Critical Contraints: When Leadership Itself Is the Obstacle
Why your organization lurches between bureaucratic rigidity and chaotic adaptiveness, and how to find productive balance.
[This post is helpful reading on its own, so feel free to read on, however it's intended for anyone who completed the Disruption-Fluency Self-Assessment. I encourage you to start there.]
If your Disruption Fluency Self-Assessment identified Leadership Tension as your lowest-scoring dimension, you're facing a challenge that's simultaneously the most important and the most personal: the way leadership is practiced in your organization is preventing it from thriving through disruption.
Organizations weak in Leadership Tension management exhibit characteristic patterns: either bureaucratic rigidity that stifles innovation, or chaotic adaptiveness that prevents scale. Leaders consistently apply the wrong approach to the situation at hand. The creative tension that should fuel innovation becomes destructive conflict.
This isn't just about what leaders do, it's about how leadership functions as a system. And as CMO, you're at the center of that system.
What Leadership Tension Actually Means
In the Disruption-Fluent Marketing framework, Leadership Tension is defined as "the degree to which marketing leaders effectively manage the polarities that define the dynamic interplay between the framework's leadership approaches." It draws from Complexity Leadership Theory, which identifies three "entangled" leadership functions:
