How eXpansive a Leader Are You?

Mark marched into the crowded room with an arm full of folders pressed against his side. His jaw dropped, eyes bulged, and he stammered, “What are you all doing here? I came here to work.” The delighted crowd roared with laughter.

The eloquent host of this surprise party then delivered a glowing toast honoring the many accomplishments of this successful transit leader. As I glanced around the room, I marveled at how Mark had created a lifetime of relationships with lawyers, politicians, colleagues, consultants, vendors, friends, and family members. That’s when it hit me, Mark is an eXpansive leader! He knows how to stretch when he feels pulled. How about you?

In our recent analysis of 659 XLM assessments completed on 110 transportation leaders, we discovered that the competency that best correlated with leadership effectiveness was “embrace ambiguity and paradox.” No wonder Mark was such an accomplished executive. He excelled at managing uncertainty and the many conflicting demands of competing stakeholders. Unfortunately, researchers tell us that most leaders are not like Mark – they perform poorly in this critical competency. (1)

Embracing ambiguity and paradox is essential in today’s whitewater work environment because most of the challenges leaders face have multiple interpretations (ambiguous) or involve contradictory yet interrelated elements that pull in opposite directions (paradoxical). (2) Instead of stretching when they feel pulled (like Mark), many leaders under pressure narrow their focus, which leads to myopic thinking and poor decisions. (3). For example, have you ever seen leaders:

1. Concentrate on today’s crisis without keeping an eye on the future?

2. Meet the needs of one stakeholder at the expense of others?

3. Reduce training at a time when employees have time to learn?

4. Put so much time in at work that home life suffers?

Do any of these sound familiar to you? Have you experienced (or seen others suffer) the negative consequences of over-focusing on one issue of a paradox at the expense of the other, especially under stress?  

Embracing ambiguity and paradox endows leaders with the agility to respond to the rapid pace of change. Like a lion stalking its prey on the plains of the Serengeti, leaders who are highly skilled at changing gears survive. Listed below are six tips to help you be more elastic, like Mark. Adapt them to suite your style: 

1. Look through other windows. How we perceive our challenges and environment is not reality. It is our view of reality. Therefore, when dealing with a complex issue, imagine you’re on the outside of a house looking through one window into one room. You do not know what is going on throughout the room, much less the entire house. This perspective opens you to hearing from the “loyal opposition.”

2. Invite the loyal opposition to your table. Welcome conflicting views and styles. Effective leaders like George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy (after the Bay of Pigs disaster) invited contrary thinking and views. A closed mind is a wonderful thing to lose.

3. Fail fast and small. Conduct little experiments to test your assumptions and learn as you go. Henry Ford once observed that “failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” Don’t suffer from the “big fix fallacy,” which asserts that you need to do it big or not do it at all.

4. Give it time. Leaders who embrace paradoxical thinking understand that it takes time to work through a paradoxical issue. When they’re under pressure, they pause. They seldom rush to judgment. It is better to respond to difficult issues than react to them.

5. Practice shifting gears. If you want to stretch your mindset, change the rhythm of your work. Spend time thinking about major innovative growth strategies and then quickly transition to managing operations. Conduct a motivating team meeting, then quickly move to a one-on-one counseling session with an underperformer. Fast transitions teach the mind agility.

6. Adopt the beginners mind. Avoid the “arrogance of excellence” by applying Zen teacher Suzuki insight that, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” Spend four or five minutes every day pretending you don’t know anything about what you’re doing. This is how software guru Peter Norton was thinking when he founded the famous Norton Utilities (sold to Semantic in 1990). One of the first utilities that he brought to market was called “undelete,” which provided the capability to recover computer files that may have been accidentally erased. Perhaps the years he spent as a Zen Buddhist helped him see the utility of the yin and yang.

Yin is loosely translated as the ‘shady place,’ while yang means the ‘sunny place.’ Yin and yang can be described in terms of how the sunlight illuminates the mountains and valleys. As the world turns, the sun appears to move across the sky, and yin and yang trade places. What was once in darkness is now seen and that which was seen is now in darkness. The beginners mind, like Mark’s, stretches to embrace the ambiguous and paradoxical nature of both. How about you?

Let me know how you’re doing. I’d love to hear from you.

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

FYI – The eXpansive Leadership Model (XLM) assessment provides feedback (via a 25-page report) regarding the 16 core competencies needed to stretch when you feel pulled, including embrace ambiguity and paradox ( http://xlmassessment.com/ ).

1. Lewis, Marianne; Exploring Paradox: Toward a More Comprehensive Guide, Academy of Management Review, 2000, 35, 4, 760-776.

2. American Management Association Report, Leading into the Future, New York, New York, 2005.

3. Robert Kaplan, David Norton, Stewart Friedman, et al; Unconventional Wisdom in a Downturn, Harvard Business Review, December 2008, 28-31.