The Unfinished Leader E-Book

David L. Dotlich

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 407

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

With the demands of technology, transparency, and constant connectedness, and calls for higher performance, leaders from the front line to the C-suite face complex dilemmas that cannot be easily denied or postponed. These perplexing, recurring issues are familiar to anyone in a leadership role today, including: * How do I balance my functional or business unit goals with the needs of my peers and the whole company? * How do I support and promote others while still advancing my own career? * How do I emphasize teamwork and still reward the "stars"? * Can I really devote enough time and energy to both family and work? These are not "problems" but paradoxes--situations in which there will never be a single correct solution--and while they make many leaders feel overwhelmed and challenged, this remarkable book provides help. The Unfinished Leader is a modern handbook for recognizing, facing, and inspiring others to expose the real issues that underlie paradoxes in modern organizations. Leaders must first recognize situations they will never be able to "solve" and understand how to confront the barriers--in their own heads and their organizations--that push them towards seeking ultimate solutions that don't exist. Leading through complexity requires giving up the illusion of control, consistency, and closure, while embracing the reality of being permanently "unfinished." Drawing from interviews with 100 CEOs and top leaders from a wide range of companies--such as Avon, Nike, Colgate, DeutschePost DHL, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, and many more-- The Unfinished Leader provides the mindsets and tools to recognize contradictory requirements, understand competing demands, and still be able to take action. No one can find or even should look for perfect solutions to impossible situations. The Unfinished Leader will help leaders at all levels understand and excel at their true task: guiding themselves and their teams through ongoing paradoxes, reconciling competing outcomes, continually changing and adapting, and thereby building lasting success.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise for The Unfinished Leader

Title page

Copyright page

Epigraph

Foreword

Preface

Introduction: Stepping Up to Complete Leadership

PART ONE: The Challenge of Paradoxes

1: Puzzles and Paradoxes

The Problem Continuum

Approach to Paradox

More Paradoxes Than Ever

Becoming Complete Leaders

2: Jumping Over the Line

Desperately Seeking Control

Desperately Seeking Consistency

Desperately Seeking Closure

Getting Ready to Cross the Line

The Costs of Mishandling Paradox

Paradox Leadership

3: Obstacles to Leadership

The Obstacles of Organization

The Obstacles of Stakeholders

The Obstacles Within Ourselves

Complete Leaders Over the Line

PART TWO: Mindsets for Leading Through Paradox

4: The Purpose Mindset

What Is a Mindset?

Purpose-Driven Decisions

Toward Higher Purpose

A Final Note

5: The Reconciliation Mindset

Outlining the Mindset

Decision Making with the Reconciliation Mindset

A Final Caution

6: The Innovation Mindset

Outlining the Mindset

Decision Making with the Innovation Mindset

Final Thoughts

PART THREE: Tools for Leadership

7: Scanning for the Right Paradox

The Value of an External Focus

The Practices of Scanning

Developing a Point of View

8: Scenario Thinking

The Value of Scenario Thinking

The Practices of Scenario Thinking

Follow Up by Acting

9: Stakeholder Mapping

The Value of Stakeholder Mapping

The Process of Stakeholder Mapping

A Basis in Trust

10: Dialogue for Alignment

The Practices of Dialogue

Patience, the Virtue in Dialogue

11: Quelling Conflict

The Value of Conflict Management

The Practices of Conflict Management

Leading Beyond Conflict

PART FOUR: Your Personal Challenge

12: Developing Yourself

Getting Fit as a Paradox Leader

Overcoming Derailers

Overcoming Hindrances to Action

Spreading the Skills of Paradox Management

The Complete Paradox Leader

Conclusion: Managing Personal and Public Paradoxes

About the Authors

More from Wiley

Index

End User License Agreement

Praise for The Unfinished Leader

“Leaders in all organizations—whether companies or governments—are faced with messy challenges every day. The Unfinished Leader accepts these paradoxes as a fact of life and offers useful advice and real-world examples so every leader can respond more effectively to these challenges.”

—Alan Webber, founding editor, Fast Company

“The Unfinished Leader is a fascinating and provoctive book which makes a strong case that leaders are always ‘becoming’ rather than reaching a destination. In particular, the authors focus on the paradoxes that characterize organizational life and how leaders can learn to confront, live with, and ultimately leverage those paradoxes. The book is a compelling combination of counterintuitive theory combined with a tremendous amount of very practical and pragmatic advice. Leaders at all levels, facing the increasingly paradoxical nature of leadership and organizations, will benefit greatly from this work.”

—David A. Nadler, principal, Nadler Advisory Solutions, and retired vice chairman, Marsh & McLennan Companies

“Leadership dilemmas are an opportunity to inspire innovation and creativity if you approach them with the right tools and mindset. Full of invaluable insights from international CEOs and senior executives, The Unfinished Leader provides practical advice on how the best leaders turn obstacles into opportunities to inspire innovation and creativity.”

