High Performance Leadership

Teams get confused. They compete, they collaborate, they get stuck. As a high performance leader, how do you get them unstuck? What if you want your team members to compete with each other to enhance their performance AND you want them to cooperate on projects? Can you have both? Can you embrace the paradox? Here's what helps: tell the truth. Let your team members know what works. Let them know how you decide what to compensate. Sort thru the details with honesty. Wrestle with the contradictions and focus on your team's mission. Because whether you choose to embrace the paradoxes of leadership or not, they will find you and how you deal with them will largely calibrate the success of your team. What if the opposite of what you want is also what you want? Get more clarity around what you want. Go for that. Let your team know. -- doug smith

Has a hard problem got you tied in a box? Are the boundaries so bound you aren't moving forward? Even obvious problems can feel like puzzles. Even easy problems can appear paradoxical - one answer is true, and yet it is false. One solution will work, and yet it won't. We wrestle with, balance, and confront two or more competing ideas knowing that something is true about each of them. When a problem is a paradox you may need to cross a boundary or two to make sense of it. Flip it around. Turn it inside out. Push the limit until the limit surrenders. Suspend all disbelief until something believable emerges. Maybe it's your answer, and maybe it's not. It could be another bunny trail down the rabbit hole of mystery. But your answer is there somewhere - somewhere beyond its current boundary. What's got you boxed in? -- Doug Smith Front Range Leadership:  Training Supervisors for Success doug smith training:  how to achieve your goals

What do you do with paradox? ( A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition. -- Wikipedia ) How do you explain your company's need to reduce expenses and expand at the same time? High performance leaders must deal with paradox. They must deal with the fact that sometimes we need to hold what appear to be two conflicting ideas at the same time in similar (if not equal) measure. There is no easy answer. We wrestle with complicated problems that have no simple explanation. Some must be left to evolve. Some must be carefully sculpted into a sensible blend. But our issues are often not a yes or no proposition. How leaders explain their need for paradox determines their credibility. How do you expand energy without using public domain acquisition of property? How do you reform banking without failing to compete internationally? How do you adopt austerity measures and reduce unemployme...