through our suffering (Rom 5:3-5), and perseverance in suffering takes courage. Someone said that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. After recognizing you have made a bad decision, press in, press on, and press forward towards that which is truly important.
3. Hear and believe a word from God (vs. 23-24): As Christian leaders we are always finding ourselves doing course corrections. The Holy Spirit will speak to us both in little and in big things, challenging us to “repent” (think different; turn the other direction; admit fault) and obediently follow what the Lord is saying. He will show us a way through, but we have to hear Him, believe Him, and obey Him to make it to the other side.
4. Embrace the consequences (vs. 22 & 41): The cargo was jettisoned; the ship was run aground and destroyed; valuable resources were lost; but everyone made it to shore alive. Sometimes we have made decisions that inevitably cause loss. However, God is less concerned with our ships and cargo than He is with our lives and the lives of those we influence. Had they been fixated on saving the ship, this crew would have lost both the boat and all the people aboard. But because they agreed to embrace the inevitable consequences the people were saved and the message of the Gospel continued.
5. Take the next step forward (28:1-10): Don’t get fixated on the bad choice that has been made; there is not a thing you can do to change what has happened in the past. Instead, figure out how to make healthy decisions moving forward. Though the shipwreck threw a wrench into their travel plans, ultimately a whole island was exposed to the message of the Kingdom of God.

What bad leadership decisions are you beating yourself up about? How can you start to move forward today?