—Marvin Chow, marketing director, Google Inc.

Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dotlich, David L. (David Landreth), 1950–

The unfinished leader : balancing contradictory answers to unsolvable problems / David L. Dotlich, Peter C. Cairo, Cade Cowan.—First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-45509-8 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-86711-2 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-118-86714-3 (epub)

1. Leadership. 2. Decision making. 3. Work and family. I. Cairo, Peter C., 1948– II. Cowan, Cade, 1972– III. Title.

HD57.7.D678 2014

658.4′092–dc23

2013046389

One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical … for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

—Søren Kierkegaard1

Note

1.Søren Kierkegaard (as Johannes Climacus), Philosophical Fragments (1844). See also online: http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=2512.

Foreword

Stephen H. Rhinesmith

Most people are so used to hearing about the complete leader, the whole leader, and the balanced leader that it probably brings you up short to think of the unfinished leader as a role model. But that is what this book is all about.

When could an unfinished leader be good? Well, it might be in a complex world in which there are no easy answers. In a world where leaders need to see themselves as constantly open to new possibilities. In a world where leaders are willing to jump on new ideas and accept that they probably don't have all the answers—and never will.

A leadership model that posits that the ideal leader is finished—complete and self-sufficient—has several inadequacies in today's world. First, leadership is becoming a collective experience as the world becomes more complex. Few leaders today can manage the challenges of a complex, technology-driven, connected marketplace by themselves. The increasing numbers of books on collaboration underscore the need for leaders to achieve their organizations' objectives in a way that moves them beyond whether they personally are finished leaders.

This coincides with a trend in leadership research to identify effective leaders as authentic in their relations both with others and with themselves. That means acknowledging strengths and weaknesses and ensuring that the best skills are applied to manage the most important challenges. This again requires moving beyond thinking about one individual as an independent, finished actor.

The leadership literature today also stresses the concept of effective leaders as self-aware. And being self-aware in today's world also means being aware that you can't consider yourself finished as a leader. We are all destined to be unfinished as we continue to learn and develop for ever-changing challenges.

But we need unfinished leaders for yet other reasons. As the authors point out, we will never finish the most important personal and professional challenges. This is because more and more of our problems are not puzzles to be solved but paradoxes to be managed on a continuing basis that has no end. This turns the image of an effective leader as decisive problem solver on end. Effectiveness in a global, interconnected world depends on leaders who accept not only that they will never be finished but that the world around them will never be finished. Many of the most important challenges we face will never be solved once and for all.

This does not mean there cannot be temporary solutions, only that fewer solutions will last. The Chinese for centuries have believed the world is on a continuum between yin and yang. The pendulum stops for a split second only before it starts swinging in the opposite direction. I was interviewing a leader in Shanghai a few years ago, and he said with pride that his business had been very successful in recent years. As a result, he was working hard to anticipate a future downturn, because he knew life was never one-sided. The swing of the pendulum would require him to “manage the other side.”

Many leaders operate as if they fail to see the other side. They believe they have found the solution—the best product, the best market, or even the best niche to ride “just for the next year.” But anticipating the other side of success is a basic skill of an unfinished leader, who understands that no victory comes without the shadow of the next wave of innovation.

One could posit that all effective leaders are unfinished—in their work and in their own development. That is the contention of the authors of this unusual and important work.

The authors point out that paradoxes, unlike puzzles, have more than one right answer, and more important, they do not have an ending. Paradoxes are not susceptible to being finished. The only way we can successfully manage paradoxes is to understand that we as leaders will never be finished. Never finished in our solution to all problems. Never finished in our achievement of all goals. Never finished in the development of ourselves.

In our businesses and nations, we are daily becoming more globally entwined. This is leading to new innovations, increased productivity, growing GDPs, and a better quality of life for a majority of the people in the world. It is also opening us to the threat of pandemic diseases, terrorism, and outsourced jobs that will never return.

This sounds a like a bleak picture. And it raises many complex problems. Complex, yes, but not necessarily bleak.

Leaders who strive for final solutions will never be successful. The essence of future leadership will be the ability to manage a world of contradictory demands and needs. It will demand weighing each and ensuring that over the long term all critical needs are addressed. This is not to say that there are not challenges to be overcome, goals to be met, and victories to be claimed. But the world is filled with those conundrums we call paradoxes—the issues that demand that we choose between right and right, where one solution is never final, only temporary. No paradox can be finished once and for all. Only leaders willing to accept that the world is not simple and cannot be tidy will be effective.

