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The Seven Leadership Tensions Every SME Leader Experiences

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In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the old playbook of decisive, hierarchical leadership simply isn’t enough. Yet completely abandoning traditional leadership styles isn’t the answer either. According to IMD professor and social psychologist Jennifer Jordan, the most effective modern leaders master the art of navigating between seven key leadership tensions—knowing when to lean traditional and when to embrace emerging approaches.

The Power of Dynamic Leadership

Jordan’s research reveals that exceptional leaders don’t pick a side and stick with it. Instead, they fluidly move between what she calls “the seven tensions of the digital age.” These pairs represent the traditional versus emerging leadership styles:

Power Holder vs. Power Sharer: Sometimes teams need security and clear authority; other times they benefit from shared decision-making that develops talent and frees leaders for strategic work.

Tactician vs. Visionary: Breaking down immediate next steps serves teams differently than painting inspiring big-picture visions, depending on the moment’s needs.

Constant vs. Adapter: Maintaining clear non-negotiables provides stability, whilst adapting messages based on new information demonstrates strength, not weakness.

Perfectionist vs. Accelerator: Detail-oriented excellence has its place, but so does the “good enough, move fast” mentality when speed matters more than perfection.

Analyst vs. Intuitionist: Data-driven decisions and gut instincts both have value—brilliant leaders know when to deploy each.

Miner vs. Prospector: Deep expertise in specific areas balances beautifully with broad awareness of environmental opportunities and threats.

Teller vs. Listener: Giving direction and having answers serves teams differently than curious listening and learning from others.

Jordan highlights leaders who masterfully navigate these tensions. Angela Renz, former CEO of Burberry, exemplified the listener-teller balance. She openly admitted her knowledge gaps with millennials and digital trends, asking questions and learning from younger employees. Yet she also established non-negotiable elements of Burberry’s heritage and provided clear frameworks for innovation.

Mathias Dopfner of Axel Springer demonstrated the miner-prospector tension perfectly. He took his leadership team to Silicon Valley for six months, embracing start-up culture to understand industry disruption. Simultaneously, he identified areas of existing competency to double down on, divesting from areas where they lacked strength.

The Fear Factor

Most leaders who struggle with these tensions aren’t lacking skills—they’re paralysed by fear. Power-sharers worry about appearing authoritarian if they hold authority. Tacticians fear seeming “fluffy” if they articulate vision. These fears keep leaders trapped in narrow ranges, limiting their effectiveness.

Making It Practical

Jordan advises against trying to balance all seven tensions perfectly. Instead, identify three or four that matter most for your context and role. The key is developing emotional intelligence to read situations and people, then asking crucial questions: What’s happening in the environment? What are people around me feeling and needing right now?

The future belongs to leaders who can sway between traditional and emerging styles, providing exactly what their teams and organisations need in each moment. This isn’t about abandoning everything that made leaders successful in the past—it’s about expanding their repertoire for an increasingly complex world.

To fully grasp more about these leadership styles and how to implement them effectively, the Help to Grow Management Programme at Kingston Business School focuses exclusively on Leading Change in Module 8, providing practical frameworks for navigating these crucial tensions in today’s dynamic business environment.

Small Business Leadership & Management Certificate Training Courses UK

 

Leading Through Crisis

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In today’s volatile business environment, traditional leadership approaches fall woefully short. As Simmons University President Lynn Perry Wooten eloquently explained in her HBR Future of Business Conference masterclass, “We spend most of our time, most of our training, most of our development, learning how to lead when business is as usual. But if there’s one thing we can all agree upon from the last three to five years, we’re in a state now where there’s no more business as usual.”

Beyond the Traditional Three P’s

For decades, business education has focused on the classic three P’s: profit, people, and planet. Yet Wooten challenges us to consider a fourth dimension—prepared leadership—which she defines as “the ability to deliver in terms of people, planet, and profits when confronting uncertainty.”

Having studied hundreds of crises over 25 years, from natural disasters to corporate scandals, Wooten’s research reveals five essential practices that distinguish effective crisis leaders.

  1. Sense-making and Perspective Taking

Prepared leaders continuously scan their environment for warning signs, understanding implications for all stakeholders. This involves three temporal perspectives:

  • Hindsight: Learning from historical events
  • Insight: Interpreting current conditions
  • Foresight: Scenario planning for potential futures

The Maui wildfires offer a sobering example—a 2020 report clearly identified the risk, yet proper sense-making was missing.

  1. Decision-making Under Pressure

Unlike routine problem-solving, crisis decisions require structure and speed while avoiding cognitive biases. Wooten recommends a formal approach:

  • Define the problem clearly
  • Map stakeholder implications
  • Establish desired outcomes
  • Gather diverse information sources
  • Create parallel plans (always have a Plan B)
  • Evaluate options through multiple frames: systems thinking, power dynamics, human resources, and cultural implications
  1. Energising Your Team for Agility

Crisis leadership is “not a solo sport,” as Wooten emphasised. The NBA’s creation of a “bubble” during the pandemic exemplifies this practice—bringing together diverse experts from healthcare providers to coaches to conceptualise and execute a complex solution.

Wooten uses the jazz ensemble metaphor to illustrate effective crisis teams: “Leadership is rotating as the music dictates.” Each team member must lead when their expertise is needed, while listening and taking cues from others.

  1. Building Mega Communities

When facing unprecedented challenges, single organisations rarely possess all the necessary resources. The most successful crisis responses involve “mega communities”—partnerships across government, corporate, and non-profit sectors.

The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines demonstrates this principle perfectly: government funding, corporate pharmaceutical expertise, and non-profit distribution channels working in concert.

