Making decisions is at the heart of what managers do.

That’s why one of the big things that gets all-too-many managers into trouble is NOT making a decision when one is desperately needed, as so many Yahoo workers discovered during the disastrous reign of CEO Jerry Yang. Yang was a terribly indecisive general who fiddled around and failed to make the kind of basic management decisions that the troops needed to help move the company ahead.

When he finally stepped down, everyone below him probably breathed a big sigh of relief.

But this gets to another management truism: You gotta have a strong heart, supreme confidence and some pretty big balls (as they say on the TV show Wipeout) to make your decisions in public, where everybody and their brother gets to second-guess the call.

And, that’s why I would never, ever want to be a professional umpire or referee.
Game 4 of baseball’s American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (love that name!) featured a couple of bad calls on national television—the worst by veteran major-league umpire Tim McClelland, who failed to see what was clearly right in front of him and what every television viewer could clearly see.

“Just when you thought the 2009 postseason umpiring couldn’t get any worse,” says a Yahoo Sports blogger named Duk  (and so much for transparency in the media cesspool known as the blogosphere), “Tim McClelland goes ahead and makes what ends up as the worst call—or non-call—of all time. Yes, you read that right. The worst call of all time. Not just this postseason. Not this entire season. Not this decade. Not this century. I challenge you to think of one that was worse.”

Blogger Duk goes on to eviscerate umpire McClelland for the better part of 15 paragraphs. And as a sports fan who gets tired of the histrionics of arrogant, overpaid referees (Who goes to a game to watch them preen and overwhelm the action on the field?), I believe McClelland, the crew chief of this group of umpires, deserved it.

However, this made me wonder: How would you manage if every decision you made was televised to millions of people and analyzed endlessly by an army of pundits?

This is what paralyzes the Jerry Yangs of the world. It’s the inability to make a tough decision, or sometimes, any decision at all. Yet decision-making is one of the core functions of a leader and critical if the goal is to get the maximum out of the workforce.

“Decisions … are not made well by acclimation,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker, although Drucker also said that you needed healthy disagreement to really make sound decisions in the end.

I don’t think Drucker had Major League Baseball umpires in mind when he wrote that, but he’s right. The best decisions aren’t made by a committee, but rather, by a smart and insightful manager who takes in all the relevant data before ultimately making the call.

Still, most managers don’t make that call on national television for all to see. It’s why making big decisions in the public eye isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s why major-league umpires like Tim McClelland gets paid as well as they do. It’s a thankless job on a public stage, and how many managers would want to submit to that?

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