There is an old saying: “For every complex problem, there is a simple answer—and it is wrong.” Working with that belief, the authors posit that successful leadership in the future will depend on mindset—a way of looking at the world that allows one to weigh opposing and contradictory demands and manage them on an ongoing basis. This in turn depends on how we live and lead others to “jump over the line” from puzzles to paradoxes, and from certainty to openness. The best leaders are those who can see the bigger, broader picture on a global basis and not be overwhelmed by the world's variety of values, viewpoints, and needs.

Developing an open mindset is more important now than ever. We can see how closed mindsets are creating turmoil throughout the world. Fundamentalists of all stripes—political, economic, religious, social—are claiming they have the answer to one side of a paradox. Remember, for every complex problem there is an easy answer—and what most fundamentalists have to offer are simple, easy answers that represent only one side of the right-versus-right conundrum posed by the world's paradoxes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one's head at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Too few people today are passing that test. Instead, they retreat into ideologies or interest groups that have no interest in reconciling differences because they do not acknowledge the rightness of the other perspective.

Each of us has a personal as well as professional journey to cut through a diverse, ambiguous, and uncertain world. In the process, our ability to reconcile differences and develop new mindsets for paradoxical thinking will be critical—critical not only to our own happiness and development but to the capacity of the world to deal with its uncertain and unsettled future.

Preface

Perhaps you remember the first time you heard about the prisoner's dilemma. Someone told you the details: Two prisoners, accomplices in a robbery, are stuck in solitary confinement. The police, short on evidence, try to tempt each of them to rat the other out. If both comply, they will both get two years in jail. If both deny the crime, they will both get one year. If only one denies and the other rats, the rat will go free and the denier will get three years.

So what should they do? If you're like us, when you first heard of the dilemma, you thought you could solve it, and yet round and round you went and in short order you realized you couldn't. Fact is, there is no right answer because you get different answers based on your view of things like loyalty, cooperation, rationality, and retribution. What's right just depends.1 Still, you probably remember your consternation as you twisted your brain into knots considering the alternatives.

You might be surprised, but we encounter this same kind of consternation all the time when we teach executive leaders in large and small organizations. As part of Pivot Leadership, we work with top executives around the world, and are often called when leaders are debating an important new decision. They're all looking for the right solution, but enough factors come into play that they're tying their brains into knots coming up with it. The knots are a signal: There is no correct solution.

So then we do our job: We point out they're not facing a simple problem with a fixed solution that everyone can agree on. They're facing a paradox, usually a problem complicated not by just a single set of contradictory forces but by many. It's hard for them to see this because of the problem's complexity and their immersion in the details. The problem has many solutions, and although the stakeholders probably can't all agree on one, if they can accommodate some healthy dissent, they can come to a consensus decision on the right way to act.

When we point this out, we hear a big sigh of relief—so big that it's often audible around the room.

You might be puzzled. How could some of the world's top leaders—often from the biggest and most profitable companies on the planet—have trouble seeing the distinction between simple problems and paradoxes? It turns out that the distinction is hard to detect until you're trained to do so. Second, how could those people value our revelation so much? The answer is that we helped them unfreeze a paralyzed decision-making process. People could then manage problem solving in a new way and act more swiftly, intelligently, and confidently.

Our coaching has elicited this sigh of relief so many times that we decided we had to write a book about it—or rather, about what causes people's misunderstanding of paradoxes and how to overcome paradoxes once they're recognized. Indeed, although we have been consulting with top companies for decades, the problem of paradox paralysis comes up more often with every passing year. Especially in the last five years, we have seen paradox-related consternation grow quickly, and we decided the time was right to put a book in your hands.

A lot of the insights in this book come from our work as strategy consultants and teachers of executives, which we have collectively pursued for more than thirty years. Our clients have included leaders at firms like GlaxoSmithKline, Deutsche Post DHL, AbbVie, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive, BlackRock, Thomson Reuters, Becton Dickinson, Ericsson, Johnson & Johnson, Aetna, National Australia Bank (NAB), the private equity firm KKR, Avon Products, Time Warner, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Citigroup, and Illinois Tool Works (ITW). In the typical situation, we get a call from a CEO for advice on how to transform a company or its leaders to meet a new strategic challenge, and one thing leads to another. Inevitably, the conversation turns to the significant paradoxes that are confronting the organization and how to manage them. Often these conversations result in efforts to drive an understanding of paradoxes more deeply into the organization. In one case, we consulted with a CEO, and after we pointed out the nature of paradox management, he wanted us to train his top 150 leaders in our approach.

Many other insights in our book come from our research. Specifically, we launched an effort a year prior to writing that we called The Pivot Paradox Project. We interviewed a hundred CEOs and top leaders from a wide range of companies about the paradoxes they face. These leaders included Frank Appel, CEO of Deutsche Post DHL; John Veihmeyer, CEO of KPMG; Henry Kravis, co-CEO of KKR; Ian Cook, CEO of Colgate-Palmolive; Cameron Clyne, CEO of NAB; Alex Gorsky, chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Bill Weldon, formerly chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock; Andrea Jung, former chairman and CEO of Avon Products; Andrew Thornburgh, CEO of Bank of New Zealand; and Scott Santi, CEO of ITW. The research provided us with insightful stories and perspectives on paradoxes that exist in organizations today.

