There Is No Compiler for Leadership

There is no compiler for leadership.

You don’t get a green checkmark when you make a decision.
You don’t get a warning when you’re about to ship a bad one.
And you almost never get immediate feedback.

Most leadership decisions take weeks or months to play out.

By the time the outcome is clear, something else has already moved on.

That’s where things get dangerous.

Your memory is not a neutral observer. It edits. It smooths. It lies.
You’ll convince yourself that you “knew this would happen all along,” even when you didn’t.

Not because you’re dishonest.
Because that’s how the brain works.

Without a feedback loop, learning turns into storytelling.

The Invisible Work

A lot of leadership work is invisible.

The context you weighed.
The tradeoffs you considered.
The pressure you felt.
The reasons you made the call when you did.

None of that shows up in the outcome alone.

When things go well, you get credit.
When things go poorly, you get hindsight.

What you don’t get is a clear signal about whether your decision-making was sound.

The Missing Loop

Engineers have feedback loops everywhere.

Code compiles or it doesn’t.
Tests pass, or they don’t.
Systems tell you when something is broken.

Leadership doesn’t work like that.

So if you want to get better, you have to manufacture your own loop.

The simplest way I’ve found is boring and uncomfortable.

Write the decision down.
Write what you think will happen.
Set a date to come back.
Then actually come back.

Not every week. Not forever. Once.

That moment, the reckoning, is where learning happens.

Outcomes Over Hours

This isn’t about productivity.
It isn’t about working harder or tracking time.

It’s about outcomes over hours.

Did the decision do what you thought it would do?
If not, why?

Were you wrong about the problem?
The constraints?
The people?

Or were you right and just unlucky?

You can’t answer those questions if the original thinking is gone.

A Simple Tool

I got tired of pretending I’d remember all of this.

So I built a simple decision log to force the habit.

It’s a printable journal and a Notion template.
Same structure. Same questions. No fluff.

If this resonates, you can find it here:
👉 https://mullinsnick8.gumroad.com/l/bihzpk

Use it or don’t. The tool isn’t the point.

The point is closing the loop.

Closing

Leadership without feedback feels like intuition.
Sometimes it’s skill. Sometimes it’s luck.

If you don’t track your decisions, you’ll never know which is which.