Are You a Balanced Leader?

Leadership is a great balancing act. It involves balancing the short-term and long-term; investment and return; innovation and efficiency; and head and heart. Leaders relentlessly live F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

Great leaders are not one-dimensional. In politics, society, business, athletics, etc. (pick your field of endeavor), great leaders function by balancing multiple dimensions of their perspective and their skill.

Three dimensions are particularly important:

Orientation: Do you orient your thinking outside-in or inside-out? An outside-in market and customer perspective ensures you and your organization stay focused on meeting needs, delivering value, and understanding the jobs-to-be-done of your products and services. Without the market or worldview, you can become extinct before you know it. But an effective leader is equally aware of the inside-out organization perspective: What are we good at? In what ways do we struggle? Are the intangibles of our culture and values enabling our progress? Without organizational awareness, the best strategic plans wither, unexecuted.

Approach: Do you leverage your leadership on your cognitive analytical capabilities or on your interpersonal and empathetic ability to engage others? Effective leaders need to synthesize the vast overload of information of today's world and cull what matters to set direction and analyze performance. But an effective leader must also engage and motivate and sustain an emotional connection to employees, customers, and partners. One without the other falls flat.

Horizon: What is your field of vision? Like the headlights on a car, great leaders need to be able to switch between high beams (the vision, the long-term horizon, the potential for success) and low beams (the daily tactical activities required to get there). Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in a 2011 Harvard Business Review piece about the importance of leaders zooming in and zooming out. Her view is that these perspectives need to be “vantage points, not fixed positions.”

We see leaders in our business simulations struggle with balancing these three dimensions — even in microcosm. In a focused leadership development activity, it is easy to get unbalanced on any one of these three (and often on all). The more time pressure there is and the more conflict that exists, the poorer your business results are and the more you can get unbalanced to the immediate, the tactical, and the internal. It’s often at the time that leaders need to be the most balanced that it’s toughest to do.

Are you a balanced leader? Take a look here at the dimensions of our Balancing Leadership™ Assessment Tool. You might discover a clue about how to regain your bearings.

Amanda Young Hickman

Amanda Young Hickman has more than 20 years of experience advising and leading clients on the design and implementation of strategic change initiatives and leadership development experiences. She is an expert facilitator and a seasoned program designer who works in all phases of learning experience design and delivery. Amanda is a founding partner of Insight Experience and believes in the impact a leader has on an organization and its results.