One of the valuable lessons from the project was that paradoxes come in many forms, and they occur everywhere. In fact, we found that much of our advice applied to people in their personal lives as well as their leadership roles. If people solved some of the more universal personal paradoxes—for example, the conflict between making money and finding meaning or to achieve the right balance between work and family—they developed the skills and perspective to deal with them better as leaders in their organization. We hope that as you read the book, although we speak directly to you on the job, you will see that we're also addressing you as an individual facing paradoxes at home, in the community, and as a citizen.

Many clients and friends contributed to our understanding of paradox in organizations and are an important part of this book: Ken Meyers, Nicole Cipa, Mary Lauria, Tim Richmond, Kristin Weirick, Monique Matheison, Mike Tarbell, David Ayre, Kim Lafferty, Carolynn Cameron, Rolf-Dirc Roitzheim, Joan Lavin, Kevin Wilde, Mary Lauria, Peter Fasolo, Arturo Poire, Selina Milstam, Andrew Kilshaw, Annie Brown, Dan Johnston, Kristy Matthews, Kim Lafferty, Roger Cude, Vicki Lostetter, Jeff Smith, Mark Wiedman, Fabian Carcia, Daniel Marsili, and Angela Titzrath.

We couldn't have completed the research for the book, or articulated the insights, or gotten it written without the support of many people. At Pivot Leadership, our team included Ryan Fisher, Stacey Philpot, Albertina Vaughn, Ron Meeks, Kathleen Olsen, Antoine Tirard, Julie Aiken, Julie Roberts, Anesu Mandisodza, Brenda Fogelman, and Michaelene Kyrala. Bruce Wexler assisted with an early copy of the manuscript, and Bill Birchard as editor and coach was superb in guiding this book to its destination.

We especially want to thank the many people whose stories provided details and background for the book. Some of them we name; others, for reasons of privacy, we do not, and we have disguised them by changing identifying facts. Still others provided only background for the book—we couldn't fit everyone's story into its pages and had to make hard decisions of what to (and not to) include. All these stories come from our research or recent consulting work, and for that reason we do not note any of them at the end of the book. In any case, we want to thank all the people who allowed us to interview them. Their stories, all true, are what make it possible to convey this crucial yet subtle element of leadership practice so clearly.

We also want to thank our wonderful editors and support team at Jossey-Bass, whose patience and belief in this project sustained us through multiple rewrites: John Maas, Susan Williams, Clancy Drake, and always Cedric Crocker.

Finally, we want to thank you as a reader. Presumably you are a leader or would-be leader in some capacity. It is the response of people like you, upon publication of this book and our previous ones, who inspire us to do the hard work of authorship. We see much consternation in our line of work, and our most earnest hope is to release people from that prison of indecision that comes from wrestling with paradoxical problems without having the tools to manage them. With this book, we hope to help many take that first step in mastering a new leadership practice.

David L. Dotlich

Portland, Oregon

Peter C. Cairo

New York, New York

Cade Cowan

Atlanta, Georgia

February 2014

Note

1. Admittedly, there is only one answer that can be called “rational,” but few people act on reason alone.

Introduction: Stepping Up to Complete Leadership

Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox.

–John Steinbeck1

In a book about how to manage paradox, we will start with one that applies to you personally: The only way to become a finished leader is to remain an unfinished one. There you go. You thought we were going to distill the many insights in our book into a clear axiom. And instead, well, we made a statement that sounds complex and ambiguous.

Although this is a risky way to start a book, we want to make a point: If you're a leader—or an aspiring one—you can't afford to be scared off by complexity or ambiguity. You have to hunger to thrive in their midst. And if you're that kind of person, this book is for you. Step by step, we show you how to make better decisions and act more decisively in a complex world—practices that will prove useful even if you already recognize that you live in a world of paradox and have found ways to work with it productively.

Many people believe the way to solve complex problems is to reduce them to something simple. This is not our approach. As Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, “Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”2 We agree. If you're too much of a reductionist, you end up glossing over the rough edges that make most difficult problems so prickly.

And “as simple as possible” is getting more complex by the day. In fact, the most important problems we face—at home, in the office, in the factory, in the community—have increasingly taken on complex new forms full of illogic. Especially when it comes to leading people. Problems of the past were two-dimensional in comparison. As Chapter One explains, we call these simpler problems puzzles—straightforward, single-solution problems you can solve once and for all.

