The Messy Paradoxes of Leadership

Truly effective and enduring leadership has always been a bit messy and mired in paradox. We have always aspired to be kind and demanding, to ensure performance and enable employees to develop and make mistakes, to be unyielding (e.g., on standards) and flexible (e.g., on methods), to maintain consistency and drive innovation, to address the short and the long term, to inspire big-picture thinking and attention to detail, to strengthen individual autonomy and organizational control, to remain humble and confident, optimistic and realistic, patient and driven, authentic and situationally appropriate, thoughtful and action-oriented, and so on.

Leadership (and life) has certainly gotten messier these days. Yet it is important to remember that leadership, at its best, has always been and will continue to be at least a little messy, a little uncomfortable, at times, well beyond the crisis du jour. If it is not, then it is probably not leadership. It is something else, something likely less than it could be.