Beyond Either / Or - 10 Paradoxes That Transformed My Leadership

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Our world and our lives are full of contradictions, and leadership and management are no exception. In my coaching practice, I see many managers searching for balance and growing frustrated when they can’t find it. The truth is that much in their lives is pushed to extremes, making equilibrium elusive.

Ambitious yet not assertive. Always in motion but longing for rest. Doing anything to gain visibility, only to conform resentfully to their organisation’s social norms. Striving for precision and correctness as experts, yet risking their relationships. Craving recognition but sacrificing values to obtain it.

At first glance, it seems we can’t have it all. But is that really true?

This newsletter draws inspiration from “Seven Transformations of Leadership” by D. Rooke and W. Torbert, published in April 2005 by Harvard Business Review. After 25 years of survey-based consultancy, they asked executives to complete 36 leadership-related sentences. From those responses, they identified seven “action logics”—distinct ways leaders make meaning of the world.

Rooke and Torbert argued that while each action logic has its merits, some prove more effective across a wider range of leadership scenarios, resulting in stronger overall performance. By recognising your current action logic, you can deliberately shift toward a more effective one, and in doing so, integrate the very paradoxes that make leadership both challenging and powerful.

As I read their article, I reflected on the paradoxes I encountered throughout my own management career. In writing this piece, I hope you’ll find clarity, normalisation of common managerial struggles, and fresh inspiration to move forward if you feel stuck. If you’d like to discover your own range of action logics, write back to me—I’d be delighted to support you on that journey.

Early in my managerial career, I was many times frustrated or puzzled by the constant contradictions I faced. I thought good leadership meant being decisive in picking a side and sticking with it. Well, this is an understatement and an oversimplification. Over time, though, I've realised that true leadership isn't about choosing between two extremes, but learning to gracefully balance both at once. It was in navigating these contradictions that I genuinely started to grow. 

As a high-performing contributor driven primarily by ambition and individual achievement, I quickly advanced into my first managerial role. One project vividly stands out: leading my team to negotiate and procure specialised multi-million-dollar equipment for a complex shipbuilding project, constrained by an extremely tight budget and limited options. It was the first time I managed such scope, and I decided to do it differently from my predecessor: I engaged each team member individually, deeply understood the purchasing challenges, and collaboratively planned our detailed strategy, right down to supplier communications. To my surprise, it worked exceptionally well. The strategic clarity I provided, combined with open communication and teamwork, allowed us to secure significant savings within the budget. That experience marked my first encounter with the paradoxical shift from "me-first" to "we-first." I started deliberately sharing credit with senior management and publicly praising my team. Personal victories transformed into collective triumphs; it no longer mattered whose idea it was. Although this shift felt natural to me and I felt safe and appreciated for this approach, I soon noticed many other managers struggled to adopt it, leaving them with fragmented teams, eroded trust, and rewards isolated at the top.

At a functional management level, control was my comfort zone. I thrived on oversight, ensuring everything was flawless. Even if we had this initial success together as a team, I soon found my team hesitant to act without my explicit approval. I felt at times like pushing a boulder uphill. It was clear something had to shift. My coach at that time made me see how I contributed to that dynamic. I start experimenting, stepping back, setting clear outcomes, and allowing others' freedom in execution. Letting go of very strict control felt very uncomfortable, even risky, but it unlocked a new sense of initiative within my team. Soon I realised people lived completely up to the expectations and delivered, and I found myself having lots of free time. And I realised this time can be filled with other types of activities, adding more value according to my role. I would say this was a critical transition, not only from control to genuine delegation but also sowing the seeds for me to understand and start working with the entire organisation as a big system.