But these two-dimensional puzzles have morphed into multi-dimensional paradoxes. They bristle with contradictions. They pit the forces of one interest against another. You can't solve them once and for all. In fact, you can't always solve them at all—although you can manage them.

You may believe you can simplify every complex problem into an uncomplex essence. Then you can tirelessly work to find the single right solution for the problem in question, then close the book on that mind twister, pat yourself on the back, and declare: Mission Accomplished!

But with leadership paradoxes, you can't arrive at a single or right or definitive solution. The paradoxes may trick you into thinking you have to give in either to one opposing choice or to the other—the long term or the short term, for instance. Or they may tempt you into trying to turn every set of contradictions into complementarities. But they will confound you if you approach them this way, and instead of patting yourself on the back, you may want to tear your hair out and proclaim: Mission Impossible!

One of our consulting clients is CEO of a big company that faces an uncertain future. The company has thrived for many years with captive customers, stable technology, and seasoned management. But as the Internet has changed the product set, and as customers enjoy more choices from firms breaking down industry boundaries, he has decided the ability to thrive in the future will require new capabilities. He has also realized that nobody on his senior team has those capabilities, nor can anyone quickly learn them. So what does he do? Does he fire all of them? Does he send them to training? Does he hire young MBAs to work with them to understand and master the challenges of a suddenly alien business?

He has worked hard to build the company, and he wants to secure his legacy. His goal is to position the firm as sustainable for decades. So what's the best way to solve that problem? Does he decide based on people performance or company performance? Does he reward loyalty or skill? Does he think about the welfare of his colleagues or the entire employee base? Does he think about the short term or long term? The decision is full of contradictions. What do you think? What would you do?

After much thought about the paradoxes built into his dilemma, he reshaped his organization around the talents (and deficiencies) of his people. He came up with an innovative regrouping of products and services, highlighting the strengths of his key players, reducing the role of some, and positioning others for greater future responsibility. He added new people to his team, and removed one or two of the old ones. In short, he faced into paradox and rather than decide between either/or alternatives, he used paradox to spur innovation in his thinking and then his decisions.

We have been helping people like this CEO make difficult decisions for years, and we have found that these paradoxical situations have come up more and more. In fact, top leaders face paradoxes all the time. And the number of paradoxes they are facing has exploded, along with the numbers of choices in every aspect of business—new ways companies compete for customers, new technologies embedded in products, new ways to work and collaborate, new global marketplaces, new competitive players, and so on.

We have discovered much about how to help people faced with paradoxes. Confounding as the contradictions are, they can be managed if you approach them the right way. You cannot master this approach in business school, nor through traditional management experience. You have to learn it through direct experience in struggling with paradoxical problems, acknowledging them, sorting out the contradictions.

We help you get started with this book, offering a range of content to highlight an approach that works. We tell stories of leaders who are struggling with paradoxical questions. We summarize research to show you how the world has changed and how you can react effectively. We itemize our processes and tools for moving one step at a time to solutions. We base all of this on our decades of experience, in which we have observed patterns of dysfunction in handling multiplying paradoxes—and how to move beyond them.

We agree with many of the books on leadership today. They offer lots of good tips and techniques, from recruiting to motivating to inspiring. But this book adds something vital to the leadership bookshelf: It singles out skills that most leaders desperately need today but don't have—especially veteran leaders who earned promotions when organizations faced fewer contradictions. It offers advice to these leaders as whole people, without separating the mental skills or personal characteristics needed on the job from those at home or in the community. This is not a book offering another theory. It is a how-to handbook for getting started.

We focus on collaborative problem solving because the heroic approach—the solo gunslinger protagonist going after antagonistic business forces—is not up to the task at hand. We focus on broad-based collaboration, because many people are required to help you out—not just those who sit in offices down the hall. You also need people sitting in other offices, living in your communities, or facing you across the dinner table. A company, after all, is only as smart as its people's capacity to collaborate on paradoxical problems.

You may have noticed that in the world today paradoxes seem to have paralyzed many institutions. Everywhere you look, leaders seem caught in the dysfunction of seeing problems only as offering either/or solutions, one extreme or the other. One side will not acknowledge the validity of the other side, creating problems that seemingly can't be addressed and get worse through inaction. The U.S. Congress leaps to mind here. But many business organizations are also slowed or sometimes stopped by paradox generated through matrix organizations or line-versus-staff, global-versus-local, product-versus-service conflicts, all of which are really paradoxes awaiting management.

Students of human organization patterns used to think that only the most senior leaders dealt regularly with paradoxes, but in today's organizations full of empowered people, just about everyone does. This book can help you begin the conversation on how to deal with them. How will your team, peers, boss, and even spouse manage amid so many contradictions? How can they become collaborators in bringing the toughest ones to resolution? When you wrestle with others over paradoxes, you will have a new insight: While contradictory forces can drive a wedge between people, you can also use those forces to unite people. Although paradox can spark strife, it can also spur possibility.

