The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership

Turbulent times require a new kind of leader with eight sets of paradoxical skills.

Transformational times demand leaders who can steer their organizations in a global, networked economy. Information technology and more demanding stakeholders in an increasingly volatile political and social environment call for executives with new skills. Collaborative leaders have replaced the traditional command and control hierarchies of mass-scale industrial production. 

Workers and consumers know more today and prove less loyal to corporate cultures or traditional brands than they did in the past. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted the workplace and accelerated trends toward remote work and the gig economy. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence today prove more sound markers of leaders’ likely success than expertise and cognitive abilities ever can. 

Isaac Newton, for example, used a year of disruption – 1665 to 1666, when the Great Plague of London forced him to leave Cambridge University to return home – to develop his most extraordinary ideas in mathematics and physics. Newton used the lacuna created by the pandemic...