Stop Choosing — Start Balancing: The future of HR is Both/And.
Strategic HRM is full of paradoxes — employee well-being vs. high performance, standardization vs. personalization, control vs. autonomy.
"Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems" by Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis reminds us that effective HR leaders don’t resolve these tensions by choosing one side; they learn to manage and leverage them.
How to apply this mindset in practice:
⚽ Name the tension instead of avoiding it. For example, openly acknowledge the trade-offs between cost-efficiency and employee development.
⚽ Engage multiple stakeholders to surface diverse perspectives and values behind competing goals.
⚽ Frame decisions as iterative, not finaal — design HR practices that evolve over time and respond to context.
⚽ Use paradox as a design principle in HR systems: build policies that can flex across employee segments or time horizons, not just one-size-fits-all solutions.
❗Mastering paradox isn’t a soft skill — it’s a strategic capability.
"Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems" by Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis reminds us that effective HR leaders don’t resolve these tensions by choosing one side; they learn to manage and leverage them.
How to apply this mindset in practice:
⚽ Name the tension instead of avoiding it. For example, openly acknowledge the trade-offs between cost-efficiency and employee development.
⚽ Engage multiple stakeholders to surface diverse perspectives and values behind competing goals.
⚽ Frame decisions as iterative, not finaal — design HR practices that evolve over time and respond to context.
⚽ Use paradox as a design principle in HR systems: build policies that can flex across employee segments or time horizons, not just one-size-fits-all solutions.
❗Mastering paradox isn’t a soft skill — it’s a strategic capability.