The advice we give in this book expands on our advice in earlier books, in which we called for the development of “head, heart, and guts” leaders. You use your head as an analytical tool. You use your heart to listen to and empathize with your collaborators' and stakeholders' points of view. You use your guts to summon the courage to act in the face of complexity and ambiguity. The CEO we described earlier found that his head, heart, and guts were telling him different things. You will find the same thing in the paradoxical challenges that are common today.

To deal in this world, it takes a specific approach, which we describe here: First, in Chapter One, we urge you to draw a distinction between straightforward puzzle-like problems and complex paradoxical ones. When you can identify the beast you're going after, you're more likely to succeed in subduing it. There's an old story about a rookie hunter who arrives at a game station bragging about the cow moose he shot. The wildlife officer retorts, “That's some poor honest farmer's mule!” The lesson, of course, is that knowing the size and shape of the problem you're going after makes all the difference.

Second, in Chapter Two, we urge you to recognize the human strengths that help people to solve puzzle-like problems but hinder their work on paradoxical ones. We highlight the natural human drives for control, consistency, and closure, for which most leaders have been rewarded over a lifetime. Who wants a leader who doesn't want to control events? A leader who doesn't act consistently? A leader who can't bring about closure? But with paradoxical problems, these drives get the problem-solving plane down the runway but fail to give it sufficient lift to take off. Leaders need to understand how to use control, consistency, and closure but also how to give away control to others, to tolerate inconsistency, and to accept a lack of closure.

Third, in Chapter Three, we urge you to take stock of the limitations the organization puts on managing paradoxical problem solving. Ironically, many things that make an organization run efficiently are antithetical to managing paradox effectively. Matrix organization creates multiple internal advocates for either/or choices—either theirs (good) or their rivals' (bad)—instead of a range of more reasonable options. Strategic planning assumes you can predict and control the future rather than act, react, and adapt. Performance review systems reward people for solving puzzles and, as an unintentional consequence, ignore most good work on paradoxes. Added to these organizational dysfunctions are personal ones such as arrogance and aloofness and perfectionism, and we discuss many of these in Chapter Three.

Fourth, in Chapters Four through Six, we urge you to start on the path to dealing with paradox by changing your thinking. By reworking the mechanics inside your head, you can engineer fresh perspectives that facilitate the collaborative search for solutions. We recommend practicing three mindsets, each helpful in different situations: the purpose mindset, the reconciliation mindset, and the innovation mindset. To oversimplify a bit, the innovation mindset calls for out-of-the-box thinking; the reconciliation mindset, inside-the-box thinking; and the purpose mindset, above-the-box thinking. They foster, in turn, invention, negotiation, and aspiration.

Fifth, in Chapters Seven through Eleven, we suggest five time-tested tools that we have found especially helpful in resolving paradoxical problems: scanning the environment, scenario thinking, stakeholder mapping, dialogue, and conflict management. These tools are not new, but as with tools in any trade, you can apply them in specific ways to fulfill particular objectives. We aim to show how to use them to engage in broad and deep conversations, allowing you to work with groups of people in an unbiased way. We have found that many people, even when they recognize paradoxes, feel overwhelmed and unable to deal with them. These tools break the paralysis. They get you to advance your thinking and to act in the face of ambiguity.

Finally, in Chapter Twelve, we show you how to develop your personal skills as a leader intent on mastering the paradoxes of our time. We focus especially on human weaknesses and how to identify and mitigate them. We hope in the process to give you permission to accept that, however hard you try, you will sometimes let the quirks of your personality thrust monkey wrenches into the spokes of smooth collaboration. You will sabotage your own best intentions, but you can often head off your self-destructive tendencies. We offer ways to help keep to your chosen path.

All this brings us to our opening paradox: “The only way to become a finished leader is to remain an unfinished one.” Becoming a finished leader means you have developed exceptional leadership skills, and you constantly upgrade them as you recognize your failings. But practice does not make perfect. None of us is perfect. So keeping a sense that you're unfinished keeps you fresh and makes you better.

Along with engaging your head, heart, and guts, your unfinished attitude makes you a complete leader. Your attitude of humility helps you to drive every day toward mastery, while accepting that you can never quite get there. You accept that your task is to keep trying—diving deep inside yourself, reaching broadly out to others, and embracing complexity without denying it. That's how you will find ways to act effectively in a world of paradox.

Notes

1.John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Viking, 1951).

2. This quote is attributed to Einstein, although not verified. A similar quote by Einstein, in scientific terms, is as follows: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” For a discussion of the simpler quote's source, originally from the New York Times, see http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/#more-2363.

PART ONE

The Challenge of Paradoxes

1

Puzzles and Paradoxes

Par-a-dox: noun, def. 3: one (as a person, situation, or action) having seemingly contradictory qualities or phases.

