Managing “tension tightropes” as a leader

A collaborative work environment is typically linked to productivity and a healthy-looking bottom line, so it stands to reason that businesses are looking for collaborative people who can get along well with their colleagues. At the same time, companies are often on the lookout for innovative trailblazers who can challenge the status quo and established ways of thinking, and drive the organisation forward.

Businesses often believe they’ll be able to embed and maintain these seemingly incompatible traits in full. However, leaders need to reconcile the natural tensions and competing commitments of these cultures to make this possible.

Interlinked tensions

Duke Corporate Education outlines the six paradoxes that form an interlinked strategic landscape and system of natural tensions that today’s leaders need to be able to navigate. These include the inherent contradictions of being both a ‘Humble hero’ and a ‘Traditioned innovator’. Walking the line between each of these paradoxes is key to being able to confront, with focus and depth, the varied challenges at play in the modern-day workplace. 

At Achieve Breakthrough, we see tensions extend beyond these leadership asymmetries as well, and into other contradictory agendas rife in our modern organisational cultures. As Gary P. Pisano of Harvard Business School points out, ‘celebrating failure’ is a nuance many companies are striving to hardwire into their cultural code, but that doesn’t mean inviting incompetence into workflows. There is a spectrum of scenarios between ‘failure’ and ‘incompetence’ that leaders need to navigate.

Similarly, we have an organisational culture of 100% responsibility at Achieve Breakthrough, but we also acknowledge that it's possible – due to competing commitments – to take this principle too far and into a scenario where everyone treads on each other's toes. That’s because there are always polarities at play in the world of work and effective leadership has to adapt to them.

Competing commitments

Whichever way competing commitments play out in your workplace (some sort of polarity is bound to, we wouldn’t believe you if said there weren’t any) the first point to acknowledge is that this is normal. Competing contexts have always and will always exist. 

Your organisation might think of itself as fundamentally collaborative, for example, but know this sometimes causes increased costs, delays in getting to market or other accountability issues that are sometimes tricky to resolve under a ‘collaborative’ umbrella. The fact that these two competing contexts persist isn’t the issue, it’s the way the push-pull relationship between them is managed that’s key. 

So what’s the fix? Well, leaders have to get clear on the overarching commitment unifying the outcome of a project or business pursuit. This way we can provide teams with a functional path through the dense undergrowth where the roots of competing commitments each fight for space.

What’s the goal? 

When committing to big cultural nuances such as ‘collaboration’, ‘celebrating failure’ or ‘willingness to experiment’, deciding on a specific unifying commitment is a way of establishing what that nuance means to our exact workplace environment.

A leader might decide the overarching organisational commitment is to ‘innovation’ for example, which allows teams to contextualise the falls and gains of both ‘collaboration’ and ‘accountability’ in their project workflows. From here, they can navigate the different working parts of each commitment and strive for breakthrough results instead of binary compromises.

Without an overarching commitment, organisations might attempt to embed cultural modulations without thinking about the outcome they’re actually intended to achieve. If we think about introducing a ‘psychologically safe environment’ it might be because we’re attracted to the idea of having a nice place to work, but that could run counter to an existing commitment to brutal candour that’s already driving innovation in our teams.

Avoiding binary thinking

There’s always a gradation in the particulars of a situation, and as leaders we need to be able to see the shading instead of binary oppositions. Allowing tensions into our workplaces might feel like a contradiction at first but it’s really just another step towards avoiding binary thinking. Creating space for the tension tightrope that’s already strung up in our organisations allows our teams to walk it comfortably whenever they need to.

A good example of achieving success via upheld commitments can be found at John Lewis where the Partnership is one of the largest employee-owned businesses in the UK with a workforce of 80,000 Partners.

Their business model comes with all sorts of polarities – most notably being employee-centric as well as customer-centric. But John Lewis makes it work by being very clear on its values, ensuring they hold relevance to both the customer and its Partners, so that all the business co-owners are empowered along the same narrative line in the face of competing commitments. 

Declaring our true commitments allows our teams to work with the polarities and contradictory agendas that are so essential to an organisation. In acknowledging that there’s no set way things should be, we invite our organisations to exist more as living organisms, fully comfortable with all the natural tensions that play out in them. Looking to make collaboration work? Get in touch to explore how we can help you ignite your ambitions.