2 Great Leadership Trade-offs

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“There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.”

Thomas Sowell said that in his book, A Conflict of Visions. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a tradeoff as “A balancing of factors all of which are not attainable at the same time.”

There would be no tradeoffs in a perfect world. In a perfect world, we’d be able to do everything we needed without sacrificing one objective to another. But this is not a perfect world. We are not perfect leaders. And so, there are two important leadership tradeoffs that are facts of life if you’re responsible for the performance and wellbeing of a group.

Only Designated Leaders Must Face the Tradeoffs

If your organization assigned you responsibility for the performance and wellbeing of a group, you must deal with the leadership tradeoffs. If you’re not assigned a leadership role, leadership is not your job. You can duck the tradeoff problem if you choose.

Tradeoffs Between Your Two Jobs

Leaders have two jobs. One is to accomplish the mission through the group. The other is to care for group members. Another way to say that is that your job is to help the team and team members succeed.

Sometimes, you must sacrifice performance on the mission to meet the objective of caring for your team members. Sometimes, you must risk sacrificing a good relationship with team members to confront them about a performance issue.

Tradeoffs In Time

We live in the present. But our choices and actions affect both the present and the future. Sometimes, you’ll sacrifice productive time and use it to train. You’ll build capacity at the expense of today’s productivity.

Sometimes, it will go the other way. You’ll sacrifice training and development to get the mission done today.

Another View

Juggling the tradeoffs is one thing that makes leadership both difficult and exciting. Even if you understand that, you must come to grips with the fact that perfect is not possible.

Back in the mid-1970s, the Caterpillar Tractor company ran a series of ads with the following tagline: “There are no simple solutions. Only intelligent choices.”

Takeaways

If you’re responsible for the performance of a group, you can’t escape tradeoffs.

“There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.”

There are tradeoffs between accomplishing the mission and caring for the people.

There are tradeoffs between the present and the future.

“There are no simple solutions. Only intelligent choices.”

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