Navigating paradox and contradictions in leadership
This blog builds on last week’s topic of “meaning-making and the fundamental attribution error”. Together, they offer an invitation to leaders to stay curious, linger in the grey, and find nuance in themselves, their teams and the world around them.
Two (or more) seemingly contradictory things can be true at once. If there is such a thing, the ‘truth’ often lies somewhere in the grey.
Leadership in complex environments and uncertain times requires us to be open to the world’s nuance and greyness and its fabulous, contradictory, imperfect human inhabitants. Cognitively, we know this.
But it is one of the hardest things to do in practice, particularly when we are stuck in the busyness of the day to day, with our nervous systems on high alert.
Our brains do not always work in our favour
It doesn’t help that our brains are built to seek patterns, hold judgements and make assumptions - all in a bid to conserve precious cognitive resources. These allow us to resolve conflicting emotions or thoughts and boil them down into simpler, accessible stories that feel more comfortable.
In essence, seeing things in black and white helps us feel less vulnerable and experience more certainty and predictability in an increasingly more volatile world.
For example, if I am given constructive criticism, I might either reject it entirely on account of the feedback-giver’s lack of context or understanding or internalise all blame and responsibility. The two conflicting truths that:
The feedback-giver may have a point and
Not all the context or understanding feels comfortable
It feels safer to choose one reality over the other.
The problem is that this kind of thinking is reductive. It limits the scope of our understanding of ourselves, others, and the situations we face. It prohibits us from believing that multiple things can be true at once, limits our ability to see different perspectives and make better, more informed decisions.
It also seriously compromises organisational culture when it is modelled from the top down. Blame culture, anyone?
What does it look like in practice?
These tensions come up all the time in the coaching space. It is by opening ourselves up to multiple realities that we can thrive as individuals, teams, and organisations.
On an individual level, you can:
Love what you do and feel unmotivated.
Be really frustrated with someone and love them deeply.
Be jealous of someone and allow it to inspire you.
Be afraid and do something anyway.
Be deep in grief and still experience a moment of joy.
My favourite - You can refuse to take responsibility for other people’s behaviour and consider how you have contributed to it.
Left to its own devices, the brain will try to resolve these seemingly contradictory truths, like so:
When you feel unmotivated, you might question the work that you do and start looking for something else.
When you feel frustrated with someone, you might question the entire relationship and never trust them again.
When you feel jealous, you might dismiss the person and their work.
And, last but not least, when someone is aggressive or dismissive of you, you might either blame it all on them - after all we are not responsible for other people’s behaviour - or blame it all on yourself.
The reality is that we are all flawed human beings who can show up in different ways at different times and with different people depending on a whole host of variables.
Curiosity as the antidote
So, what can we do?
We start with awareness. When we experience the urge to think in absolute terms about anything, we can notice the pull, slow down, pause and choose to stay curious and open to the possibility of multiple truths holding at once.
When we choose curiosity, we stop judgement, blame, and shame in their tracks.
Instead of putting our armour on, we ask questions:
What am I assuming that might not be true?
What else might be true?
What might that person say if I asked them?
What else do I need to find out?
By simply asking the questions, we vastly improve the quality of the next action we take.
Turning judgement into curiosity is a superpower but it’s not a gift. It requires daily practice. Even coaches get caught up sometimes because we’re human too. The key is to notice and pivot with compassion for ourselves and others.