The Power of Paradox

The Protean Leader and Leading in Uncertain Times

Nina Rosoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136707773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Leaders' actions can have consequences opposite to those they intend. These unintentional results are difficult to detect, understand, and change. Consequently, leaders' actions tend to persist resulting in further unexpected outcomes. This can create a vicious cycle of leadership failure. With all their best efforts, strategic, financial, scenario, human capital and operational plans in place, they fail. Unaware, they self-sabotage and sabotage others; again, the result is unintended consequences, no matter how hard they try.

This book gives a glimpse into why and how this happens, and what to do about it.

Understanding the Power of Paradox can empower leaders in uncertain times. Paradox reveals uncertainty giving leaders room to breathe and time to think, better able to deal with ambiguity and manage complexity, no longer stymied. Learning to think differently and behave with capabilities, you already have, more resilient, adaptive and flexible leaders execute conscious actions effectively, inspire and empower others, creating the consequences they intend, successful Protean Leaders.

1

Paradox

What is Paradox?

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

Paradox is “a contradiction in terms. It is a statement that seems contradictory, unbelievable, or absurd but that may be true in fact, the underlying meaning of which is revealed only by careful scrutiny.”¹

The purpose of paradox is to arrest attention and provoke thought. The statements listen to the sound of silence and less is more are examples of paradox.

Thinking about it, we find paradox in plain sight everywhere, in every organization, large or small, national or international. Paradox provides a key to a new way of thinking, knowing, seeing, and acting. In paradox there are navigational reference points elucidating ways that Heroic Leaders develop into Protean Leaders.

To invest in uncertainty and paradox, the unknowable and invisible landscape of business, is the leadership challenge. You will want to think differently, have more questions and fewer answers. Paradox reveals complexity and ambiguity.

Leaders work hard at clarity. You want clarity. You want to be decisive, reassuring … even when you are ambivalent, stymied by dilemmas, and face impossible decisions where uncertainty is present. You want credit. After all, you are the leader.

Many leaders will want to think about how to lead in uncertain circumstances. You know this is what you have always done, but times have changed. Now the world of work is fluctuating, vacillating, and fluid. How are you to adapt to this within yourself and the organization? Suddenly you are a leader who must alter, readjust, redo, acclimate, reshape, tweak, and rework the unknown. How will you be able to be most proud of doing this at the end of each day? This is where paradox—the phenomenon that links apparently conflicting realities—makes you effective in these strange, new circumstances.

Buried in the structure of life, from birth to death and the world we live in, is the question: How will you lead in ambiguity where paradox abounds? How will you manage complexity? It exists in the light, behaving simultaneously like both a wave and a particle. It’s in the subatomic particles, which are actually patterns of probability rather than bundles of matter.

You don’t have to wrestle with the mysteries of quantum physics to find paradox. Take the economy. Saving for a rainy day is good, so it should follow that saving more rather than less is better. However, if everyone saves more, demand for goods goes down, companies fail, people lose their jobs. Leaders use up their savings and then find themselves upside down, too heavily debt-leveraged, and on the brink of bankruptcy.

Let’s take baseball as an example. Some baseball players are undeniably better than others. So, as a team owner, you go out and buy more of the best players than any other team. Yours should be the best team, right? But what if paying a player a huge salary makes him less hungry so that he actually ends up performing below his ability and below your expectations? And what if the widening gap between the elite players and their teammates makes the lower-paid teammates resentful and less productive?

Paradox shows a way for leaders to see opportunities that are otherwise easily overlooked. Paradox exists in unexpected results, unforeseen outcomes, and unintended consequences in the decisions you make every day. At the risk of sounding like a Buddhist sage, paradox is a reality; reality is a paradox. The more mindful you are of this, the better off you’ll be.

Is there an analogy to paradox in other cultures making paradox easier to understand? Paradox is to the Western mind as the concept of yin and yang is to Eastern thought. Perhaps you have read Jim Collin’s book, Built to Last. If you have, you’ll recall the circular yin and yang symbol appearing from Western and Oriental works of art in his book. It shows there is duality, polar reversal—“in all things we see the seeds of the opposite”² —where yin is negative and yang, positive. The concept of yin and yang is the first physical law essential to paradox. The other underlying physical law represents periodicity. Constantly oscillating, it “manifests in cycles and rhythms.”³ On both sides of the yin and yang symbol, there is a dot: a white dot on the black side and a black dot on the white side.

There is nothing constant in the universe except the seeds of change and uncertainty.

All ebb and flow, and every shape that’s born, bears in its womb the seeds of change.

Ovid, Metamorphoses

One path for leaders to follow is paradox. They can illuminate paradoxically what is otherwise difficult, if perhaps not impossible for you to know and see at first glance: the opportunity in uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity. The way paradox works for, not against you is to awaken you. Doing this reveals direction.

There you have it: paradox helps lead you in uncertain times to become protean, and becoming protean empowers you to lead with greater probability for success and fewer unintended consequences. Paradox has power.

