Leadership Trap #1: Eliminating Tension
Executive Insight
Some of the hardest leadership challenges persist because both sides protect something the organization needs.
Effective leaders don't seek a permanent midpoint; they recognize when the benefits of emphasizing one priority begin to be outweighed by its costs or risks.
Balance isn't the point. Leadership is the judgment and periodic reassessment of the costs and benefits of tension within the greater organizational context.
What if the tension isn't the problem?
Leaders are often expected to resolve tension: choose a direction, set the standard, get everyone aligned.
But some tensions shouldn't be resolved. Organizations need standardization and flexibility, speed and rigor, local autonomy and enterprise visibility, innovation and reliability.
The leadership challenge isn't choosing the right side. It's recognizing what each side protects — and what happens when either is pushed too far.
Barry Johnson's work on polarity management describes these as interdependent pairs: competing needs that cannot be permanently solved because organizations need the benefits of both. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis similarly describe effective leadership as "both/and" thinking rather than forcing complex challenges into either/or choices.
The system wasn't broken. The context had changed.
I recently facilitated a workshop for an engineering organization integrating several acquired businesses. One business unit was considerably larger and more mature than the others. It had established governance, processes, and custom tools that worked well. So when corporate asked for information or proposed standardization, its leaders understandably responded: We already track that. We already have a system.
And they did. The problem was that their systems had been optimized for running their business, not an integrated enterprise.
So I asked: What information does corporate leadership need to see across the enterprise?
That question changed the conversation. The business unit opened its tools, showed the group what it was already tracking, and began working through what else would be required for enterprise reporting. Its existing capability didn't need to be discarded; it became a starting point.
Standardization can create problems, too.
The conversation also revealed the danger of pushing too far in the other direction. These businesses don't all do the same work. One is heavily oriented toward engineering services; another primarily sells products. Both had historically called customer work "projects."
Standardizing around that term would have created consistency while losing meaning. The group ultimately distinguished between projects for service-oriented work and orders for product-based work. That gave corporate consistent language without pretending the businesses were identical.
Good integration doesn't eliminate differences. It distinguishes between differences that create value and differences that create friction.
Too much autonomy makes enterprise integration difficult. Too much standardization can erase capabilities and distinctions that matter. Both are legitimate concerns.
Balance isn't a point. It's a judgment.
This is why I hesitate when leaders talk about finding "balance." Balance sounds static. Leadership isn't. The appropriate emphasis changes with the situation.
In engineering, another analysis may reduce meaningful risk — or simply consume four more hours confirming something we already know. In organizational design, another corporate standard may enable valuable reporting — or impose unnecessary bureaucracy on businesses that operate differently.
In these situations, I'll ask: What additional benefit are we getting from pushing farther in this direction, and what is it beginning to cost us?
Risk matters. Opportunity cost matters. Time matters. Reversibility matters enormously. A decision that is cheap to reverse generally warrants less analysis than one involving safety, reputation, major capital, or strategic direction.
The objective isn't to find the midpoint between competing priorities. It's to recognize when the benefits of emphasizing one are beginning to be outweighed by the consequences.
Leadership requires keeping useful tensions alive.
Polarity management doesn't mean avoiding decisions. Leaders still have to choose. But choosing doesn't require declaring one perspective correct and the other wrong.
Often, intelligent people advocate different positions because they are optimizing for different - but legitimate - outcomes. The business unit wasn't wrong to protect systems that worked. Corporate wasn't wrong to require enterprise visibility. Progress came when we expanded the frame enough to see both.
That's why I increasingly think of leadership not as eliminating tension, but as managing it deliberately in service of a shared purpose.
Some tension is evidence that the system is working. The challenge is knowing when it isn't.
References
Barry Johnson, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, HRD Press, 1992.
Wendy K. Smith, Marianne W. Lewis, and Michael L. Tushman, "Both/And Leadership," Harvard Business Review, May 2016.
Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis, Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, Harvard Business Review Press, 2022.
