How Four Hidden Tensions Are Blocking Your Team's Performance

Leadership is hard because it is a game of tensions:

• The tension between profit and people.
• The tension between being strategic and operational performance.
• The desire to be a high performer pulls against all those things which are holding you back, inability to delegate, trust, prioritisation.

When you realise that the tensions can be managed, and the impacts of focussing on one area or another, you can start to lift your game. Often times this can be unclear from the inside looking out though.

What we’re seeing right now is a lot of organisations losing talent through the great resignation because they’ve been focusing too much on the operations and profit side of their business (survival) and missed some of the people and innovation work.

The magic comes when you look at the factors in relation to each other and the quadrants that result.

The key is understanding the impact of each factor in these tensions and what happens when you put energy into each. That’s where we help.

The Four Quadrants of Leadership Tension

Profit and Strategy

Consider the quadrant created between the overlap of profit and strategy. High focus leads to vision and innovation. It’s where the future-thinking businesses head. Low focus leads to potentially being left behind by your competition.

Profit and Operations

Moving to the Profit and Operations quadrant, this is where efficiency and lean business practices emerge when the business focus is high on these tensions. Equally, a low focus can lead to poor process management and loss of profits through excess wastage.

Operations and People

Where Operations and People intersect, we see organisations who put this as a high priority with effective people management processes, low turnover and generally good performance, albeit in a more traditional versus transformational sense. A low focus here leads to the wrong people being in the wrong seats on the bus.

Strategy and People

Where Strategic and People tensions intersect, a high focus often results in the development of workforce planning and tying business strategy to what will be needed from people strategy in the coming three to five years. A low focus here leads to high attrition, low engagement, and a workforce feeling underutilised and under-developed.

Your Diagnostic: Where Is Your Focus?

You can do a bit of a diagnostic for yourself right now. Ask yourself:

• Which of these quadrants are the focus of your efforts, and which are not?
• What impact is that having on your business?

It tells a story. If you’d like to talk about your results more, or dig a bit deeper, let’s have a conversation about it.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.