—Merriam-Webster1

You often hear of top-flight managers who do so well at one company that another firm woos them away for a tidy sum—only to turn into losers at their new jobs. And you often wonder: How could wunderkinds in one company so quickly become bona fide duds in another?

We can't tell you all the reasons why, but we know one of them. It relates to how people solve problems. As a way of explaining, let us tell the story of Ron, a client and the former hotshot leader at a media and technology company. Ron, who made his name as a brain-iac overachiever, could absorb, integrate, and act on vast mountains of data about consumers and market trends. With a team of geeks and creatives, he developed breakthrough marketing strategies, created brilliant ad campaigns, and delivered rapid market growth.

After great success, Ron was tapped to become COO of another company. He took the same approach there—and it didn't go well. Almost too late, he realized that the real problem he faced was not solving an analytical puzzle about global marketing. It was figuring out how to work with others in a matrix organization.

Ron and others at headquarters wanted one thing. People in the field wanted another—and both sides had good reasons. Ron was caught navigating between contradictory organizational forces. In spite of his intellect, he was skewered for arrogance by regional salespeople, who shunned him as cold and uncaring.

Ron was proving as ineffective in his new job as he'd been effective in the old one—so much so that his boss threatened to let him go. It didn't matter that Ron, based on his exhaustive analysis, knew how to build bigger market share with a bigger and smarter brand, offering customers a new website, new loyalty programs, and new amenities. He could even prove in meetings that he had the right answer: He had irrefutable numbers and logic.

And yet Ron's inability to deal with contradiction became the problem itself. Ron was one man in one unhappy job, but we have encountered people in the same circumstances in other companies. In fact, he may remind you of someone you know. Or maybe you, yourself. Because the fault he revealed at the conceptual level was common among leaders: thinking of every problem as an analytical one—and acting on that thinking so single-mindedly as to remain blinded to the reality that the make-or-break problem may actually be a paradoxical one.

When we use the term paradoxical, we do not mean paradoxical as in literature. We mean paradoxical as in bristling with opposing forces—forces that seem contradictory or even absurd in juxtaposition. Forces that cannot be muted or ignored. In Ron's case, that meant forces that pushed a headquarters solution on one hand and a regional one on the other. Or put another way, forces that required acceptance of a solution at the headquarters level versus acceptance at the regional level. Achieving ownership at both levels—a contradictory task—was key. If salespeople didn't feel that ownership, they wouldn't take action in spite of Ron's appeals to the CEO to force compliance.

When leaders don't see the paradoxical nature of problems and solutions—when they think they can solve every problem as an analytical puzzle, as Ron did—they fail at some of their hardest challenges in management today. Especially the people challenges. They get stuck on one side of the line separating straightforward problems from complex ones. And their decision making then perplexes, angers, and alienates people around them—bosses, subordinates, partners, even family.

We tell more of Ron's story later, because he did ultimately transform himself to overcome the challenge he faced. He began to think about how he could change his own behavior, rather than fix his new organization. He decided to learn before he leaped, and listen before he led. Over time he was accepted by the new organization, which began to appreciate the value he could provide.

But first we look deeper at the ability he initially lacked: to recognize the difference between problems with pat answers, what we classify as puzzles, and problems with no pat answers—and no promise of ever having them—which we classify as paradoxes. Life can be miserable—as Ron learned, in spite of his devotion to a quality analytical solution—if you don't make this distinction. It's essential to jump over the line and work with others to handle paradoxes.

If you don't make this distinction, you make another error—an error we see in leaders all the time—thinking the skills needed for resolving one kind of problem are adequate to handle the other. They aren't. And the deployment of the wrong combination of mindsets and tools explains why leaders who excel in solving puzzles flail and fail with paradoxical problems. Only by jumping over the line (and when appropriate jumping back) can they manage the complexity that life throws at them today.

Jumping over that line is no small task for many leaders, but it is well worthwhile. Obtaining this ability is what sets them up for functioning at much higher levels of performance. It also sets them up to function at the highest levels in the organization, since the higher you go the more paradoxical the problems become. Managing those problems effectively enables you to avoid frustrating others while eliciting unparalleled levels of energy from your people.

It can also do something else, and that is prepare you to see that dealing with paradoxical problems often raises, in turn, paradoxical solutions: The way to compete in the long term is to compete in the short term. The way to compete globally is to compete locally. The way to create stability is to create change. The way to serve yourself is to serve the team. The way to gain power at the center is to give power to the periphery. The way to achieve cohesion is to champion diversity. These solutions result from first seeing the basic distinction Ron missed entirely.

