KUALA LUMPUR: Leaders should not fear failure when implementing change, but should be prepared to correct mistakes and take responsibility, former chief justice Tun Zaki Azmi said.
Ultimately, he said, effective leadership is not about being certain that every decision will be correct, but about having the courage to act, accepting responsibility for the outcome and correcting course when necessary.
“Be courageous to make decisions. You have to make, otherwise don’t be a leader. It’s better to make a wrong decision rather than not make a decision,” Zaki said in his keynote address on “Courage and Leadership” at the 2026 Human Resources Leadership, Talent & Top Employers Forum today.
He said failing to make a decision could leave matters unresolved indefinitely, making decisiveness is an important quality of effective leadership.
At the same time, Zaki said decisiveness did not mean leaders should make decisions without first understanding the problems they were trying to address.
“Before one makes a decision, you must know the problem. You must know why the problem existed,” he said.
Drawing on his experience as chief justice, Zaki said he took a hands-on approach when he was appointed to the position, going to the ground to understand the problems facing the judiciary rather than relying solely on reports.
He added there were about 340 courts at the time and he visited around 50 to 60 of them, examining filing rooms, looking at individual files and questioning why cases and documents had remained unresolved.
“I went down to the ground, court by court,” Zaki said, adding that the approach enabled him to identify repeated postponements as one of the major causes of delays in the courts.
He subsequently issued an instruction to judges and magistrates to carefully consider applications for postponements and proceed with cases once they had been fixed, unless there were legitimate grounds for a delay.
The move faced resistance from lawyers, who argued that justice could be compromised if cases were pushed through too quickly.
However, Zaki said the judiciary maintained the policy while allowing postponements where there were proper reasons.
He said the approach eventually resulted in cases moving faster, while also putting greater pressure on lawyers, prosecutors and other parties to ensure they were properly prepared for court proceedings.
Zaki said the experience demonstrated that leaders had to be willing to make difficult decisions and stand by them, while remaining prepared to address problems that emerged during implementation.
He also cited the establishment of a dedicated commercial court as an example of how organisations could introduce major changes while limiting the risks associated with failure.
Zaki said the judiciary initially implemented the initiative in Kuala Lumpur before expanding it more widely.
“Don’t try to implement throughout your company. You may fail,” he said, adding that introducing a new initiative on a smaller scale allowed leaders to identify what was missing or did not work, make the necessary corrections and subsequently expand the initiative.
“If it happens in a small place, quietly, you can correct what is wrong, what is missing, and then move on,” he said, emphasising that this approach was preferable to implementing a major change across an entire organisation or country at once, where problems could become more difficult to rectify.
The commercial court initiative was subsequently expanded after the initial implementation, he said.
Zaki acknowledged that some of his own decisions had subsequently proved to be wrong, but said leaders should be prepared to accept their mistakes than allowing fear of failure to paralyse them.
He also stressed the importance of delegation, saying leaders need,to give capable subordinates sufficient authority to carry out their responsibilities while remaining accountable for the overall outcome.
“A leader must have courage enough to delegate, delegate to his subordinate and give that mandate to somebody to do. And you check whether he’s doing it right or wrong. If he fails, I take the responsibility,” Zaki said.
