The Leader’s Paradox –
How to Stretch When Pulled by Opposing Demands
 

What Keeps Transit leaders Up at Night?
Jean, CEO of Super Transit, approached me with her difficult challenge.
“Dave, how do I get one of our cities to understand that we don’t have the budget to do everything they want when our regional light rail system goes through their city?”

I had just completed my presentations at her association’s CEO Seminar and replied, “Let’s sit down and discuss it.”

Only a few minutes earlier, during my presentation to Jean and 100 of her CEO colleagues, I had shared the top twenty challenges based on my interviews with 26 transit CEOs. These are seen in Table 1.

Table 1 - The Top Twenty Transit Challenges

1. Manage funding cuts
2. Follow new mandates
3. Engage/motivate employees
4. Implement service reductions
5. Meet short-term objectives
6. Innovate for the long-term
7. Get more done with less
8. Take time to coach/mentor others
9. Deliver legacy projects
10. Meet community's real needs
11. Maintain standard IT platforms
12. Adapt software to address local needs
13. Become a regional mobility manager
14. Address each city’s issue
15. Manage generational and cultural differences
16. Adhere to uniform policies and procedures
17. Gain buy-in to the accelerated pace of change
18. Build a platform of stability
19. Meet the increasing demands of work
20. Have a fulfilling home life…

What Should Keep Transit Leaders Up at Night?
So, how many of these challenges are affecting you? Jean and most of the other CEOs admitted in the seminar that they confront at least a dozen or more on a regular basis. I then asked them if they noticed anything unusual about the list. They didn’t. Do you? Review Table 1 again. This time however, read the list in pairs by adding the words and at the same time after every odd-numbered challenge. In other words, read number one and number two together with the word and between them. Do this with numbers three and four, five and six, and so forth.

What did you observe as you read the list in pairs? Did the pairs seem to be at odds with each other? Good. That's because they are! What I discovered from these 26 interviews was that many of the challenges transit leaders face in today’s rapidly changing landscape are in fact, paradoxes - they pull in opposite directions simultaneously. In fact, if we reformat the top 20 challenges into paradoxes, we create a top 10 list as seen in Table 2. Can you guess which one Jean and I focused on?

Table 2 - Transit’s Top Ten Paradoxical Challenges

1.  Manage funding cuts and Follow new mandates
2.  Engage/motivate employees and Implement service reductions
3.  Meet short-term objectives and Innovate for long-term growth
4.  Get more done with less and Take time to coach/mentor others
5.  Deliver legacy projects and Meet community's real needs
6.  Maintain standard IT platforms and Adapt software to address local needs
7.  Become a regional mobility manager and Address each city’s issues
8.  Embrace generational/cultural diversity and Adhere to uniform policies
9.  Gain buy-in to the accelerated pace of change and Provide a platform of stability
10. Meet the increasing demands of work and Have a fulfilling home life

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

  From Balancing to Stretching 

Trying to meet conflicting demands is familiar terrain to most transit leaders. Executives have been balancing competing goals for many years. But that’s the point; it used to be all about balancing goals. My interviews suggested that today, it’s more about managing the tension between contradictory issues. (Do you feel like you’re balancing issues these days OR being pulled by opposing demands?) Jean and I agreed that paradox number seven in Table 2 came close to describing the tension she was feeling. Before I share how we resolved her challenge, let’s briefly discuss why there is so much tension and what our workforce development research discovered you can do about it.

  Why So Much Tension These Days?
Professors Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis reviewed 360 separate studies on paradoxes. (1) They reported that paradoxical tensions are more prevalent and persistent when three forces are at work.

1. Competing Stakeholders – Leaders experience increased tension when the number of stakeholders with conflicting agendas increases. Jean lamented that she felt pulled to meet the divergent demands of community groups, regulators, sustainability advocates, a regional board of directors, and local city councils. Sound familiar?

2. Resource Constraints – Despite passage of a two-year transit bill, most transit leaders confess that they have to do more with less. They feel pulled to manage their budget constraints while at the same time boost employee morale, exceed riders’ expectations, and invest in the future. Jean pointed out that she would love to provide the city with everything they want, but she only had so much money to meet the entire region’s needs.

