Continuing to operate like a start-up as a company grows, or becoming more corporate?

Making decisions centrally, or giving factories greater decision-making autonomy?

Management teams who genuinely want what is best for their organizations sometimes find themselves in intense conflicts, each trying to convince the other that one of these two approaches is the right one.

And more often than not, these debates go on without ever reaching a resolution.

Why?

Because if what we are trying to address is not a problem, but a polarity, the answer is not to choose one side over the other.

Polarity management is about making progress towards our overarching purpose by leveraging the strengths of both poles, rather than choosing one over the other, while avoiding the downsides that emerge when we overemphasize either side.

Let me illustrate this with an everyday example:

If our goal is to build muscle, we cannot simply exercise all the time.

Training stimulates muscle growth, but rest is equally essential for muscles to develop.

If we train without allowing enough time for recovery, we risk injury. If we rest too much, we fail to make progress.

In other words, the question is not "Exercise or rest?"

If our goal is to become fitter and increase our muscle mass, we need to manage exercise and rest together, in a way that best serves our goal and takes our individual circumstances into account.

The same principle applies to organizations.

In one consulting engagement, I suggested looking at the polarity between maintaining a start-up culture and becoming more corporate, which was creating tension within the management team, through this lens.

In another organization, the tension was between centralized decision-making and giving factories greater decision-making autonomy.

Because problems can be solved, but polarities can only be managed by learning to work with both sides.

Kindest Regards

Şebnem Gürün Özeren