In this guest blog for International HR Day 2026, Wendy K. Smith, Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management, University of Delaware and Faculty Fellow, Harvard Business School, explores how both/and thinking will define the future of leadership.
Leadership is facing a crisis. We need more competent, capable leaders to navigate our most complex challenges. Yet these very issues are driving leaders away. Seventy-one percent of leaders report increased stress and overwhelm and 40% are considering leaving their roles.
Even more concerning, those who stay aren’t equipped for what they face. Seventy-seven percent of CHROs lack confidence in their leadership bench strength when it matters most. Today’s leaders aren’t overwhelmed and underprepared because of limited talent, but because they’re facing a level of complexity their tools were never designed to handle.
Today’s leaders confront ongoing tensions between opposing demands. Consider AI adoption. Leaders are called to accelerate technological advancement while preserving human judgment, connection and trust. Push too far toward automation and you risk dehumanising work. Resist too strongly and you create performance gaps.
Climate change presents a similar bind. Leaders must invest in long-term sustainability, but overinvestment creates financial risk that can limit future environmental initiatives. Even geopolitics creates leadership tensions as organisations navigate remaining globally engaged while responding to local political pressures.
Across industries, leaders are confronting a vast array of tensions:
Most leaders have been trained to confront tensions by making decisive choices. Evaluate the options. Pick a side. Execute with clarity and consistency. For decades, this approach served organisations well. But in today’s context, it fails.
Over 25 years, my research with co-author Marianne Lewis shows that when leaders adopt this traditional either/or approach, they fall into three predictable traps.
The rabbit hole
Leaders choose one side and double down, even as conditions change. For example, some leaders insist on fully in-person work because it once ensured productivity and connection, without fully exploring how hybrid models might evolve those outcomes.
The wrecking ball
When the environment shifts, leaders swing hard in the opposite direction, abandoning what worked along with what didn’t. In the wake of the pandemic, some organisations moved entirely to remote work without building the structures needed to sustain collaboration, culture and development.
Trench warfare
This is the most damaging trap. Choosing sides turns differences into divisions. Leaders begin to dismiss and delegitimise those who hold opposing views, deepening silos and fracturing teams. For example, HR professionals and line leaders, sustainability and finance, innovation and operations become locked in ongoing battles. These patterns don’t just limit effectiveness. They erode trust, fragment organisations and mirror the broader polarisation we see in society.
The problem isn’t the tensions themselves, but our approach to these tensions. Instead of seeing tensions as trade-offs that need to be resolved, both/and thinking offers an alternative. Tensions involve opposing pressures that also create synergies – competing demands that can reinforce each other. Seeing these tensions as a yin-yang challenges our thinking. It shifts leaders from asking “Which should we choose?” to exploring “How might these reinforce one another?”
For example, instead of viewing well-being and performance as competing demands, leaders can ask how investing in well-being enables long-term sustained performance. Instead of choosing between global consistency and local adaptation, they can design systems that allow both to coexist.
This isn’t about compromise, but creative thinking that grows the space of possibility. It invites leaders to see tensions as opportunities for innovation rather than problems to eliminate, enabling more sustainable solutions because it honours the full complexity of the challenge.
Both/and thinking isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill that can be developed. Building on mounting research, we identify four sets of practices that help leaders do this effectively. We call this the Paradox System, labelled as ABCD for ease of memory.
Assumptions: change the question
Both/and thinking begins with a mindset shift. When leaders are presented with a dilemma, the first move is to reframe it. What looks like a choice between two options becomes an invitation to explore how both might coexist. This simple shift opens the door to new possibilities.
Boundaries: separate and connect
Effective leaders create structures that allow competing demands to be explored independently while remaining aligned. This might mean different teams focusing on short-term performance and long-term innovation, connected by a shared vision that integrates their efforts.
Comfort: stay with the discomfort
Tensions generate anxiety, defensiveness and uncertainty. Rather than avoiding these emotions, both/and leaders acknowledge and work through them. They build the emotional capacity to remain grounded in the face of contradiction.
Dynamics: balancing over time
Sometimes tensions can be integrated into a creative “win-win” solution. We call this creative integration a mule – the hybrid between a horse and donkey. More often, they require ongoing adjustment. We label this tightrope walking. Leaders make small, continuous shifts across options that allow for ongoing balancing, responding to changing conditions while maintaining forward momentum.
International HR Day is a moment to ask: what skills and capabilities do we need for the future of leadership? We need assertiveness and humility, empathy and high standards, emotional intelligence and clear thinking. But mostly we need the overarching capability to hold these opposing pressures together. We need to navigate tensions without collapsing into simple answers, and to lead with confidence amid uncertainty.
Both/and thinking is the skill that makes this possible. It’s what will distinguish leaders who can integrate competing demands from those who are overwhelmed by them. Just as emotional intelligence reshaped leadership over the past two decades, both/and thinking will define the next.
The opportunity for HR professionals is clear: to build this capability intentionally, embedding it into how leaders are developed, supported and evaluated. The future of leadership depends on it.