Sunk cost bias: The hidden tax on leadership

Winter brings reflection — evaluating products, people and systems for better planning. Often, we evaluate every detail to the point of exhaustion and over-engineering, creating plans with milestones we haven’t earned yet.

I’ve not only seen superintendents design elaborate intern rotational programs complete with learning modules and mentorship structures — before they’ve retained a single intern past their first season. By the way, I’ve done this myself! 

The infrastructure feels professional. It signals seriousness. But you’re building for a level of execution you haven’t achieved and team alignment you haven’t earned yet.

This isn’t preparation. It’s a premature commitment.

Think of this scenario: you promoted your longtime irrigation tech to assistant superintendent because they were loyal and knew the course inside and out. You spend three months teaching them how to manage

disease pressure, walking greens together every morning, explaining thresholds and treatment timing. But when you’re not there, they still wait for you to make the call.

You invest hours coaching them on pre-shift organization and task delegation, but every morning the crew is standing around waiting for you to tell them what to do.

There’s a fine line between developing talent and subsidizing misalignment.

Here’s what makes it insidious in golf course operations: you can always justify one more explanation. The turf is complicated. The timing is critical. Surely if you just show them one more time, invest one more Saturday morning walking the property together, send them to one more workshop, it will click.

Six months in, it’s clear they don’t want to manage people; they want to fix things. The irrigation systems, the technical challenges, the equipment troubleshooting … that’s where they come alive. Managing crew conflicts? Planning workflows? Delegating tasks? That drains them.

But instead of having an honest conversation about fit, you keep training them into leadership. You justify: “They just need more time. They’re still learning. They’ve been here 10 years; I owe them this opportunity.”

Meanwhile, unfinished decisions are not neutral. They drain focus, slow momentum and quietly raise the cognitive tax on every other decision you make.

This assistant isn’t just underperforming their role. They occupy mental space in every pre-tournament conversation, every crew meeting, every planning session. You’re managing around them constantly, building the spray plan yourself, handling member interactions they should own and running interference with the crew.

These unresolved situations compound. Your high performers notice. They watch you give this person their fifth chance while they’re executing flawlessly on their first. They see you managing around problems instead of through them. And they recalibrate their effort to match the standards they see you actually enforce rather than the ones you claim to hold.

You justify this not for the betterment of the other person, but because your identity is tied to being right. If this promotion doesn’t work out, it feels like a reflection on your judgment. Judgment isn’t something you pre-build. It’s something you earn by making decisions and living with the consequences. 

Here are some examples I have used — and also had to relearn over and over again.

Define success in advance: “By July 1, you’ll manage all routine fertility applications independently — planning, calibration and execution — with me only reviewing the plan, not building it. By September, you’ll run pre-shift meetings and delegate daily tasks without my input. If we’re not seeing that level of ownership and execution, we’ll talk about whether this role is the right fit.”

Set deadlines that force truth: A 90-day checkpoint isn’t arbitrary. It’s long enough to see patterns, and short enough to prevent a full season of misalignment. Do they take ownership or wait to be told? Do they solve problems or surface them?

Place people where they actually fit: Not where you want them to fit. Where they create momentum now.

This assistant might be exceptional as your senior irrigation technician or equipment systems specialist. The role they excel in isn’t less valuable — it’s just different. And insisting they stay in a role where they’re misaligned doesn’t serve them, the team or the course.

Fit isn’t about worth. It’s about function. Misfit isn’t failure. Leaving it unresolved is.

The hardest evolution in leadership isn’t learning new agronomic techniques or management frameworks. It’s letting go of the need to be right about past decisions.

High-performance leadership requires the humility to say: “That made sense then. It doesn’t now. We’re moving on.”

When you finally have a conversation, such as “I think we both know this assistant role isn’t the right fit, but I see you thriving as our senior technical specialist,” the relief is mutual. They get to do what they’re great at. You get clarity. The team gets structure.

No drama. No justification. Just clean calls and forward motion.

If your operation feels heavier than it should, ask yourself:

• Where am I over-invested beyond proof?
• Where am I waiting instead of deciding?
• Where am I protecting identity instead of momentum?

The tax isn’t the decision you got wrong. It’s how long you let it compound before you correct it.  Now, you earned better judgment. 

Tyler Bloom is a workforce and leadership consultant and principal owner of Bloom Golf Partners.