The Five Leadership Tensions
By Katryn Wright, Behavioural Science Lead, Guusje Lindemann, behavioural science associate and Prof. Laura Griurge, Head of Research and Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at LSE.
In late 2022, MoreThanNow partnered with a US-headquartered FMCG company to understand where their leaders need support and development. Amidst all the insights, we were most struck by five tensions embedded in how leaders perceived their roles.
Tension one: Leaders understand the value of strategic, long-term planning, but are distracted by short-term, urgent work.
A deluge of emails, meetings, and calls distracts leaders from focusing on important, strategic work that is core to achieving their objectives. This isn’t necessarily surprising, as our Head of Research, Dr Laura Giurge, writes in this Forbes article. But it does speak to the need for organisations to find ways to support colleagues to prioritise focused time for strategic work and deprioritise less important activities. Although this insight might seem obvious, it continues to be an unresolved leadership tension; in fact, we believe it might be one of the most undervalued and overlooked areas of leadership support and development.
Tension two: Leaders say they value authenticity in the workplace, yet don’t see the value in sharing challenges or emotions at work.
A key component of being authentic is being able to bring your whole self to work, and this includes speaking up about challenges and showing emotions at work. Yet, leaders seem to devalue these aspects of being authentic, whilst acknowledging the importance of authenticity. We’re not sure how leaders are defining authenticity but we suspect they see it as a brand rather than a reality to aspire to, and that’s a big problem.
Tension three: Leaders feel pressured to be decisive, but may not be utilising all the tools of robust decision-making.
Leaders picked decisiveness and the pressure to have quick answers to issues that arise as top leadership traits. At the same time, leaders undervalued traits such as being curious that could contribute to solid decision-making. This suggests that leaders might hold different interpretations of decisiveness, leaning towards overconfident and fast decision-making, rather than curious and collaborative decision-making.
Tension four: While organisations have committed to prioritising employee wellbeing, leaders are not doing so for themselves or their teams.
Like many organisations, the company we worked with has a strong focus on wellbeing and mental health and provides lots of resources to support employees. Yet, leaders struggle to balance the demands of work with their own wellbeing despite organisational efforts. We believe this is a result of organisations having an “additive” mindset – adding more things for leaders to do – e.g., team bonding or mindfulness exercises. The solution is simple but requires more research: how to help leaders develop a ‘subtractive’ mindset whereby they remove activities and create more space for wellbeing.
Tension five: Leaders engage in development efforts yet believe that leadership skills are innate and not easy to learn.
This insight surprised us the most: leaders still buy into the ‘great man theory’ of how a leader is born rather than made. This belief is inaccurate and harmful especially for people who don’t fit a stereotypical mould of a leader. It also presents a huge challenge to the company’s ability to impart knowledge and skills to enhance leadership capabilities.
This organisation is not alone in having these tensions at the heart of their leadership. However, they have taken the critical first step in uncovering them, allowing the business to diagnose where their leaders are facing challenges and identifying where they need more support to lead effectively. We cannot keep trying to solve organisational challenges by asking leaders to do more. Traditional approaches lead to recommendations for more training or more activities that only increase workloads and further reduce wellbeing. MoreThanNow’s behavioural science approach leads to the identification of specific moments within leaders’ day-to-day lives where we can target interventions for effective behaviour change.
Do you recognise these tensions in your own organisation? Do you want to explore if these tensions exist, and try to address them through experimental research? Get in touch if you want to explore running our leadership diagnostic, part of our Leadership Co-Lab.