This guest blog was written by Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, Ph.D., CEO at UP Partnership.
To lead is to navigate tension. Performance under pressure is the essence of an executive director or CEO’s job description. Often that pressure comes from the need to make high-quality decisions that may initially thrill few people but will ultimately support as many as possible.
Most fundamentally, executives bridge the way things are and the way they believe things should be. They are charged with balancing today’s realities and tomorrow’s demands. How they do so — or fail to — has implications for nearly every aspect of their organizations’ work.
At one end of the spectrum, executives can quickly charge into bold new futures, chasing fresh horizons. But as challenges and disruptions emerge, they may fail to bring their team or much of the larger world along with them.
At the spectrum’s other end, they can hustle to meet the needs of today, maximizing the predictability of the current operating environment. But without continuously recognizing and tackling obstacles to their mission, they risk the twin dangers of stagnation and irrelevance.
Success requires facing the world as it currently exists without giving in to its limitations. As executives, we must recognize the attitudes and mindsets of others, see how resources are organized, understand existing laws and policies, and assess a wide range of other entrenched patterns. And then we must figure out how we and our teams will shift these patterns over time in the direction of our missions.
By holding both the current state of the world and the ideal future state, we are signing up to balance many other poles as well. Some of these are largely operational…
-
- Should we pursue new lines of service? Or focus on existing work?
- Do we invest in new trainings and tools? Or better apply the ones we have?
- Should we grow our team? Or prioritize stability for current employees?
Other tensions are much more political…
-
- Do we slow down to get broader perspectives? Or push ahead with the current buy-in?
- Is now the time to challenge existing power structures? Or give momentary grace?
- Do we need to build bigger tables? Or better support those in the current seats?
Whether largely operational or more political, tensions like these are common choice points and have major organizational implications.
For executives of collective impact backbones, such as those in the national StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network, these choices continuously await both you and your institutional partners. That’s true whether our partners run a school district, a university, a philanthropic foundation, a nonprofit organization, a corporation or a local government unit. While we are on our own executive journeys (learning what to prioritize, when and with whom), we must also learn the choice points of our partner institutions, so that we can help to guide them toward more inclusive, equitable and just ways of working.
While the tensions never go away, they can get easier to navigate. As we grow in executive awareness, we can become more conscious of our decisions and their inevitable trade-offs. We can better assess our choices, more effectively gather inputs and distribute power, more clearly communicate what is happening and why, better prepare for the implications of the paths we select, and recognize more quickly when our initial thinking was off in order to adjust the collective course.
Take a few minutes to consider:
-
- What are major tensions you are facing right now?
- What underlying dynamics are influencing your approach to those challenges?
- What new resources could be most helpful as you tackle what’s before you?
If we fail to take executive tensions seriously — oversimplifying either our choices or those of our partners — we will be ill-equipped to transform systems over time. But by mapping the tensions before us and the executives who work alongside us, we can dramatically strengthen the offerings, supports and challenges we bring to those who shape our community’s cradle-to-career outcomes.
For additional inspiration on how to grow your executive awareness, here is a tutorial with nine short stories, covering topics like how to strengthen your staff team, how to pivot your leadership table, and how to better align your partners’ contributions. Each story is fictional, but has real-world applications.
About the author
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon is CEO at UP Partnership, a member of the Cradle to Career Network. Learn more about UP Partnership’s work to ensure every child in Bexar County, Texas is ready for the future at UPPartnership.org.