Would you say leaders in your organization tend to be more bold or more cautious when they make important decisions? Not sure? Here are a couple case studies for comparison.

Case Study 1:

A new CEO took the helm at a technology company and quickly eliminated 70 percent of the product line and announced a partnership with the company’s biggest rival.

Case Study 2:

At a different technology company, a new CEO was promoted from within, and instead of making bold changes, the CEO began methodically tuning the company culture and carefully analyzing trends and opportunities to refine the directional focus.

Analysis

On the surface, these case studies represent opposite leadership styles, one bold and one cautious. Which would you want to train for in your organization? Is it better to train leaders to measure twice or to teach them that fortune favors the bold?

While they appear to be in conflict, caution and courage are both virtues. Knowing the outcomes of each case study adds some useful context.

Case Study 1 describes the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997. Jobs made the risky decision to focus on a few products like the iMac and formed a partnership with Microsoft to bring Microsoft Office software to Mac machines. Apple experienced extraordinary growth under Jobs’ second tenure.

Case Study 2 describes the promotion of Satya Nadella to the top job at Microsoft. The company was struggling when he took over in 2014 and seemed to be on the fast track to irrelevance. Under his leadership, though, Microsoft has traded places with Apple as the world’s most valuable technology company.

Effective Leaders Need Both Caution and Courage

The apparent contrast between courage and caution in these examples reveals a paradox, a tension between two necessary principles that on the surface appear to be contradictory. It’s tempting to dumb down the contrast and talk about different “leadership styles”—one bold, and one cautious, either of which can be effective. This explanation ignores the important reality that every effective leader needs both caution and courage. The traits are like two posts on a suspension bridge pulling in opposite directions. The tension between them is what keeps the bridge in place. For all his caution, Nadela placed big bets on AI, cloud services, mixed reality, and quantum computing. Some of those bets have not yet paid off. For all his boldness, Jobs was intensely data-driven in his obsession with the user experience, not just measuring twice, but hundreds of times and from multiple angles.

Both Nadela and Jobs had big aspirational goals that, like a compass, pointed them in the direction they wanted to go. Jobs wanted to fundamentally reshape the way people use technology to create, interact, and find meaning. Nadela has a similar vision for Microsoft that is about empowering every individual and organization to achieve more by leveraging technology. Both leaders also knew they needed short-term achievable goals to measure progress toward those aspirational compass points.

The Balance of Courage and Caution

To train effective leaders, you need to help them understand the balance between aspirational goals and achievable goals. They need to understand that all lasting progress is the result of an iterative process of goal setting, barrier analysis, behavior changing, and results evaluation. At Niche Academy, we call this the Progress Cycle.

Effective leaders are not born. They are ordinary people who have come to understand and value paradoxes like the tension between courage and caution. Chances are that your team already has people ready to learn and implement the patterns that will move their team forward.