The Leadership Paradox: Why "Nice" Leadership Isn't Enough
In our previous posts, we explored the reality behind organizational agility data and examined the Balance-Flow bottleneck. Today, we're exploring what might be the most surprising finding from our decade-long study: the Leadership Paradox.
The Contradiction in the Data
Leadership consistently scores highest among all dimensions (2.96/4.0). That sounds like good news, right? But here's the twist: it also showed the smallest improvement over time (+0.15), and many organizations with high leadership scores still struggle with fundamental agility challenges.
This creates an interesting contradiction: How can leadership be both strong and ineffective at driving transformation?
Unpacking the Paradox
When we dig deeper into the data, a clear pattern emerges. Organizations tend to excel at what we might call "passive leadership behaviours":
Respectful treatment of team members
Creating a positive work environment
Maintaining good interpersonal relationships
Expressing support for improvement initiatives
These are undeniably important qualities for a healthy culture. However, they represent only half of what effective leadership requires in a dynamic environment. What's often missing are the "active leadership behaviors":
Clearly communicating vision and purpose
Decisively balancing competing strategic priorities
Championing systemic improvements through to completion
Rigorously measuring and ensuring lasting change
Proactively shaping the system to enable flow and remove impediments
Think for a moment... many of us have leaders who are genuinely caring people, supportive and approachable. But are they consistently making the tough calls and driving the systemic changes needed to fix broken processes and truly empower teams?
The Cost of Passive Leadership
This imbalance towards passive leadership creates a frustrating, repeating pattern:
Leaders genuinely want teams to improve and encourage change efforts.
Teams attempt to make changes but inevitably hit organizational roadblocks (silos, outdated policies, conflicting priorities).
Leaders empathize with the frustration but struggle to effectively remove these systemic barriers.
Improvement efforts get stuck, deliver minimal impact, or are abandoned.
Both leaders and teams become discouraged, leading to resistance about future change.
From Nice to Effective: Bridging the Gap
The good news is that the foundation of respectful leadership provides an excellent starting point. The challenge is expanding leadership's role from supportive to transformative. To bridge this gap, leaders can focus on a few pivotal shifts:
1. Make the Vision Tangible and Actionable
To move beyond general statements about agility and make your vision truly tangible, leaders must actively:
Connect improvement efforts to specific business outcomes. For every initiative, clearly articulate its impact on users, customers, and key business results.
Define success in measurable terms. What does "good" look like, and how will you quantify it?
Communicate how daily work connects to the larger strategic purpose. Ensure every team member can see the line of sight from their tasks to the organization's goals.
Regularly revisit and reinforce the "why" behind changes, especially when encountering challenges or resistance.
Idea to Implement:
Introduce a framework like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). This is a powerful way to link strategy to execution using outcome-based, measurable goals that cascade throughout the organization.
Critical Question for Reflection:
“Can every single team member clearly explain how their current work directly contributes to our strategic priorities and desired outcomes?”
2. Balance Priorities Explicitly and Visibly
To shift from passively allowing priorities to compete, towards making transparent choices that focus energy and resources, leaders must actively:
Enforce Strategic Focus through WIP Limits: Actively establish and consistently support Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits for strategic initiatives at the portfolio level. This involves managing the "upstream" intake process, ensuring new work is only pulled in when capacity allows, forcing focus and improving flow.
Drive Transparent and Objective Prioritization: Champion and utilize clear, agreed-upon methods to rank initiatives. The "why" behind difficult priority calls must be transparent and understandable to all involved.
Lead Decisive Alignment and Conflict Resolution: Conduct recurring strategic review meetings designed to surface, openly discuss, and decisively resolve conflicts raised from competing objectives, ensuring clear decisions are the output.
Foster a Culture of Strategic "No" and Capacity Awareness: Make organizational capacity visible and clearly understood. Explicitly teach, support, and model the behavior of saying "no" or "not yet" when requests exceed established WIP limits or realistic capacity.
Pragmatic Approaches & Tools to Implement:
Visualize Work and Limits with a Portfolio Kanban Board: Implement a visual system to display your initiatives and the workflow (linking upstream and downstream), their current state, and explicit policies. This makes bottlenecks, overall workload, and over-commitment immediately apparent.
