Managing Leadership Paradoxes

Lotte Luscher, Lotte S. Luscher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138497047
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351019927
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Managers today are faced with numerous complex challenges speckled with paradoxes. They must have a sharp economical focus while simultaneously engaging in creative and innovative thinking. They must support individuals as well as teams, think globally, and do business locally. This book views complexity as a fundamental element of leadership, rather than something that should simply be reduced and removed. It presents a leadership concept that includes both sides of the paradox.

Managing Leadership Paradoxes uses case studies and practical exercises to show how managers can maintain decisiveness in the face of paradoxes, complexities, and contradictory demands. Lotte Lüscher draws on research gleaned from managers within the international corporation, Lego, to provide first-hand knowledge of how a large-scale organization meets and manages change paradoxes, rather than treating them as something that needs to be reduced and removed. It will assist managers and aspiring managers in expanding their understanding of leadership challenges beyond dilemmas, and equip them with the managerial skills to handle the most persistent and pervasive paradoxical challenges that arise as a result of organizational change.

The book will be of interest to leaders and managers, as well as students of leadership, management and organizational studies.The intent is to provide the reader with a foundation for reflecting on his or her own leadership practice with special focus on organizational complexity, ambiguity, and paradoxes.

Part I

Paradoxical leadership as a way of thinking

1

Complex leadership

Managers today are faced with a number of complex challenges: They must have a sharp economical focus while simultaneously engaging in creative and innovative thinking. They must support individuals as well as teams, think globally, and do business locally. They must have focus on people and relationships, as well as focusing on achieving results. The list goes on and on. Within the management role we can identify a number of paradoxes which result from the demand for managers to successfully negotiate complex issues.

Several years ago I spent three years as the manager of a project organization. During that time I was constantly searching for an understanding of what good leadership entailed. I wanted to become a good leader. However, I felt that if I involved my employees too much in the decision-making process, my leadership wasn’t visible enough. On the other hand, if I tried to be firm and visible through decisions and clear directives, I found that my employees didn’t feel seen or acknowledged. In addition, I attempted to focus on building relationships with my employees because I knew that people are motivated by good cooperation, good social relations, and a strong team. However, this resulted in the board of directors demanding that I was able to cut through and require more of my employees. I felt trapped between a focus on relationships and a focus on results.

After those three years as a manager, I had the opportunity to implement an action research project with a group of managers from Lego and the Business School at Aarhus University, Denmark. During the project I had a double role as both actor and researcher, due to the fact that I was working as both consultant and researcher. This meant that I used information from the processes I was a part of in order to study the development that I – or we – had initiated.

I found that many of the Lego managers described the same types of problems I had experienced myself. They felt as if they were caught between ambiguous demands and conflicting tasks. They found that it was difficult to provide direction while still maintaining clarity regarding their roles as leaders. I was reminded of my own experiences throughout my time as a manager, as well as the times I had seen several managers grapple with their own leadership development. These paradoxes were often confusing, and created a feeling of paralysis. As a result of these observations, I was curious to discover how leadership could be understood with its complexities and ambiguity intact. This book is therefore addressed to managers who would like to learn how they can navigate the many conflicting demands of their organization.

Goals of this book

This book has two goals:

1.To present an understanding of leadership that is simple and understandable while still including complexity, ambiguity, and paradox.

2.To show that the concept of paradoxical leadership can be used as a practical way of thinking in order to create managerial drive in complex and ambiguous situations. This will allow managers to periodically evaluate and make the appropriate managerial adjustments in order to meet the organization’s goals and strategies.

It is easy to identify the paradoxes within an organization, but it is much more difficult to discover how leaders should act within these paradoxes. This chapter will present you with a way of thinking about management tasks paradoxically. The chapter introduces an understanding of leadership as a discipline that maintains all of its complexities. I will start by briefly summarizing how leadership has been understood throughout recent history. I will then advocate for an integration of the various historical understandings of what a leader should focus on in order to obtain success in his or her organization. We will see how leadership should consist of old-fashioned, traditional management virtues as well as newer, more equal understandings of the manager–employee relationship. This combination is essential in order for management to become an effective tool and fulfill the goals of the organization. Newer forms of leadership have naturally arisen from, among other things, research pointing to the fact that employees who are involved in decisions and feel valued by management are more motivated and therefore work better. However, at the same time, I often hear employees requesting clearer guidelines and greater transparency regarding the organization’s direction. This results in a situation where the manager must provide a clear direction and take on an autocratic position.

This book will not profess a preference for one or the other type of leadership, nor will it accept that managers will do what they always have done according to their personality or personal preference. Instead, I hope to demonstrate that managers can benefit from a leadership approach which contains opportunities for periodic reflection and adjustment of managerial effort in regard to the organization’s leadership needs. This book is not intended as yet another “how to do” guide (there are many of those!) but more as a “how to think” guide. In other words, this book allows you to reflect upon your leadership practices in a way that combines the organizational complexity with the ambiguities and paradoxes you meet throughout the leadership discipline.

There are many strategies and corporate management theories that have arisen from long-dead theorists and organizational “engineers” who introduced principles for organization, leadership and growth in the previous century. These very traditional principles continue to form the way in which companies distribute resources, create budgets, distribute power, reward employees, make decisions, etc. Their goal has been (and still is) to create stability, predictability, and clarity through guidelines, direction, purpose, and goals.