The Problem Continuum

Everyone implicitly knows but rarely stops to consider one core truth: The kinds of problems that emerge in an organization do not all come from the same mold. In fact, they don't even come in just two varieties, puzzles and paradoxes, as we have implied. They vary along a continuum. From quantitative problems to policy problems. From questions of achieving factory efficiencies to conundrums in making investments. From sticky situations in customer service to the quandaries over balancing stakeholder claims. From snags related to regulatory rulemaking to predicaments of centralizing versus decentralizing organizational authority.

On one end of the continuum are problems with solutions built on uncontestable facts. On the other are ambiguous problems raising a muddle of alternative solutions wherein every element is contestable. Fortunately, you don't need a whole taxonomy of problems to further your leadership skills. It's only necessary to distinguish between black-and-white puzzle-like problems and unresolvable paradoxical ones, and to recognize that puzzle-like problems amenable to a single solution differ from paradoxes with no fixed and enduring solution—and to accept that what look like easy, win-win puzzles can evolve into chronic no-win paradoxes.

We've seen a lot of misery among corporate leaders as they solve problems—a lot of it self-inflicted, and much of that starting with failure to make the puzzle-paradox distinction. That's of course what happened to Ron. He could analyze complicated markets and come up with a rational and defensible approach to what needed to be done. He could not so easily solve the complex paradoxes posed by conflicting forces in the matrix organization in which various factions competed with one another. Regional sales chiefs, the dukes of their own lands, refused to simply bend to his will.

Puzzles We Know

Today's leaders have invariably received plenty of training in solving problems with puzzle-like qualities. With persistence and ingenuity, using analysis and rigorous logic, they have become accustomed to arriving at a right solution. The analysis, of course, depends on facts and data. And the facts and data point to insights. The insights in turn allow the leader to wield a set of known tools and procedures to launch a frontal attack that promises a certain solution to the problem.

The classic puzzle in management is the “traveling sales rep problem.” What's the shortest route for someone to drive or fly to a fixed number of cities and return to the original city? The problem, even once you get to a large number of stops, has a definitive answer, even if not easy to determine. The same is true of many analogous questions of optimization in planning, logistics, manufacturing, and other fields. The traveling sales rep problem is a favorite of mathematicians.

Solving puzzles like this brings a lot of satisfaction to most people, and it's easy to see why. As in crossword puzzles, picture puzzles, or chess, so in operations management, product development, and customer service, people have learned again and again to win—and feel like a winner—with a fixed solution.

Note that by referring to puzzle-like problems, we don't imply simplicity. Many problems with what appear to be straightforward solutions are complicated and difficult. For example:

Determining the lowest-cost providers of materials for manufacturing.Determining the impact on margins of currency fluctuations in non-U.S. businesses.Identifying the technical training requirements for operating new logistics software.Determining consumers' level of satisfaction with a new product launched in Asia.Determining the impact on client portfolios if the yield on municipal bonds drops.Forecasting price points based on shifts in commodity markets.

These are tough puzzles to figure out. They have many parts, and the parts interact in many ways—and yet as complicated as they are, they still have single best solutions. And they can still be solved most of the time by just one smart person. As an example, the head of a health care business we know, an executive with lots of experience, had to develop a strategy to resuscitate a money-losing hospital device business. Competitors had invented new technologies and lowered costs, squeezing her unit's margins. Hospitals were replacing some of her business's core products in surgical devices.

The first step for this executive was to come up with a new strategy. She faced some complicated questions: Which segment of the market was growing the fastest? Which customers had the most money to pay for supplemental surgery and medical devices? Which governments reimbursed the most for medical procedures? Which competitors' technology was declining? Which was most promising? Questions like this go on and on. But each has an answer, and she could formulate her strategy based on an analysis of the facts at hand. Coming up with the strategy was still hard, and it was important. To grow her business at that point, the most important challenge was to get the strategy right. But she was facing a puzzle, albeit a complicated one, nothing more.

Like other authors, we contrast complicated problems with complex ones.2 A complex problem has no straightforward solution, defies purely logical analysis, and never yields to one answer. Complex problems are paradoxes. Distinguishing between complicated and complex is another way of distinguishing between puzzles and paradoxes. That many leaders don't make that distinction goes a long way toward explaining why company leaders so often ask us to come in and help them—and why we often trace their challenges to resolving paradoxes.

Paradoxes We May Not Know

It's useful to define paradox, as often used in management, in more detail. Leaving aside its literary uses, we define paradox, first, as a problem requiring leaders to recognize and fulfill two or more competing demands at the same time—for instance, winning at global and local levels simultaneously, as in Ron's case. You can single out what factors are under tension—and will always stay that way—almost like the poles of a magnet. In other words, paradoxes press leaders to serve one need while serving its opposite. That's hard enough on its own, but leaders are always facing multiple paradoxes at the same time and trying to find a way to proceed—when all the ways with a chance of improving current conditions are apt to seem illogical if not irrational when viewed from different perspectives.