  1. Managing for Resilience

True resilience isn’t merely bouncing back—it’s experiencing a “growth trajectory” from crucible moments. Wooten advises leaders to:

  • Take deep breaths and embrace change
  • Identify necessary learning opportunities
  • Check alignment with values and goals
  • Broaden networks and knowledge bases
  • Monitor well-being for self and team

For organisations committed to thriving amidst uncertainty, these five practices aren’t optional—they’re essential components of modern leadership. As Wooten concludes, prepared leadership means creating teams and structures ready to “weather the storm and drive positive change in the aftermath.”

In an era where crisis is the new normal, perhaps it’s time we reconceptualise leadership education and development to prioritise these capabilities from day one.

To find out more about leadership strategies, find out our 90% Government-funded programme, Help to Grow Management at Kingston Business School.

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Why do SMEs resist Digital Adoption and how to overcome it?

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There is a common theme of small and medium-sized businesses being reluctant to the idea of digitising their business processes and infrastructure especially if they have physical products.

But little did they know what they were actually uncomfortable with is their leadership mindsets that were not conducive to change and innovation. The survey conducted by Deloitte in 2016 highlights the reasons that only 44% of business leaders prepare for such disruption despite 87% of businesses knowing they are going to get the hit of digital disruption at some point yet no action gets taken. A self-induced catastrophe!

Some of the common barriers to digital adoptions are as following:

Resistance to Change

This resistance to change is reflected in all levels of an organisation such as IT department where a lack of digital processes slows down the entire workflow, leading to slower delivery of secured projects, and lesser capacity to take on new ones.

Digitally maturing companies stay ahead of the growth curve and their workforce by actively engaging in risk-taking agile collaborations, partnerships and projects. Statistics showed agile organisations achieve 30% higher profitability and 37% faster growth than non-agile businesses.

This can be achieved if the benefits of the digitised process are effectively communicated to the company hand in hand with continuous training to foster culture where innovation is valued and change is not considered a huge discomfort.

IT capacity

IT performance can easily be jeopardised if the right training is not provided to IT leaders which effectively leads to a tunnel vision towards both short-term tasks and long-term goals.

So if IT team leaders are provided adequate training and investments are made in the overall IT structure, this can help make the business scalable, resilient and flexible.

Investment in continuous Training and Education

Digital adoption training and learning opportunities for senior-level management is a key factor that further translates into creating and fostering an overall company’s culture. Therefore, it is crucial for senior management to keep their knowledge in check and look out for training focusing on future skills, digital adaptability.

In our 2nd Module of Digital Adoption of Help to Grow Management Programme, we peel the concept and practical frameworks of Digital Adoption such as the role of digital leadership, stages of digital adoption and recognising where your business is at and many more. The session will be conducted by our Expert Speaker, Eugene Fisher.

About the Speaker:

As a transformation consultant and product manager Eugene has worked with C-suite leaders in start-ups to Fortune 50s drive growth by enhancing leadership capabilities, building innovative teams and launching new products.

He takes a pragmatic and design-led approach to delivering growth; a few recent projects include testing new business propositions for a convenience foods chain with 1.2k locations, helping a new team generate £10m of business value within one year of formation, and developing the enterprise strategy for a £1b retailer.

You can find out more about the programme here: Small Business Leadership & Management Certificate Training Courses UK (kingstonuniversitybusinesstraining.com)

Spaceship View for Business Leaders

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Serving twenty-four years as a NASA astronaut, Cady Coleman recently shared her profound learnings, how she stayed focused, managed stress and navigated working in cross-cultural teams in HBR podcast. Although these lessons have come from an astronaut, but they are significant lessons for SME leaders, owners and managers.

Dream on, be positive

As cliché as it may sound, Coleman thrived by keeping a positive outlook. In the podcast, she discussed having to encounter emergency simulations, drilling and remembering to keep curious about all that she did before the big space mission.

If we compare going to space with leading a business; think about what could possibly go wrong when you change the business model, sign a deal or tap into a new market. Cady Coleman reminds us to prepare ourselves with all possible outcomes with a positive mindset.

Cultivate a work culture where mistakes are shared

Coleman shared how NASA’s culture has shaped her views and how she approaches complex challenges at work. Owning up to one’s mistakes and sharing were important parts of Coleman’s growth journey at NASA.

It can undeniably hard to admit a mistake, but it also adds a pivotal value in overall work culture – she said, share your mistakes so all can learn from them.

This could bring an enormous amount of possible solutions, shared lessons and a sense of community that, we are in it together. It gives a sense of assurance that it is absolutely humane to go wrong sometimes; making mistakes and sharing them are critical components of a growth curve.

Create diverse cultural teams at the workplace

Coleman talked about cross-cultural team dynamics and the challenges she faced working with a diverse and international crew. She acknowledged that, although it was challenging but it was also a humbling experience to fully understand that we all bring different skill sets to the table. The main purpose was to be trained for the big mission and be fully equipped to tackle uncertainties.

This is how all organisations, big or small, should work together and create a diverse set of teams.

The unique perspective of interconnectedness through the lens of an astronaut, who was literally watching the earth, from space, affirms we are more alike than different and that we can work around differences if we continue to innovate and create.

The multi-cultural teams create an air of trust and space for innovation which goes a long way and to be a good business leader is to have a spaceship view, while also being immersed in day to day operations of your earth (business).

To learn more about how to scale your small business a up, lead high-performing and engaged workforce, manage operations and finances efficiently as a SME leader, join our next cohort: Help to Grow: Management Course | Kingston University (kingstonuniversitybusinesstraining.com)