Where do we find the paradoxes in leadership? And how do you deal with them as a leader? Find out in this post, which also gives you the three most important mnemonics for dealing with paradoxes.
Your success as a leader is increasingly dependent on your ability to manage paradoxes and act in organizational tensions. Paradoxes play a central role in the creation of organizational value.
This is the claim of the rapidly growing research on leadership paradoxes. And it's confirmed when you talk to managers across different levels. They often experience demands that are both coherent and contradictory. In the public sector, for example, it can be about simultaneously strengthening the core service, ensuring efficiency improvements and creating innovation (1).
Where do we find the paradoxes?
The rise of paradoxes is partly due to the unpredictability and constant change that characterizes the modern world. For many leaders, this creates a sense of navigating tense waters. For example, technological breakthroughs force paradoxes because they place new demands on skills and speed of change, which can conflict with existing professional skills. At the same time, digitalization and new technology are often brought up as ways to manage such tensions between, for example, economy and quality.
We often don't think about it, but managing paradoxes is one of the most fundamental characteristics of leadership. As a leader, you must constantly manage these tensions, and whether you succeed as a leader is closely linked to how you manage the key paradoxes in your organization (2).
Paradoxes can be experienced as situations that require prioritization, but where you can't make clear-cut choices without creating new challenges. It therefore becomes a crucial skill to be able to hold the tensions and take them seriously, rather than hiding them away. It will also be necessary to develop the right tactics to deal with paradoxes.
Throughout the 40-year history of paradox theory, a number of effective, practical approaches have been developed to operate in these areas of tension between management, strategy and leadership. Paradoxes appear in different aspects of management and across organizational levels:
GOVERNANCE
Governance paradoxes arise between, for example, ensuring control of the organization and providing decentralized autonomy.
LEADERSHIP
Leaders across the organization navigate a multitude of paradoxes between setting direction and setting free.
STRATEGY
A number of strategic value paradoxes arise between, for example, the need to create value for current and future customers.
How can you as a leader manage the paradoxes?
Paradox management can increase the ability to create value in complexity. It's costly and pointless when organizations produce decisions that are never implemented. As a leader, you need to sharpen your sense of paradoxes because they can block management actions, as well as help create ignition in the organization.
There are a number of available management tactics you can use to deal with paradoxes that have been well researched. Paradoxes are defined by the paradox tactics we use to face them. When actors experience paradoxes, they are already shaping their response to them. In practice, paradoxes and tactics cannot be separated, but rather understood as chains of paradoxes and responses.
In short, the paradox is determined by a number of factors, such as the need to deliver on efficiency and quality with few resources and high time pressure. The tactics are about how we connect these factors. If we try to separate them in time or space, for example, we talk about avoidance tactics. Conversely, if we seek to retain all aspects, these are called activation tactics. And finally, if we seek to transcend paradoxes, this is a transcendence tactic.
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Evasion - activation - overshoot
These three categories: Avoidance, Activation and Transgression each contain a number of underlying tactics, which I go through in my book on paradox management (3). The point is that how the organization responds to paradoxes is critical to value creation.
You can often - if you know the organization well - see patterns in tactics, where one leader's paradox tactics tend to lead to a certain tactic from another leader. If one leader tries to separate the opposites of the paradox in time, for example by wanting to streamline first and then work on quality later, it can lead to other players insisting on doing both at the same time, for example by introducing digital solutions as a response to the paradox.
In other words, these patterns or tactical logics can make it possible to understand how different actors typically respond to paradoxes and can be a way to improve the organization's handling of key paradoxes in value creation. Often these rhythms of paradox response reveal something central to value creation - why it succeeds or why it fails. This can be due to destructive spirals in the organization, pushing challenges around and losing the ability to deal with key paradoxes.
It is possible to implement more constructive dynamics in the organization's handling of paradoxes in strategy, governance and leadership. In this way, organizations can develop the ability to create value in the seemingly ever-increasing areas of tension.
Three rules to remember when dealing with paradoxes
- Come to terms with paradoxes
It is important that you reconcile with the tensions you experience rather than hiding them away. This is often referred to as "acceptance" of paradoxes and is a prerequisite for working with the paradox. You need to take the tension seriously because the different aspects of the paradox are essential to the value creation of the organization, otherwise it wouldn't be a real paradox.
- Look at the entire organization
It's important that you look at the organization as a whole in interaction with its environment in order to work constructively with paradoxes and use them to create value. This is because paradoxes cannot be solved in the same way that a problem can be solved and hidden away. They will always be there, and many different actors will influence how you can work with the paradox.
- Practice flexibility in tactics
It's important to be able to use a wide arsenal of paradox tactics so you can adjust your approach to paradoxes. This means you can benefit from understanding the types of tactics in depth.
Sources and references
- Smith (2014): Dynamic Decision Making: A Model of Senior Leaders Managing Strategic Paradoxes. In Academy of Management Journal, 57(6), 1592-1623.
- El-Sawad, Arnold & Cohen (2004): "Doublethink": The Prevalence and Function of Contradiction in Accounts of Organizational Life. In Human Relations, 57(9), 1179-1203. 5. Fairhurst et al. (2016): Diverging and Converging: Integrative Insights on a Paradox Meta-Perspective.
In The Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 173-182. - Heiberg Johansen (2018): Paradox management - The search for value in complexity. Djøf Publishing.
