Written by Cheryl Flink, Ph.D.
Fresh off an international flight, I found my driver and started the two-hour journey to the offices of our recently acquired company. I certainly needed the thinking time. Clients were unhappy with both our technology platform and the level of service we delivered. Some clients were threatening to end their contracts—and some already had.
I needed to sort the issues out with a cross-functional team that had very different views about how to be customer-centric. I’d set up several listening sessions with team members to understand their views and try to pinpoint potential root causes for our revenue decline. I really didn’t know what to expect, but as it turns out, the issue related to a key polarity that had splintered the team into two factions.
We were in the midst of a major technology platform overhaul. We badly needed to up our competitive game and the innovations we planned were part of a comprehensive strategic plan. At the same time, we had a very thin pool of technological resources—and that was the rub. The same pool of resources was needed to create the new platform and maintain and update the existing one.
The team was truly stuck as they passionately advocated for their positions and priorities on what to do. Some, particularly the new business sales team, wanted to focus primarily on the innovation work so they had new things to sell. The client services team wanted to address customer complaints by focusing on upgrades to the existing system. Operations tended to fall in with the client services team, while the technology team was eager to work on new technology to advance both their skills and platform capabilities.
As I listened to various viewpoints, I realized that we could not move forward with the polarizing either-or mentality1 that was pulling the team apart. Instead, we needed to change our views to clarify our goals and address the issues that were putting the teams at odds. We used the framework of polarities to create a path forward.
Polarities exist everywhere.2 They can be characterized as pairs that seem contradictory but in fact support each other over time; they are ongoing—there’s no endgame; they are unsolvable—they simply exist; and they often have two points of view, and both are correct. They are necessary for achieving a common goal, and when leaders balance them well, magic happens. When one pole is favored at the expense of another, leaders will see increasingly dysfunctional teams that simply cannot meet the goal. Polarities occur in grand challenges,3 like solving climate change or endemic poverty. They also frequently appear in our work as leaders, for example:
goals: be an effective leader
Goals: customer centricity
