A few years ago, I approved a structural change that was directionally right.
It meant clearer ownership, quicker decisions, and accountability that was easier to see. I could defend it in a meeting without breaking a sweat.
What I misread was the moment.
The team had just been through another reorg, and everyone was still finding their footing. Trust wasn’t broken, but it wasn’t resilient either. What I meant as forward motion landed as one more disruption before people had really caught their breath.
The idea wasn’t wrong. The timing was.
That experience forced me to admit something uncomfortable. Most leadership mistakes I’ve made weren’t about strategy or intelligence. They were about timing.
We tend to obsess over what decision to make. We build cases, gather data, debate options. Far less attention goes to whether the organization is ready for that decision now.
Researchers have a language for this. Studies on “temporal leadership” show that teams perform better when leaders manage pace deliberately, aligning rhythms, sequencing work, and paying attention to how deadlines collide. Cognitive research on recognition-primed decision-making suggests that what we call instinct is usually pattern recognition built over time. Experienced leaders don’t see the future; they’ve just seen similar situations before.
That’s helpful, but it leaves a practical problem.
What if you haven’t seen it before?
What if you’re new to the role, or the scale, or the level of consequence?
Timing Shows Up Before Metrics Do
One thing I’ve learned is that timing errors rarely appear as dramatic failures at first. They show up as small signals.
Conversations start circling instead of moving. The same concern appears in different rooms. People ask for clarity on something that was already documented. Execution slows, but nobody can point to a blocker.
Those are early signs that something is misaligned. Not broken, just out of sync.
When you’ve been around long enough, you start to notice these patterns without consciously naming them. That’s what instinct feels like. It’s memory doing work.
If you’re trying to figure out whether you’ve developed that sense yet, a few questions help:
Can you think of a decision you intentionally delayed, and explain why waiting improved the outcome? Can you think of one you pushed too early and had to unwind? When something goes wrong, can you trace it back to a moment where the sequence mattered more than the content?
If those answers are fuzzy, that’s normal. Pattern recognition is built, not granted.
How to Build the Reps Faster
You don’t have to wait ten years to develop better timing. You can compress the learning cycle.
After a major decision, revisit it later, not to relitigate the outcome, but to examine the timing. Was the organization ready? What signs did you ignore? What signs did you overreact to? Write those down. Over time, you’ll build your own library of moments.
When something “feels off,” don’t just act on it or dismiss it. Capture it. Predict what you think will happen. Come back in a few weeks and see if you were right. That simple habit sharpens instinct because it forces you to test it.
And borrow experience when you can. When you talk to someone who’s been through similar cycles, don’t just ask what they would do. Ask when they would do it. What tipped them off that the moment had arrived? What did it look like right before things went sideways?
Temporal Debt
There’s another layer here that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Every timing decision creates a future consequence.
Sometimes you move quickly because momentum matters more than stability. Sometimes you delay because the organization needs room to absorb change. Both can be right.
But when you solve present pressure by borrowing stability from the future, you’ve taken on what I think of as temporal debt.
You ship before alignment and promise to clean it up later. You promote to fill a gap and hope growth catches up. You postpone a hard conversation because morale is already thin.
None of those are automatically wrong. The risk is pretending they’re free.
If you choose to borrow from the future, say it out loud. What are we trading? When will this come due? Who will be holding it when it does?
Accounting for timing costs is part of the job.
A Quick Warning About “Bad Timing”
There’s a trap here.
“The timing isn’t right” can be a polished way of saying, “I don’t want to deal with this.”
High performers are especially good at rationalizing delay. We tell ourselves we’re waiting for the right window, when what we’re really waiting for is less discomfort.
Before you postpone something, it’s worth asking a blunt question: if this conversation is necessary and will be uncomfortable no matter what, what exactly improves by waiting?
If you can’t name a concrete shift in context, new information, changed capacity, different stakeholders, you might not be practicing timing. You might be avoiding.
Temporal leadership is not hesitation. It’s choosing your moment for a reason.
Make Timing Visible
Instinct is useful, but it shouldn’t be invisible.
If timing matters, you can look for signals that reflect it.
How long does it take for a strategic decision to show up in actual behavior? When a problem starts surfacing in conversations, how quickly does leadership respond? How often do major decisions require rework because they were rushed or forced? What happens to team sentiment after a significant change?
You don’t need a complicated dashboard. You just need to notice whether your timing choices consistently reduce friction or create more of it.
The Long View
Every leader operates across multiple timelines at once.
There’s the immediate pressure, incidents, deadlines, visible noise. There’s the operational layer, habits, incentives, systems that compound quietly. And there’s the longer arc, what remains after you move on.
The hardest decisions are rarely about what to do. They’re about which timeline you’re optimizing for.
You won’t get timing perfect. Nobody does.
But you can get better at seeing patterns earlier. You can get better at naming trade-offs. You can make your reasoning explicit so others learn how to see it too.
If you stepped away tomorrow, would your team know not just what to do, but when to do it?