Are You a Paradoxical Leader?
As a leader, your behaviours are the strongest driver of your company’s culture. Your employees take their cues from you. But how is the thinking behind how you behave impacting your company’s culture?
Paradoxical leadership is the idea that you reach behavioural maturity when you can hold paradoxical behavioural traits in balance. For instance, do you like analysing pitfalls, but also like taking business risks. If so, you have balanced approach to strategic decision making – this is called “mindful courage”.
But what if you’re out of balance. This is when your thinking negatively impacts the culture. Take Ryan. He loves analysing pitfalls but doesn’t like taking risks. Ryan’s faulty thinking is that he’s trivialised and demonised risk taking. Years ago, he had to wear the fallout of an impulsive colleague who lost the company a ton of time and money. He vowed never to be “one of those irresponsible types”. This thinking pattern sub-consciously constrains his behaviour to be overly cautious. At his company, instead of promoting a culture of “mindfully courageous risk taking” to seize new opportunities, Ryan’s thinking causes him to unwittingly promote a culture of timidity.
What thinking is holding your culture back?