Over the past year, I’ve become fascinated with the principles of the dichotomy of leadership, primarily because it’s so prevalent and extends into many facets of leading ourselves, our teams, and our businesses.
It’s essential to be aware that nearly every situation presents a contradictory set of circumstances we must learn to navigate.
In other words, we must harmonize opposites relative to competing characteristics, situations, and principles. Effective leadership requires awareness, reflection, and iterative adjustments within the opposition to align our decisions and actions with a balanced approach.
It’s about operating in the AND, not the OR—meaning, we should strive to find a middle ground between the extremes. Too often, there’s a tendency to break things down into black-and-white approaches, but in reality, we must learn to exist within the grey and be mindful of the nuances.
Two fundamentals of managing dichotomies that I’ve found to be the most helpful in learning how to handle the nuance are building situational awareness and understanding our natural human tendency to overcorrect, like a pendulum swinging back and forth.
It’s about developing our ability to see the contrast and avoiding going too far in one direction or another.
Awareness of Dichotomies
First, awareness and recognition are essential. Dichotomies are arguably infinite in leadership. So many circumstances and situations occur where we must consider multiple approaches and find an alignment with each.
Consider a leader struggling to find the appropriate detachment from the team's day-to-day execution. Being too hands-on with project-level tasks leads to micromanaging. Becoming too detached and giving the team full autonomy without proper guidance leads to confusion and a lack of direction.
Not only is it situational awareness, but it’s also self-awareness tied to our characteristics. An overly confident leader may appear arrogant, while an exceedingly humble leader may appear indecisive or incompetent.
The goal is to identify an approach tailored to our leadership style where one extreme is tempered by the other. Responsibility counters delegation and humility counters confidence.
Understanding the extremes in any scenario can help us zoom out and discern the approach that best meets the team and situational needs.
Understanding the Overcorrection Principle
With awareness and recognition of dichotomies as something we’ve developed competency in, we can take the next step to begin understanding our natural tendency to overcorrect.
Overcorrection is the default tendency to overreact to a mistake, problem, or imbalance by excessively adjusting in the opposite direction, often creating new problems or imbalances.
Therefore, the principle relies on our ability to overwrite defaults. With awareness, we know the extremes of the situation. But we must take that a step further.
Swinging from one extreme to another is rarely the solution. Take our micromanaging example, for instance:
When we realize we’ve been too hands-on and directive, the answer is not to become entirely hands-off. Instead, we should find a nuanced approach that gradually adjusts our level of involvement and direction based on the people, project, and other factors.
Recognizing the tendency to overcorrect allows us to take a more measured approach—it’s about incremental adjustments rather than drastic shifts.
Effective leaders do not operate at the extremes.
Avoiding Overcorrection
The space between one extreme and another is often tricky to navigate. It’s easy to subconsciously slip into a dynamic where we bounce from one end of the spectrum to another.
While it may seem obvious and intuitive, it rarely is when we find ourselves actively engaged in a situation contending with our egos, relational conflicts, and external pressures.
The key is enabling a system that creates inherent checkpoints identifying when we begin to drift and allowing us the space to assess and adjust with the appropriate corrections:
Reflect and assess—When you realize you’ve made a misstep, pause to reflect on the extent of the imbalance. Assess the dynamics and impact instead of immediately reacting. Understand the effect your actions are having on the team and operations. This will help you understand the depth of the correction needed without overshooting.
Seek feedback—Engage your team in the assessment process and be willing to listen. Continuous input from trusted relationships is an objective mirror to help calibrate our decisions and actions. It also prevents assumptions about the team’s needs, ensuring that your corrections do not only account for your perception and perspective.
Make iterative adjustments—Instead of making drastic changes too quickly, opt for gradual, iterative adjustments combined with feedback to gauge the effectiveness of your actions and make further tweaks as necessary. This approach prevents the pendulum from swinging too far in the opposite direction and prevents dragging the team through a back-and-forth style.
Document the lessons—You will face repeated situations, so document your lessons learned. When you face a similar dynamic a year later, having something to refer back to will put you steps ahead. It also fuels the reflection and assessment process when we can revisit prior experiences in a journal to avoid slipping back into default patterns.
Accept the constant flux—Accept that two related dichotomies are rarely the same, especially when dealing with different people. Applying an exact approach to another situation without tailoring often leads to unintended consequences. Lead with first principles, but don’t forget that principles must be adapted to various circumstances. Be consistent AND adaptable.
Practical Application
Continuing with the micromanagement example, imagine you’re leading a project and receive feedback that you’re too hands-on with some aspects of the work. Acknowledging this, you decide to give them more autonomy.
But instead of abruptly stepping back completely, which would be an overcorrection to the opposite extreme, you might start by delegating specific tasks while maintaining oversight on critical milestones.
You'll be able to work in regular check-ins to provide support and feedback while also asking for input from your team to understand what they need from you to ensure alignment with project goals.
This measured approach helps you avoid swinging from micromanagement to a completely hands-off approach, which could lead to confusion and a lack of role clarity or direction.
This concept is difficult. Building awareness and getting comfortable with operating in the gray areas takes time, experience, repetition, and mistakes.
However, once we see it, we can’t unsee it.
Managing the dichotomies becomes a skill that allows us to proactively recognize these situations and find a tailored approach suiting our leadership style and approach to stop the pendulum from swinging.
We cultivate resilience, adaptability, and trust by recognizing the contradictions in nearly every situation and learning to operate within them.
We improve our ability to lead ourselves and our teams.
Read:
The Dichotomy of Leadership is one of the most important books I’ve read. This gave me a framework to recognize how pervasive these opposing situations are in leading a team and company. The authors practically outline their experience as Navy SEALs to demonstrate the principles in extreme situations and distill them into everyday business examples.
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I am also a big fan of the The Dichotomy of Leadership book. A must read for a leader.
You summed it very well here,
"This concept is difficult. Building awareness and getting comfortable with operating in the gray areas takes time, experience, repetition, and mistakes."
Great post!