This highlight video is from February 9, 2024 session Hidden Leadership Challenges: Harmonizing Competing Demands for Leadership Breakthroughs
Session Focus: Leaders face tremendous challenges that are often not well understood or perceived by others. These hidden challenges arise from competing demands in the dynamic, ever-changing workplace and require leaders to transcend binary thinking to skillfully navigate seemingly contradictory priorities.
This interactive session, "Hidden Leadership Challenges: Harmonizing Competing Demands for Leadership Breakthroughs", is designed to explore the art of navigating common polarities in the workplace. As HR talent leaders, understanding and acknowledging these polarities can be transformative in supporting leaders as they navigate these challenges.
Leaders today face tremendous pressures and challenges that are often invisible to those around them. These hidden difficulties frequently arise from needing to balance competing priorities and demands in a complex, rapidly evolving workplace. To achieve long-term success, leaders must move beyond the binary "either/or" thinking to integrate and harmonize opposites.
This leadership session highlighted the need for greater empathy, awareness, and elevated perspective-taking to help leaders effectively navigate frequent polarities.
“With polarities we need a blend of both because both sides have benefits and both can create negative impacts when they're overused.” - andiron.com
Based on the session, we wanted to highlight three key takeaways for learning leaders:
- Empathy is crucial - Leaders face mounting complex pressures. Extending empathy helps understand their context despite apparent gaps in their own displays of empathy.
- Move from "Either/Or" to "Both/And" Thinking - Many leadership dilemmas involve interdependent opposites needing balanced integration, not just choosing one side.
- Use Tools to Map Polarities - Structured tools like the "Polarity Map" build self-awareness of upsides and downsides to each pole. This enables optimizing the benefits of both.
By recognizing common polarities leaders wrestle with daily between change and stability, action and reflection, or flexibility and structure, we can appreciate the tremendous balancing acts expected of modern leadership. This empathetic mindset combined with practical tools to map polarities positions savvy leaders to discover breakthrough "third way" solutions. In doing so, they reduce friction, boost sustainable performance, and role model the versatile, paradox-embracing leadership needed to guide teams through unrelenting workplace complexity.