As I advanced into managing logistics in an automotive plant, I faced another tension: blending in with my peers versus standing out individually. Initially, I prioritised fitting into the team, quietly accepting disruptions in the production flow caused by design or production issues. I worried that speaking up might jeopardise my relationships with other managers. But soon, I uncovered a deeper, systemic issue: problems in our production flow triggered by incorrect settings in the company's MRP software, configured thousands of kilometres away at headquarters. This issue had become the "pink elephant" in the room, well-known to my colleagues but invisible to me, a newcomer, and to our recently appointed managing director. My predecessor had left without resolving it, and my peers, afraid of confrontation, had stayed silent. Initially hesitant about appearing resistant or overly critical, I realised transparency was the only viable solution. In a pivotal presentation to our managing director and my peers, I laid out schematic evidence clearly illustrating how the flawed software settings negatively impacted our local logistics and production. Supported by concrete data my team had collected over two months, my perspective was validated publicly for the first time by my peers. This moment highlighted another crucial paradox: shifting from simply belonging to purposeful differentiation. I understood that stepping forward was not about risking isolation, but intentionally contributing my unique perspective and strengths. By openly addressing hidden challenges without blame, I encouraged collective responsibility and actionable solutions.

When I became managing director of a mid-size engineering company, another tension surfaced: balancing the comfort of certainty with the discomfort of ambiguity. With no prior experience in such a role, relying solely on data-driven decisions wasn't enough, especially when shifting organisational culture. Initially, I felt paralysed by complexity, unsure of the correct solutions. Soon, I realised that even the most experienced colleagues lacked clarity. In working with a coach, I started to combine intuition with evidence and address challenges incrementally. Coaching was crucial at that point: it helped me accept ambiguity, take measured steps, and build steadily, despite the urgent need for rapid transformation. Embracing both certainty and ambiguity profoundly elevated my strategic thinking.

Moving into the C-suite, efficiency was everything, until it wasn’t. I recall that, at the beginning, my focus on productivity was so tight that there was no room for creativity or innovation. Too tied to certain project success metrics, I noticed management’s attention was hijacked by defending subpar performance instead of finding organisational solutions to boost productivity. One day, during a casual lunch chat, a junior project manager shared an idea that was rough and messy but utterly brilliant. It challenged our established processes, it challenged me, and it challenged the value of our chosen objectives. In that moment, I realised management had focused too narrowly on what was already set, and nobody had taken the time to examine the system settings to see what was obsolete and what still held value. That’s when a new paradox revealed itself: real growth comes from balancing efficiency with creativity. From then on, I deliberately carved out time to create an organisational context where improvement ideas could flow and be discussed. Once the right routines were in place, creative ideas began to emerge alongside measurable results.

I also realised that an unrelenting focus on results was preventing managers from questioning their own assumptions. This became obvious also during our annual budgeting cycle. Overloaded with tasks, functional and project managers treated the process as a routine exercise instead of an opportunity to challenge past decisions. There is no real progress when we only aim to keep the lights on. True development begins when leaders ask: “If I had every resource I needed, what could my team achieve? If so, what constraints do I need to raise to make sure resources are coming?” After I introduced one-on-one budget reviews, managers began to spot and propose initiatives that boosted both capability and efficiency. That shift from pure delivery to inquiry gave us deeper strategic insights and a resilient foundation for growth.

In my executive role, I also felt caught between chasing short-term quarterly wins and planning transformative long-term changes. This reality became even more complex during a financial crisis, when market conditions deteriorated and I maintained three active scenarios, each reflecting a different level of market risk. Initially, this tension exhausted me. Yet over time, I saw how these dimensions complemented each other. I used them as the backdrop for discussions with shareholders, senior and middle management, as well as with the union. Constantly gauging and discerning the level of transparency needed to move the organisation forward, I worked closely with management, the union, and shareholders to ensure we not only had the latest accurate information but all the mentioned stakeholders could have a say in influencing strategic and tactical decisions. Short-term achievements built momentum despite tough capacity-reduction choices; still, within the management team, our trust in each other grew, as well as our credibility as an appropriate management team in times of crisis. The long-term vision gave us purpose and direction during difficult times and informed many of the hard decisions required for short-term survival. Balancing these two time horizons was challenging but crucial, and helped me realise that both timeframes must be integrated into any strategic decision, no matter how conflicting they may seem at first glance.

