Leading Mergers of Competing Ideas
Course Overview
Competing ideas are everywhere. Most leaders have developed a leadership style that only incorporates one side of these two-sided gems. When their normal approach stops working, they swing to the opposite approach. As a result, organizations end up on the pendulum: back and forth—here immersed in the present and there swamped by the future, here controlling and dictating and there involving and sharing power, now striving for consistency but then driving for change. No one is able to develop any proficiency with either approach because the visits to each approach are so brief.
This course is designed to get your leadership out of whiplash mode. Learn to manage competing ideas to benefit your people and generate pure performance and outstanding results. With tools to merge competing ideas, you’ll be equipped to produce significantly better thinking and substantially better results.
The Key Takeaways:
Thinking DNA
- How to replace simplistic thinking with Elegant Simplicity
- The crucial difference between paradoxes, tradeoffs, and contradictions
Thinking Infrastructure
- How to tell whether competing ideas can be merged
- How to exploit 5 Culture Paradoxes to produce more effective teams
Thinking Leadership
- The 5 Steps of the Paradox Management Process for merging competing ideas
- How to exploit 5 Leadership Paradoxes to produce powerful results
Thinking People
- Why either/or thinking is so dangerous in a both/and world
- How to exploit 5 Talent Paradoxes to produce more with less
Thinking Transformation
- How to use Paradox-Based Leadership to transform your organization’s performance
- How to exploit 5 Strategy Paradoxes to produce optimum execution
“Jim Lucas’ suggestion that leadership greatness is harnessed in understanding and managing paradoxes is very compelling….This book arms a business leader with information on how to use the power of paradoxes and provides an approach to successfully applying the paradox principle in our organizations….My leadership team and I plan to leverage these principles to access the power of paradoxes and develop a passionate and engaged Thinking Organization™.”
– Glenn Hartman, Director of Customer Operations, Procter & Gamble, North America
“Managing through the power of paradox is both fundamental and provocative. Lucas shows us how effective organizations behave in flexible yet sometimes contradictory ways, and he provides leaders with steps to improve business decisions and master the paradox principle.”
– Robert Barrett, President & CEO, InCharge Institute of America