The Performance Improvement Blog

The Paradoxes of Leadership

What's your answer to these questions?

• Should I focus on short-term results or long-term strategy?
• Should we stay true to our mission or should we look for new opportunities to compete in the marketplace?
• Should I take time to stay physically fit or should I spend more time at the office?
• Should I delegate a task to others or should I do it to make sure it’s done right?
• Should I tell my direct reports everything that is going on or should I not burden them with problems they can’t do anything about?
• Should I do what’s best for the team or should I help individuals get ahead?
• Should I bring other departments into our decision-making process or should I plow ahead and not use valuable time trying to achieve consensus?
• Should we centralize long-range planning or should we delegate that responsibility to the departments and different locations?

Your answer to each of these questions could be “yes”. Both options presented in each question may need to exist simultaneously. The statements are paradoxes that confront every leader in organizations today. Most leaders look for a solution that is impossible to achieve and, in so doing, fail to move the organization forward.

In a new book titled, Getting Unstuck (Download a free chapter.), Ralph Jacobson takes on paradoxes and explains what to do about them.

Jacobson writes:

A paradox is a conflict between two perspectives that appear incapable of simultaneously existing at the same time…yet they must. A paradox has at least two apparent options, called polarities (for example, short and long term). The effective management of a paradox requires balancing the polarities over time…

Problems have solutions. Paradoxes do not.  Paradoxes must be consistently balanced. In other words, there are many issues to which the familiar either/or formula will not work. In order to work through the above issues we have to change the formula to both/and.

As organizational leaders, we want solutions. We want to solve problems, put them behind us, and move on. But the reality is that many challenges cannot be resolved. We must continually shift between long-term and short-term, stability and change, work demands and non-work demands, delegation and control, transparency and secrecy, the team and the individual, consensus and autocratic decision-making, and centralization and decentralization.

What paradoxes do you face in your role and how do you handle them?

No Time to Learn

One of the concerns that worry training and learning professionals most about leading culture change in their organizations is that managers will say that they don’t have time to facilitate and support employee development. These managers don’t value learning.

Maybe there was a time when you could learn a set of skills in your youth and then build a career around those abilities. Not anymore. The pace of change is too fast and no occupation is insulated from disruptive innovation. The only way to keep pace and maybe even get ahead of the curve is to keep learning.

The plea, “I don’t have time to help employees learn,” should be answered with the refrain, “You can’t afford not to help employees learn.” Whether it’s a technician who needs to know how to install an armrest on a state of the art, ergonomic office chair, or an engineer who needs to know how to use the latest “green” materials in the design of a car, or an executive who needs to know how to use a new enterprise scheduling app, or a senior manager who needs to know how to build a global sales team, or a CEO who needs to know how to communicate in a way that engenders trust and confidence among employees, learning is critical to achieving the intended results.

This is also true for teams that need to become more effective and whole organizations that want to become more successful. Rick Wartzman identifies six, key questions that Peter Drucker, the “father of modern management”, would ask managers:

1. What does the customer value?
2. What is our business, and what should it be?
3. What is the task?
4. What are your ideas for us to try to do new things, develop new products, design new ways of reaching the market?
5. Who in this organization depends on me for what information?
6. What would happen if this were not done at all? [Drucker was trying to get managers to think about how they use their time.]

Good questions, but managers need to learn how to use these questions. When should they ask them, to whom, and what should they do with the answers so that they can improve performance? It’s all about learning!

Learning interventions do not necessarily require much time. A water-cooler conversation about expectations and performance improvement, an informal inquiry about what was learned from a recent training program, an on-the-job suggestion to improve technique, often do not take more than a few minutes. And short, weekly conversations between managers and their direct reports would be far more than is typical in organizations today and could go a long way to support learning.

Also, action learning, which is learning in the course of doing, when designed as a reflective exercise, shouldn’t take much more time than the activity itself and is essential to the success of any new program or project.

HR and Training departments can’t do it alone. They need the cooperation and collaboration of everyone in the organization. They need everyone to value learning and its contribution to continuous performance improvement. They need managers to make learning a high priority for their time and effort.

If it’s not supported, then it’s not valued. A company that says it values employee development and innovation but its managers are not actively supporting continuous learning, is being disingenuous. And employees see this and, realizing that learning is not valued by the company, don’t value it themselves and, therefore, don’t work at learning.

Sometimes time is a legitimate concern, but when it comes to employee learning, if it is valued in the organization, managers will prioritize their time so that they can involve themselves in helping all of their employees acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities to help the organization be successful. 

Do You Have a Learning Culture? (Part Two)

In "Part One" of this post, I presented some situations in which espoused values (not necessarily values in use) play a role and examples of instinctive reactions that indicate either the presence or absence of a learning culture. 

Here are four more situations: 

The espoused value says, “We value creativity and innovation.”

An employee had an idea for a new mobile app that seemed very promising and early feedback from customers was that it was something they would want. However, after a couple of months, the employee discovered that the app couldn’t have the intended functionality without being overly complicated and too expensive for customers. Is the first reaction of the employee’s boss to say, “What a waste; two months lost. Next time we have to make sure the product will be successful before we start on it. Now, how am I going to explain this to management?” Or, is the first reaction of the employee’s boss to say, “Good effort. What did you learn from trying to build the app? What did you learn about developing new products, about collaboration, and about yourself? Is there anything we could have done to help you achieve your goal?” Both reactions are reasonable, but one is indicative of a learning culture and the other is not.

The espoused value says, “We want feedback and accountability.”

The leadership team of the company spent three days in an annual meeting developing a strategic plan for the following year. At the end of the first quarter, a manager asked the VP for Planning why they hadn’t used the plan to measure their progress and take stock of what they need to do to achieve their goals. Is the VP’s first reaction to say, “It’s been a busy quarter and, besides, the main reason we have that meeting each year is to get the leadership team together. The plan is out of date as soon as it is done.” Or, is the VP’s first reaction to say, “That’s a good point. I’m going to recommend that we get the leadership team back together and talk about what we can learn about ourselves and the company from a comparison of what we said we would do to what’s been accomplished.” Both reactions are reasonable, but one is indicative of a learning culture and the other is not.

The espoused value says, “We develop leaders.”

A department manager goes to her Director with a complaint that she is not getting best effort from her team. She says that they don’t follow through on assignments, they are late for meetings, and they don’t communicate important decisions to each other. Is the Director’s first reaction to say, “You’re a leader now. You need to take charge and be a leader in your team. They should be looking to you for direction.” Or, is the director’s first reaction to say, “It seems like you could benefit from a coach who could help you learn how to be a more effective leader in this team. Let’s talk about how a coach could be helpful and what kind of coach we should find for you.” Both reactions are reasonable, but one is indicative of a learning culture and the other is not.

The espoused value is “continuous improvement.”

A new salesperson is attending a class in relationship selling at a local college. He goes to his sales manager and asks how he could apply what he is learning to their department’s sales strategy. Is the Sales Manager’s first reaction to say, “I doubt we can use what you’re learning in this sales organization. The way we’ve always done sales here is by the numbers. You make a certain number of cold calls. A percentage of those turn into presentations and a percentage of those presentations turn into sales. We don’t have time for anything else.” Or, is the Sales Manager’s first reaction to say, “Tell me about what you are learning in the class. How do you think it could help our sales organization? Let’s come up with a plan for how you could experiment with that approach and then we can determine if it’s a good fit with our goals.” Both reactions are reasonable, but one is indicative of a learning culture and the other is not.

How would people in your organization instintively react to these situations? What other situations would help you determine if you have a learning culture in your organization?