In response to this traditional approach, rising attention has been placed on concepts such as complexity, ambiguity, “multi-verses,” internal consistency, contrasts, and paradox. These concepts are most often used in research regarding organizational changes, leadership, and innovation/creativity. For example, some researchers point to the fact that the act of creating an organization raises questions about simultaneous demands regarding centralizing vs. involvement, collective vs. individual, stability vs. change, streamlining vs. complexity, and preserving an organization’s core identity vs. innovation. In other words, we no longer see organizations as stable entities that must manage a changing environment, but instead as renewable, dynamic systems that contain the seeds of change. More and more we see organizations as fluctuating processes, rather than as stable structures with fixed procedures and completely coordinated behavior. Organizations are currently perceived as a set of activities which coordinate our understandings and create a shared mental structure that grounds us in a world of changing uncertainty. As a result, traditional leadership tools become more and more difficult to use when situations change. Managers need to be able to act within the organization in different ways in accordance with different times and changing challenges. Tools to create structure, stability, and clarity fall short of this challenge.

Today there is recognition of the fact that companies that want to survive must be equipped to handle constant changes in products, organization, marketing, etc. However, despite this recognition, we often see that change is understood (both in practice and in leadership literature) as deep, radical turnarounds, where everything must be re-thought from the beginning. This raises the question of how equipped an organization actually is if it ends up replacing directors, implementing radical re-structuring, rethinking products, etc. In this model, single individuals are considered as having “hero-status.” The idea is, “we’ll replace the director and somewhere find the person that can implement exactly the type of change we want.” This is a common tendency in European companies, where turnarounds (a new director with fundamentally different ideas) demonstrate that change is still primarily understood as a top-down process with closely planned missions, events, goals, and actions.

The limitation of this model is that when the director is replaced, the entire basis for the organization’s existence must be re-discovered by the next director. It can be beneficial to replace a director, but it is also a costly and lengthy process to find and orient a new director. Therefore, it might be more effective to have a director (or manager or other management position) who can operate with the company’s diverse needs over time. Leadership is managing complexity. This does not mean reducing complexity, but rather helping employees to operate within complexity.

In today’s world, management groups must be able to create organizations that can continually renew themselves and switch focus between operation and renewal. In the book, The Future of Management (2010), Hamel uses the body as an analogy for the ability for ongoing adaptation. I will use the following examples to illustrate his point: When the body is exposed to new physical challenges the heart pumps faster, which in turn provides the muscles with more blood. When you stand in front of an audience to give a presentation, your adrenaline levels rise in order to sharpen your performance. When you see someone you are attracted to, your pupils automatically contract. Hamel claims that challenges faced by organizations are the same as those faced by the body, even though this is not a usual method used to describe organizations. Like the body, organizations must develop automatic, responsive, adaptive systems that can be changed and renewed continually, spontaneously, and without crisis.

Within organizational change there are many disciplines that are worth considering when a company needs to handle the challenge of coping with ongoing change. Strategic thinking, economics, decision-making, budgeting, logistics, structure, marketing strategies, accounting, and leadership psychology must be incorporated in a non-traditional manner. For example, many companies still find that the process of creating a reward structure that promotes team performance without compromising individual performance is a great mystery. According to Hamel, all management courses should be thrown up in the air and fundamentally re-thought in order to create context and task-dependent courses. This would allow managers to meet leadership challenges while focusing on what they want to achieve according to various times and various organizational challenges.

I hope that this book will establish a leadership concept that can help managers navigate the ground between renewal and stability, as well as between a focus on relationships and on bottom lines as forms of leadership change in accordance with changing demands and focus. I hope to create an understanding of leadership as a compass, leadership that can create renewal and maintain continuity, leadership that involves employees, and leadership that first and foremost is about following the organization’s need instead of following personal strengths and preferences.

Leadership: Toward “Workable certainty.” Workable certainty can be defined as situations where total certainty is not possible, due to contradictory and ambiguous demands, but where there remains just enough certainty for work to take place. There is a significant amount of management literature which claims that handling the changes, diversity, and variation in an organization calls for leaders who can show the way, create clarity, and find “workable certainty” for the employees. March and Olsen (1976) describe organizations as “meaning-creation” entities which use communication and symbolic interaction as procedures for argumentation and interpretation. They claim that organizational life is based on a negotiated and shared understanding of reality. This shared understanding lays the foundation for organizational decisions and actions.

A manager’s task is to create meaning between opposing pieces of information, to select relevant information, and share the selected information with the goal of creating what Karl Weick (1995) calls “workable certainty.” Certainty is an illusion, but organizational actors are always engaged in the process of creating meaning through their own understanding and interpretation of the flow of information. Our actions are created by our own understandings, not by an objective reality. This model of understanding organizational life is called a social-constructionist approach, because it builds upon the way in which we create our reality through communication and shared understandings.

The social-constructionist perspective of leadership uses language in order to create shared meaning and direction in organizations. We continually negotiate, coordinate, hold meetings, clarify tasks, inform others, and create more or less shared meaning because we have a need for perceiving reality as ordered, fixed, and understandable. Concepts such as “shared meaning” and “workable certainty” are considered objective realities, not constructed concepts. For example, at the time this book was written, Denmark was going through an “economic crisis.” Formulating the crisis as objective reality means that we must contemplate a long list of logical actions. We believ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Author biography
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Paradoxical leadership as a way of thinking
• Part II Paradoxical leadership development
• Part III Leading through paradox: Acceptance, positioning, and integrative thinking
• 12 Acceptance
• 13 Managerial flow: Leading through paradox
• Bibliography
• Index