Leadership is a great balancing act. It involves balancing the short- and long-term; investment and return; innovation and efficiency; and head and heart. Leaders relentlessly live F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
Great leaders are not one-dimensional.
Whether in politics, business, society, athletics—or any field of endeavor—great leaders succeed by balancing multiple dimensions of both perspective and skill.
Three dimensions are particularly important.
Orientation
Do you orient your thinking outside-in or inside-out?
An outside-in perspective—grounded in the market and customer view—ensures that you and your organization stay focused on meeting real needs, delivering value, and understanding the jobs your products and services are hired to do. Without this external lens, organizations risk irrelevance, becoming obsolete before they even realize it.
But effective leaders also embrace the inside-out perspective: What are we great at? Where do we struggle? Are our culture and values helping us move forward or holding us back?
Without this organizational self-awareness, even the best strategic plans wither, unexecuted.
Approach
Do you leverage your leadership on your cognitive analytical capabilities or on your interpersonal and empathetic ability to engage others?
Effective leaders must synthesize today’s overwhelming flood of information—distilling what matters most to set direction and evaluate performance. But they must also engage, motivate, and build emotional connections with employees, customers, and partners.
Relying on one without the other falls flat.
Horizon
What is your field of vision?
Like the headlights on a car, great leaders must shift between high beams—seeing the long-term horizon, the vision, and the potential for success—and low beams—the tactical day-to-day actions that move the organization forward.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in a 2011 article at Harvard Business Review about the importance of leaders zooming in and zooming out. Her view is that these perspectives need to be “vantage points, not fixed positions.”
We see this dynamic play out in our business simulations. Even in microcosm, leaders often struggle to balance these three dimensions: outside-in vs. inside-out, analytical vs. empathetic, and strategic vs. tactical. In high-pressure situations with tight deadlines or rising conflict, it’s easy to get pulled toward the immediate, the tactical, and the internal. Ironically, it’s in those very moments—when the stakes are highest—that leaders most need to stay balanced.
Are you a balanced leader? Explore the dimensions in our Balancing Leadership™ Assessment Tool. You might find a clue to help you regain your bearings.
References
Kanter, R. M. (2011, March). Managing yourself: Zoom in, zoom out. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/03/managing-yourself-zoom-in-zoom-out