Reaching the C-suite forced me to think even broader. Initially, my instinct was to optimise my immediate area of responsibility, which seemed logical. After all, my main responsibility was to maintain local operations efficiently and in good order, consistently meeting the design capacity set by headquarters. Yet many operational decisions had to be harmonised with legal requirements across business units and the shifting complexities of our projects. Learning to simultaneously optimise locally and envision enterprise-wide change became essential. Navigating this paradox - local optimisation alongside systemic transformation - was incredibly rewarding. I worked with the entire organisation to embrace and implement changes that satisfied client demands and other divisions’ needs, and I acted with transparency and assertiveness once I realised the organisation needed political support to turn local improvements into broader initiatives.

The paradoxes became even subtler as an MD. Here, the balance was between projecting authority and being openly vulnerable. In the male-dominated industry of ship design/shipbuilding, my prior models were leaders who hardly revealed doubts and mistakes. Even though at times such errors and their impact were so obvious. However, emulating a similar behaviour would have been both very unnatural and a death sentence for my credibility, especially when I joined the company as the MD. Everyone knew I had never had a similar role. I truly do not believe in “fake it till you make it”, and my approach is to remain actively and fully accountable for what you can assume and call as being your responsibility. Right from the beginning, I remained accountable for who I was: probably the person with the least technical knowledge from the whole company (in spite of my appropriate technical background), with stellar academic management knowledge, but with fairly limited management experience. This allowed me to remain humble yet very active in finding the right collaborators inside and outside the organisation, and develop mutual trust and respect through the questions I put and the overall picture I continuously communicated. I chose transparency right from the beginning, and permanently played my strength - clarity of processes and integrity of the system and culture - to complement my colleagues' deep technical knowledge with clarity of vision and strategy. The reaction surprised me: respect deepened, trust strengthened, and in less than 1 year, I was accepted and felt “at home,” and I felt clearly that true power integrates authority with vulnerability.

Many people, including senior executives I coach, ask how I decided to step away from senior management and choose a new path. The truth is, I was ready. A couple of years before I made the change, I realised my work felt as uninspiring as reheated fries: you can eat them if you’re starving, but I wasn’t hungry. Everything I had built in management - four cycles of organisational growth - felt like a golden cage: I no longer found meaning there. Leadership had become my identity, but I wondered who else I could be.

Today, I’m grateful I followed that instinct and moved into executive leadership and management performance coaching. I maintained boundaries around who I was as a leader, yet I also shed the rigidity of that professional identity. I find coaching deeply rewarding because every day I help managers and teams recognise their action logic, accept and integrate the paradoxes of leadership, and escape the traps of organisational dilemmas. In working with so many leaders, I live in a world where geographical, temporal, organisational, and personal barriers dissolve. I embrace the collective stories of dozens of organisations and communities, and I find immense fulfilment in being part of something far greater, even if my contribution of empowering works one leader or one leadership team at a time. This renewed sense of purpose revealed another paradox I’m continually mastering: the balance between self-boundary and interconnectedness.

Looking back, every step forward in my growth involved these subtle yet profound shifts. Embracing contradictions was about understanding complexity and about harnessing multiple truths. And I feel they help me become wiser, stronger, and genuinely impactful.

I encourage you, as you encounter these paradoxes, to lean into them. Welcome them! Because these tensions aren't problems to solve. They are the gateways to your next level as a leader and as a person.

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If this article speaks to you, I’d love to hear your story. What paradoxes did you notice you overcame? What created the challenge? How was your approach different after that? Write me back and share that story. Remember, just talking with your colleagues or team members on those turning points helps others make their own shift.

And if you are someone who wants to work on this and know more about your range of action logics, book a free discovery session with me. It will help you not only to discover your action logic, but also to discover your immediate directions for personal growth that would help to reach your next level of performance in your career and in life. And to make an informed choice whether coaching is the right personal development tool for you.

I am looking forward to continuing this conversation with you.
  

Until next time, keep thriving!

Alina Florea

Your Management Performance Coach 

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