Evgenia Trapeznikova, HR Director at Wilco Wealth Management, spoke at The Cost of Leadership, the 13th Annual Regional HR Conference in Yerevan, where she led the anti-panel The Cost of Decision Making.
A conversation, not a lecture
Rather than presenting ready answers, Evgenia invited the participants to discuss together questions built around the real dilemmas the leaders in the room were facing. She invited them to weigh what hurts a team and a business more: a wrong decision, or no decision at all. The audience was asked to name, in their own words, what makes decision-making hard.
Key takeaways:
Every decision has a cost
Evgenia invited the audience to look at decisions through what they cost. Some costs can be counted: time, resources, the alternative given up. Others are harder to see. She described the cost of certainty: the moment a decision is made, every other version of events closes, and the leader takes on responsibility for this one alone. And she pointed to the cost of not deciding, which can feel like nothing is being paid, while the bill keeps growing for others as uncertainty, stalled processes and waiting. In her framing, the question is not whether to pay, but whether we are willing to see what we are paying with.
Complex decisions exist at every level
Experience does not make hard decisions disappear. What changes with seniority is why a decision is hard, not whether it is.
Start by understanding what makes it hard
Evgenia suggested that the first step is to understand what exactly makes a particular decision difficult. She outlined six possible sources: attitude to the task, not knowing how, lacking the tools, the emotional weight, unclear risk, and fear of being wrong. For each, she encouraged leaders to ask themselves a guiding question, such as “Why do I feel this way about the decision?” or “What will happen if this turns out to be a mistake?”, and then decide whether to mitigate the difficulty, avoid it or work through it. The answers, she noted, will not make the decision for the person, but they show what is needed to make it.
From stuck to decided
To bring it together, Evgenia proposed a simple sequence:
- Name what is making it hard
- See what is missing to decide
- Gather the data, the tools and the support
- Prepare a scenario for action
- Decide, deliberately rather than perfectly
Thinking it through together
Another question raised was whether a leader should carry a difficult decision alone, whether its cost can be shared, and when a second opinion is needed. According to Evgenia, leaders do not have to carry the full weight by themselves. However, sharing the weight of decision-making does not mean shifting responsibility or passing the blame. The final accountability always stays with the leader. Instead, having the right partner, including HR, gives the leader someone to think things through with: they offer a less attached perspective, a read on risk and timing, a look at process and precedent, and a way to pressure-test a call before it is final. When it comes to managing risk, she suggested the same discipline: break the decision down, name who and what it touches, clarify the consequences and who can act on them, and find the right person to work it through with.
Prepared, not perfect
Evgenia’s closing message was to stop aiming for the perfect decision and aim for a prepared, responsible one. As she put it, the goal was never to make hard decisions feel simple, but to give people a place to start.
Through sessions like this, Wilco continues to shape regional and global conversations on leadership and organizational growth.