3. Accelerating Pace of Change – The speed of change is a bullet train to transit’s future. Yet, these changes (technology, information availability, demographic shifts...) create an avalanche of continuous change. Keeping pace with the warp-speed of change demands numerous initiatives that often compete with each other. For example, do you ever feel stretched to allocate resources between tactical (e.g., use new technology to increase bus route efficiency) and strategic initiatives (e.g., create long-term, transit-oriented development plans)?

Any of these forces (or all three) can hit transit leaders on any given day. That’s why the transit leader’s paradox is less about finding balance and more about managing the tension of opposing demands. Unfortunately, our ongoing workforce development research suggests that many executives, like Jean, don’t stretch when they feel pulled by their conflicting issues, they SNAP! Let’s briefly review that research and then recommend four tools that will help you and your team stretch.

Workforce Development – Transit Research at the Top
At the end of my presentation to the APTA CEOs two years ago, I invited them and their senior executive teams to complete a 360 assessment (called the eXpansive Leadership Model - XLM) as part of our research in the transportation industry.

The objectives of our research were three-fold:

1. Identify which competencies are transit leaders’ strongest and weakest
2. Determine if these competencies predict leadership effectiveness
3. Learn how well leaders actually manage paradoxical tensions

To date, 77 transit executives (16 CEOs and 61 executive team members) have rated themselves and invited 376 other people (boss, peers, direct reports...) to rate them on the researched-based competencies assessed by XLM.

Which Competencies Are Transit Leaders’ Strongest and Weakest?
Of the 16 competencies assessed by the XLM, the four that transit executives scored the highest in are:

1. Execute with passion & courage
2. Choose responsibly
3. Serve ethically
4. Clarify objectives & expectations

The four competencies that executives scored the lowest in (often referred to as “developmental opportunities”) are as follows (the lowest score is first, second lowest score is second...):

1. Embrace ambiguity & paradox
2. Know thyself & others
3. Regulate emotions
4. Cultivate innovative growth

Do These Competencies Predict Transit Leadership Effectiveness?
To measure leadership effectiveness, the XLM asks seven questions related to how well the leaders actually lead (e.g., to what extent would you rate this leaders overall leadership effectiveness as outstanding?) We averaged the scores of these seven questions to derive a composite leadership effectiveness score. (If you multiply the 7 questions times the 376 total raters, you can see that we had 2,632 leadership effectiveness scores.) We then analyzed the data to determine how well the XLM competencies correlated with perceived leadership effectiveness in the 77 transit executives. In essence, we were asking if these competencies actually mattered in the transit industry. The correlations for the highest and lowest scored competencies are seen in parenthesis below. (Scientists tell us that in this type of research, correlations greater than .30 are considered significant, while correlations greater than .50 are considered high.)

The correlations of the competencies that executives scored the highest in are:

1. Execute with passion & courage (.58)
2. Choose responsibly (.52)
3. Serve ethically (.43)
4. Clarify objectives & expectations (.52)

The correlations of the four competencies that executives scored the lowest in are:

1. Embrace ambiguity & paradox (.56)
2. Know thyself & others (.57)
3. Regulate emotions (.48)
4. Cultivate innovative growth (.59)

Paradox Lost - How Well Do Leaders Manage Paradoxical Tensions?
Although the leadership competency “Embrace ambiguity & paradox” is highly correlated with leadership effectiveness (.56), it is the lowest ranked of the 16 competencies assessed. As Mike Scanlon, CEO at SamTrans remarked, “Are you telling us that we are least effective in the most important competency – the one that can help in today’s paradoxical environment?” Precisely.

Transit leaders are not alone in their need to develop this low-scoring skill. In a study of 1,000 organizations over a 20-year period, researchers found that leaders mismanage paradoxes between 38 – 45% of the time, and suffer poor performance because of it. (2) The most common error was addressing one issue of a paradox independently of the other. The good news is that these authors, as well as others, have also reported that small improvements in managing paradoxical issues significantly increased firm performance. (3) In addition, my work over the last decade with transit leaders, like Jean, indicates there are several ways to improve your ability to stretch when you feel pulled. Four are discussed in the next sections.

