Great leaders don’t fear tension or conflict. They understand the difference between healthy tension and destructive conflict, and they harness its energy in positive ways.

Healthy tension exists in that place where you’re pushing the envelope while keeping control. It can exist when one or more positive things may conflict with each other.

For example, consider short term gain versus long term stability. I’d bet you think both of them are good things, and I’d bet you’ve faced times when you felt you had to choose between them, sacrificing one to get the other.

That’s tension. You get to choose whether you embrace it as a healthy tension (a competition of goods) or fight it as a destructive conflict (something must be sacrificed).

All kinds of tensions exist, especially for leaders. Other examples: Empathy versus accountability. Ambition versus contentment. Strength versus vulnerability. Fitting in versus being yourself.

Good leaders strive to balance these polarities by minimizing the tension. Great leaders embrace the tension and harness its energy.

Healthy tension drives creativity and innovation

There is nothing wrong with balance. Balance is stable. Balance is predictable. People like stability and predictability.

Balance is the art of minimizing the tension between the poles. Successful middle managers in large organizations are often very good at balance. They take fewer chances and make fewer mistakes. They have acceptable levels of return, retention, engagement. They stay on schedule and under budget while performing to key indicators. Their bosses appreciate their reliability, conformity, and predictability. They only get truly innovative when they need to.

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
– widely attributed to Plato

Innovation is the art of finding the edges of the balance zone and then stretching those edges out farther. Push toward one pole (short term gain, say) until you feel the tension of the other pole (long term stability) pulling back.

Retreating at that point is a return to the comfort zone. Stability. Predictability. Balance.

“Ambition is the unruly friend of invention.”
– anonymous

Pressing a little farther to increase the tension puts you in a zone of creativity—in order to maintain the improved short term gain, you need to improve the long term stability in this new context. If you can’t rebalance that healthy tension, you may end up turning the tension into destructive conflict and sacrificing your long term stability.

Great leaders know how to surf the edge of that healthy tension without snapping it, whether it’s empathy/accountability, strength/vulnerability, short-term/long-term, or any other tension dimension.

Healthy tension is not the same as gratuitous conflict

I once worked for a guy who thought conflict was the source of innovation. He completely misunderstood the difference between tension and conflict.

He told the engineers in his organization to fight with each other. This came from his experience at a prior job where everyone was encouraged to challenge others’ ideas and processes in a sort of survival-of-the-fittest idea tank. But he didn’t fully understand, and he demanded conflict even when there was no reason for it. He thought the presence of conflict alone would create innovation.

What resulted was a near total lack of collaboration, and a culture of entrenchment followed by failure followed by blame. It was not a culture of innovation. That startup did not last long.

He did not understand the healthy tension that needs to exist between collaborating and challenging. He maximized for challenging without correcting for collaboration, and he created a culture that spun off its axis into dysfunction.

Tension exists; whether it’s healthy tension or conflict is up to you

I guarantee that whatever situation you are in, there is at least one dimension of tension.

Just this morning I was talking with someone caregiving a family member with a degenerative disease. They were trying to figure out when to move their family member into a care facility. There are many points of tension in that distressing morass. Finances, quality of life, quality of care, family dynamics, how each choice today might affect future options.

In a situation like that, you might want to maximize for balance. Focus more on the “healthy” part of “healthy tension” and less on the “tension” part, in order to reduce friction and minimize suffering.

That’s very different from the middle manager I talked with last week who has ambitions of moving up into an executive role. She knows she needs to get out of her shell of security and safety and take some risks in order to get noticed and recognized as someone who has more ability than the standard middle manager at her company. She’s ready to harness the healthy tension between ambition and comfort, and get comfortable being more ambitious.

What tensions are you feeling right now? Where should you strive for balance, and where will stretching the comfort zone lead to growth?

Connect with me

Schedule a consultation session now or drop me a line.