In the previous article, we explored why leaders so often mistake polarities for problems and how that illusion drains energy and focus. But recognizing polarities with their nature is only the first step. The real skill lies in learning how to manage them intentionally, rhythmically, and systemically.
Every leadership team lives in the space between competing forces: the need for control and the desire for autonomy, the push for performance and the pull for recovery, the demand for speed and the discipline of slow down and reflect.
When these tensions are not managed consciously, organizations swing between extremes (the pendulum effect); moving from imposing too much structure that most probably will suffocate initiative, to giving too much freedom (not matching it with accountability to results) that eventually creates chaos.
Leaders who learn to accept, hold and manage with attention these opposites by integrating the two forces rather than choosing one or the other, discover soon something remarkable: energy that was once lost to friction (debating, struggling, resisting) transforms into synergies able to fuel innovation and value creation.
When leaders practice and demonstrate such skill will see their teams stop fighting for the “right answer” and start designing collaboration habits and rhythms that allow both sides to contribute value.
Managing polarities isn’t at all about compromising. It’s about converting tension into movement.
If awareness was the mindset shift of Part 1 of this series (The Leadership Skill Nobody Taught You: Understanding Polarities – Part 1), this second step is about operationalizing it — learning how to turn tension into energy. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready.
From Awareness to Action: Managing the Loop
In Part 1, we introduced the Polarity Map — a simple yet powerful tool to explore and visualize the rhythm between interdependent forces. Now it’s time to bring that map to life.
Managing polarities means intentionally leveraging the upsides of both poles, looking for synergies and contributions to effective value creation, while contemporarily minimizing their downsides by applying a conscious and proactive approach.
Polarity Maps are not only a powerful tool for creating awareness among the different stakeholders (who are polarizing) but offers a structured way to transform reflection into practical action. Let’s see how through these concrete steps:
- Identify & Clarify
- Map Poles, Upsides and Downsides
- Add Early Warning Signs
- Design Action Steps
- Communicate and Align
Step 1. Identify & Clarify
As just mentioned, a Polarity Map is first and foremost a tool for collective awareness. It triggers fruitful conversation among the people involved in the tension.
The first action is to define the tension you’re experiencing, bring the “right voices” into the room and, together, clarify whether what is under analysis is a polarity or a problem.
Remember: problems can be solved; polarities must be managed.
Through shared mapping, the team develops a common understanding of what each side values, fears, and needs. This joint exploration is the foundation for both awareness and coordinated action.
Typical examples include Planning vs Action, Stability vs Change, Control vs Trust.
Step 2. Map Poles, Upsides and Downsides
Capture both poles on the left and right of the map and brainstorm on their upsides and downsides.
Ask: What value does each pole bring when used well? What happens when it’s overused?
See the example below about Planning and Action polarity (upper part Upsides, lower part Downsides for each pole).
Visualize the full system of interdependence; how they influence positively or negatively each one and the value creation process, so that everyone can see the dynamics at play.
Step 3. Add Early Warning Signs
This is a key step. It has the potential to avoid slides towards the negative aspects of persisting in just one pole.
Now it’s time to understand and jot down what early warning signs come into play to capture the “tipping point”, the moment when what was once a strength becomes a liability: when speed turns into hurry, control becomes just rigidity, freedom becomes unfruitful expenditure of energy.
These signs must not present themselves as actual failures (otherwise you are already in trouble), but “just” signals that the system is losing its dynamic balance and so leaders have enough time to prevent overcorrection and restore flow before energy is lost.
| Focus Box: Mastering Polarity Management |
| Developing such a sensitivity is the superpower leaders must develop: monitoring these symptoms is the first step to shift from binary to paradoxical thinking where we abandon reactive approaches born from traditional Either/Or reflex, and we start developing a Both/And mindset: recognizing that both poles are valid, interdependent, and necessary.
|
Early warnings then become not alarms to “fix” one side of the polarity, but invitations to reconnect the two because probably the integration mechanism is weakening. Mature leadership means to not suppress tension but listening to it and recalibrate.Step 4. Design Action Steps
How can you set the foundation for not switching between opposites but integrating them?
The answer is to intentionally seeking and facilitating synergies between the two poles.
This requires discipline: defining specific, observable action steps that keep both sides alive and in dialogue. Examples? Set tangible routines, practices, or rituals that sustain the rhythm of value creation between poles.
Doing this we are creating a self-correcting dual-action loop:
- Actions are the deliberate behaviors and practices that help gain and maintain the upsides of both poles
- Early Warnings are the signals that tell when one side is starting to dominate eventually creating fatigue, rigidity, reactivity
Back to Part 1 of this series, we presented breathing as a self-explanatory example of polarity: health lies in oscillation and not in holding your breath.
Step 5. Communicate and Align
This is the last step, where you enforce the awareness around the existing polarity and ask the commitment to all the involved parties.
Share the map with the relevant stakeholders. Explain how to behave from that moment on, what approaches, practices, events and behaviors to put in place, so that balancing becomes a collective routine, not an isolated struggle of a bunch of individuals.
Navigating Tensions Through Paradox Theory
If we explore this concept just a step further, we come across the Paradox Theory (Smith & Lewis, 2011) that helps us understand what makes complex systems like organizations, ecosystems, and human beings, thrive under tension instead of collapsing under it.
At its core, the theory argues that contradictions are not pathologies to fix, but conditions to manage and when managed consciously, they become sources of adaptability, creativity, and resilience. Organizations that endure do not eliminate opposites; they however sustain living cycles where competing forces feed, stretch, and renew each other.
Think for a moment on how stability enables change or discipline sustains creativity. And even more concrete on how pressure helps building resilience.
Contradictions, in this light, are not errors in the system, they are its engine
Paradox Theory identifies several key principles that guide leaders through this dynamic tension:
1. Acceptance of Tensions: acknowledge paradoxes rather than denying or simplifying them
2. Differentiation: integration happens only once each pole sees the other’s value
3. Integration: once both poles are aligned, leaders design ways to connect them
4. Dynamism: paradoxes are never solved, they move
When leaders apply these principles, they stop reacting to paradoxes as crises and start using them as creative constraints — boundaries that focus energy rather than fragment it.
This is where paradoxical leadership meets the essence of flow: presence under pressure, awareness within complexity, and rhythm within contradiction.
Easy? Not at all; but at least we know from where to start.
Pick one polarity you’re living this week.
Map it. Observe it. Breathe through it.
That’s how flow begins.
