How to Up-Level Your Leadership Through Balancing Opposing Concepts

 

Collins asserted that the most powerfully transformative executives possess a paradoxical mixture of what seems like oppositional qualities such as personal humility and professional will. They are timid and ferocious. Shy and fearless. He believed they are are rare—and unstoppable.

 

Rather than combining and balancing two extreme ideas is to actually look at them both and work out what's in the middle. 

 

At a more conscious level, it requires exploring the intersections between two ideas and creating another alternative. Once you consider a third option, it can magically open things up. It also up-levels your leadership.

Thinking of trust as just being about one thing versus another is actually too simplistic.  It's didactic thinking that feels forced like we're making an ultimatum.  And if there is one thing about trust - it's not a binary emotion.  It's a complex, interrelated, multidimensional concept that has the ability to magically improve a whole raft of negative behaviours in one fell swoop. 

 

Of course, it's not just with trust that we do this, but a multiple of things.  Common workplace ambiguities exist between "People versus Results," "Individual results versus Group results," and  "Gut-feeling versus Data analysis."

Rather than look at two opposing extremes, we need to either consider the middle ground or some other positive that arises when you balance out both perspectives. For example, take the negative behaviour of Perfectionist (A) and it's polar opposite Acceptance (B). For many perfectionists, being able to accept work without typos and grammar mistakes is a pretty tall ask. Another option would be to aim for Allowance (both to themselves and others). 

The good news is that there are no rules here. You can create the C option in a way that suits your style and abilities.

My challenge for you is that if you want to transform your leadership, then it's time to start considering how you can break open the A/B paradigm that limits your thinking and behaviours. It's time to explore how to unlock your results through combining both A+B or deliberately creating a C option. This even means self-examining your behaviours and reflecting on how you can react in a different way that integrates polarised options.

It's not easy, but it can be done with the right discipline and awareness.