What’s all this got to do with leadership? Leadership is about taking charge, right? You are the one with vision—you see the way forward. You make choices and then decisions. You choose this technology over that one, this investment or acquisition over that one, this policy, not that one. You execute, empower, innovate, and deliver.

Except, as our reality demonstrates conclusively, leaders often fail. While there are many reasons for a leader’s failure, one of the most common reasons is simply that most are not sufficiently aware of how to see and deal with complexity. You overlook paradox’s usefulness. You believe you need to stick with your vision or plan, unwilling to be flexible. You move too quickly in order to make the right decision—the one everyone wants, or maybe the one you want—but then you make the wrong one. You fail. As a result, your decisions increasingly lose support. People feign following.

Many leaders fear the unknown. This is natural, and you may not admit this even to yourself. You go out of your way to have right answers or the answer. You pull out policy when challenged. The leaders at the top, sometimes even your executive team, turn out to be a lot of sizzle, while those within the fabric of the organization sometimes seem more like the steak it needs. You have a nagging feeling there are more hidden leaders. But you don’t do anything about this.

You fail when less attuned to the downside of control: the side that stifles, isolates, alienates, blocks participation, and deflates motivation. You overlook the distrust you create, working hard to silence others. Employees stifle their voices. They follow and comply. After all, why would they do otherwise? They cannot afford to take risks that might cause them to lose their jobs. You don’t stop long enough to see the promise of unintended consequences that your behaviors and actions result in. Opportunity passes you by, again.

I have observed and worked with top-level leaders in national and international companies, and in startups as an internal leader. I have worked with small family businesses; nonprofit companies; and medical, research-related, and sports-related organizations. I learned that successful leaders rely on different capabilities and actions. Leaders who flounder or fail do half-baked jobs. They seem confused or defensive about the unintended consequences they bring about.

What is it that stands out in successful leaders? I observed that they think and act in ways to empower and inspire people to be the best they can be. They lead differently. They execute well. They think differently, making conscious rather than unconscious choices. Commit to the right things. Are more awake. Their control needs, ego, and arrogance don’t overshadow good judgment. They are humble. They lead accountably, with integrity and balance.

These observations increased my curiosity. I wondered why some leaders see what others overlook. Why do you know what actions to take? Why do you know when to defer decisions, or when and how to execute them when others miss the mark entirely?

These questions led to more focused questions:

• How do leaders balance technology and people?

• How are growth opportunities made possible in organizations when the future holds growing uncertainty and complexity, sometimes even chaos? Or is today’s leader challenged with maintaining and sustaining rather than growth? Where does individual risk taking fit in?

• What is the best way to ward off decline?

• Can organizations rooted in stability and equilibrium avoid becoming static, leading to eventual entropy (death) without the input of hidden leaders?

• Will the escalating need for “more and more and more” fuel success or simply the race for more? Do the results bring the happiness that leaders and followers yearn for?

• Is it realistic to think work should be meaningful? Who is responsible for making work meaningful?

• Is there a business reason for leaders to serve a larger purpose than financial success?

To learn more about these questions, we turn now to our successful leaders.

Meet Our Leaders

The next step was to see how a diverse group of leaders might respond if I asked them to reflect on this idea about paradox. Ultimately I ended up engaging at some depth many women and men from different spheres of activity, all of them holding significant leadership positions.

• Jan Goessing, general manager of the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok

• Warren G. Bennis, university professor and distinguished professor of business administration and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, widely regarded as a pioneer in the contemporary field of leadership studies

• Francois Payard, celebrity chef, author, and business owner

• Doris Riehm, for decades a top leader of the worldwide Girl Scouts movement

• Edward Tricomi, hairstylist and co-owner of an upscale hair salon, that headquarters in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, New York

• Fredrick H. Waddell, chairman and CEO of Northern Trust, a 122-year-old bank

• Susan Mallory, president of Northern Trust’s Southern California region

• Mary Semans, emerita trustee of the North Carolina School of the Arts, emerita trustee of Duke University and active trustee of the Duke Endowment

• Frank Lazarus, retired president of the University of Dallas.

Others in the group will be identified by pseudonymous first names only. The reasons they gave for asking to remain anonymous were confidentiality agreements; the bureaucratic nightmare of gaining permission to be quoted (along with the time constraints to do so); the desire to remain private; and not wanting to put senior executives, those below them, or their companies in an awkward position. They include a partner in a major regional law firm; an NFL executive; the founder and president of a Hong Kong-based battery manufacturer; as well as the director of a leading academic center focused on business and leadership; and an array of entrepreneurs and corporate executives.

Some of our leaders were born into families in which it was expected that they would one day lead. For these individuals, opportunity—including attendance at elite institutions of learning—was part of their birthright. Others come from families where expectations were low and support limited. For these ind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Paradox
• 2. The Connection Paradox
• 3. The Decision Paradox
• 4. The Growth Paradox
• 5. The Static Organization Paradox
• 6. The More Paradox
• 7. The Meaning Paradox
• 8. The Purpose Paradox
• 9. We Need a New Kind of Leader
• 10. Investing in Paradox and Uncertainty
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibiliography
• Index