“Both/And” Leadership

Jack Welch once claimed that great leaders are “relentless and boring.” Good leaders are consistent in their decision making, stick to their commitments, and remain on-message. The trouble is, much as we may value consistency in our leaders, we do not live in a world that rewards it—at least not in the long term!

We all know that leaders face different challenges. They may be under pressure to improve their existing products incrementally while inventing radically in new products based on new business models or striving to reach a global network while also serving distinct local needs. Some CEOs respond by prioritizing one challenge over the other; some seek an integrative middle ground, negotiating acceptable tradeoffs that all stakeholders can obey. What those approaches have in common is that they aim to provide a stable resolution of the different challenges—the implicit assumption being that stability is what organizations need to prosper.

I profoundly cannot entirely agree with this image of leadership because it is rooted in a mischaracterization of the business environment. The challenges we focus on are not conflicting goals that invite a calculated choice or a compromise. They are fundamental paradoxes that persist over time, as today’s “long term” becomes tomorrow’s “short term.” Too much focus on one goal triggers a demand for the other, and as the business environment and the actors in it change, stability breaks down, often destroying a great deal of value and eventually culminating in a crisis that prompts a leader to impose a different order—fueling the start of another cycle.

Here is a proposal for a new model— one in which the goal of leadership is to maintain a dynamic equilibrium in the organization. Executives with this goal do not focus on being consistent; instead, they purposefully and confidently embrace the paradoxes they confront. Senior teams build dynamic equilibrium by separating the imperatives that conflict with one another to recognize and respect each one, for example, creating a separate unit to develop a new business model, while at the same time actively managing connections between them to leverage interdependencies and benefit from their synergies.

THE PROBLEM: We look to leaders to make consistent decisions, keep a steady course, and align an organization’s culture. However, leaders typically face multiple demands that conflict with one another, and it is a mistake to assume there are cut-and-dried choices.

WHY IT HAPPENS: Strategic paradoxes are mostly dilemmas that cannot be resolved. Tensions continually arise between today’s needs and tomorrow’s (innovation paradoxes), between global integration and local interests (globalization paradoxes), and between social missions and financial pressures (obligation paradoxes).

THE SOLUTION: Managers need to shift from an “either/ or” mindset to a “both/and” one by seeing the virtues of inconsistency, recognizing that resources are not always finite, and embracing change rather than chasing stability. In practical terms, this means nurturing the unique aspects of competing constituencies and strategies while finding ways to unite them.