How to Stretch When You Feel Pulled by Opposing Demands

Managing a paradox is analogous to sailing a small boat on windy day. When the wind grabs your sails and starts tipping you over, you don’t pick one side and stick to it for the entire trip. Nor do you drop the rope and let the wind have its way with you; you scramble to the other side of the boat and hang over the edge while holding the ropes. You get where you want to go by managing the tension between your hands and the wind (the two “elements” of this paradox.) Harnessing the tension keeps you moving toward your destination. Which of the four below might keep you moving on your journey?

1. Look through other’s windows. Our point of view is not the only view. Understand that how we perceive our business challenge and environment at the present moment is not reality. It is our view of reality. We can embrace paradoxical thinking by pretending we are on the outside of a house looking through one window into one room. Whenever we are dealing with a paradox, we can assume we do not know what is going on throughout the entire room. Our view improves if we invite the “loyal opposition” to share their perspective from their windows. This will help develop the “flexible thinking” that Joe Calabrese, CEO of Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, identified as critical in today’s transit leader.

2. Fail fast, small, and learn. Leaders who embrace contrarian thinking often conduct little experiments to test assumptions and address issues. As Charles Odimgbe, CEO of Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, pointed out during our interview, “We must think outside the BUS! This increases our agility to respond rapidly to our changing environment.”

3. Make the abstract concrete. Paradoxical thinkers are not dreamers disconnected from reality. They are visionary leaders who are in touch with their surroundings. They are possibility and probability thinkers. Like kite flyers, they let their dreams fly high while tethered to the ground. Jean translated our discussion about her paradoxical tensions into practical actions that helped her deal with the city. She told me that adapting the “Map the paradox” idea was the most beneficial to her because it helped others see the trade-offs in her paradox.

4. Map the paradox. To help Jean with her paradox, I drew two small boxes on opposite sides, in the middle of a blank piece of paper. In the left box, I wrote City’s Needs and in the right box, I wrote Super Transit’s Regional Budget. We then brainstormed the answers to four simple questions:

1) What are the benefits of meeting the needs of the City?
2) What are the benefits of staying within Super Transit’s Regional Budget?
3) What might be the unintended consequences of over-focusing on the city’s needs?
4) What might be the unintended consequences of over-focusing on the Regional Budget?

I scribbled Jean’s answers to question 1 in the upper-left quadrant of the sheet of paper; answers to question 2 in the upper-right quadrant; answers to question 3 in the lower-left quadrant; the answers to question 4 in the lower-right quadrant. This created a variation of what Dr. Barry Johnson called it a polarity map. (5) I then asked Jean this rhetorical question, “If there’s an upside and a downside to both sides, should you meet the needs of the city or your regional budget?”

Jean smiled, took the insights she gained from this process, and used them to lead a discussion with city officials about the tradeoffs of focusing on one side at the expense of the other. She later told me that this idea led to a breakthrough with the city.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence;
it is to act with yesterday's logic.
Peter Drucker

Competing stakeholders, resource constraints, and an accelerating pace of change are all conspiring to pull transit leaders in opposite directions during these turbulent times. Adapt these ideas to help you stretch whenever you feel pulled by paradox at work. 

  P.S. Dave Jensen is a transit consultant and executive coach who transforms proven leadership tools into client success stories. As a leadership expert, he is also an engaging speaker and facilitator at conferences, meetings, and retreats. He can be reached in Los Angeles, CA at (310) 397-6686 or http://davejensenonleadership.com/

1. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis; Theory Development: Toward a Theory of Paradox: A Dynamic Equilibrium Model of Organizing,  Academy of Management Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2011, p381–403.
2. Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro; Managing the Right Tension, Harvard Business Review, December 2006, 62-74.
3. Beech, Nic; Contrary prescriptions: Recognizing Good Practice Tensions in Management, Organization Studies, January 2003, 1 -- 28.
4. Roger Martin; The Opposable Mind - How Successful Leaders Win through Integrative Thinking, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2007, page 31.
5. Barry Johnson, Polarity Management - Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems. (Polarity Management - Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, HRD Press, Inc., Amherst, Massachusetts, 1996.