I talked in my last leadingthougts podcast about the value of holding ambiguity and tension as a leader. People who tap their creativity on a regular basis demonstrate this ability. The artist, in any domain, understands the tension of creating. You don’t “control” the process, you move with it and ride it like a wave. It doesn’t mean you are completely passive. A surfer is surely not passive. But, neither can she control the wave.
Great leaders and teams hold tension in order to pull the creative life out of it. This is hard to do, because the ambiguity can be frustrating—even maddening. One of the teams I’m currently leading is really struggling to get to a new place of effective collaboration and productivity. The solution, if you will, is coming slow. There’s a collective sense, on the team, that things are not as they could be, BUT the new way has not yet emerged. This is the tough spot in the creative process. The moment when leaders and teams are tempted to give up, run back, distract themselves with a favorite dysfunction, or panic just for fun.
There is an ability I will call “active waiting” that can enable a team stay vigilient for the solutions needed, but stay in the angst long enough for parts of those solutions to emerge. Remember the wave? We don’t control everything going on. There are forces at work we must allow and wait for. But while we wait for the wave to form, we watch, we dialogue, we prepare…and then we get up and ride the wave—implemnet the new as it surfaces.
What would it take to move your team toward this kind of “active waiting?
More on active waiting soon…
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