Utilize Structured Prioritization Frameworks: Employ objective methods like WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First), RICE scoring, or value/effort matrices to guide prioritization discussions and decisions.
Implement Regular Review Cadences: Establish recurring forums (e.g., monthly) to systematically review active or new initiatives, make tough choices about what to pause, continue, stop, or start and align on how to move forward.
Maintain a Decision Log for Key Priority Shifts: Document the rationale behind significant prioritization decisions and changes. This ensures transparency, provides a historical reference, and support in communicating changes effectively.
Powerful Questions to Drive Deliberate Focus:
“By saying ‘yes’ to many things, where are we implicitly saying ‘no’ to achieving true success on our most critical priorities?”
“Which initiatives must we pause, or even stop entirely, right now to guarantee the achievement of what's absolutely most important?”
3. Model System-Level Thinking
Effective leaders understand that lasting agility requires moving beyond localized team improvements to address the entire organizational system. Focusing solely on team-level enhancements often overlooks the deeper, systemic blockers that truly impede progress and flow. This involves leaders to:
Actively Diagnose and Address Cross-Functional Bottlenecks: Look beyond individual team performance to consistently identify, analyze, and tackle issues that disrupt flow between teams, departments, or value streams.
Challenge and Redesign Structures that Hinder Collaboration: Examine existing organizational structures, roles, and reporting lines. Suggest and implement changes that break down silos and foster genuine cross-functional cooperation.
Systematically Question and Remove Flow-Impeding Policies: Reflect on established policies and processes, and lead the charge to simplify or eliminate those that create unnecessary bureaucracy, delays, or frustration without adding clear value.
Initiate and Navigate Difficult Conversations about Organizational Impediments: Create a safe environment to address and discuss ongoing challenges (the "elephants in the room") that create systemic problems
Pragmatic Approaches to Guide System-Level Thinking:
Introduce Value Stream Mapping & Kanban Systems Thinking: Visually map your organization's value streams. Use Kanban practices and principles to visualize workflow, dependencies, and identify flow blockers across multiple teams and departments, from idea to delivery.
Utilize Tools like a Lean Change Canvas: Collaboratively map out change initiatives, ensuring all stakeholders have a shared understanding of objectives, actions, and measures of success.
Cultivate "Catalyst" Leadership Capabilities : Consciously work to evolve your leadership approach. This involves moving from a primary focus on tactical, expert-driven problem-solving towards a more facilitative, capacity-building, and empowering orientation leader that seeks to transform the entire system—what Joiner describes as "Catalyst" level agility.
Critical Questions for Leaders to Stimulate Systemic Insight:
“Across our entire organization, where is work consistently slowing down, getting stuck, or requiring excessive handoffs? What underlying assumptions, structures, or policies might be reinforcing these breakdowns?”
“Are our current improvement efforts primarily addressing visible symptoms, or are we truly getting to the root causes and enabling the system to adapt and improve itself for long-term, sustainable agility?”
The Transformation Multiplier
When leaders evolve from passive support to active enablement, the impact is exponential. Organizations in our study that developed these active leadership behaviors saw improvements across all other dimensions:
Flow improved as leaders helped remove cross-functional barriers
Balance became more manageable with clearer priorities and protection from overload
Collaboration strengthened when leaders modeled and rewarded cross-team cooperation
Customer focus deepened through consistent leadership emphasis on outcomes
Finding Your Balance
Effective leadership isn't about abandoning the positive, respectful climate that scored so well in our assessments. Rather, it's about building upon that foundation to create more active, systemic change.
In our next post, we'll explore how to break down organizational silos that prevent effective collaboration, a critical challenge that directly impacts both flow and customer satisfaction.
How does leadership function in your organization? Are your leaders supportive but perhaps not actively driving systemic change? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Ready to put these ideas into practice?
If these challenges sound familiar, you don't have to tackle them alone. At Pathways, we offer hands-on workshops, trainings and coaching support tailored to your needs
