Balance or Integration?

Image By: Leo Burnett Manila, 2010

Five layers of Coke bottles displayed in an inverted pyramid as created by Leo Burnett Manila (an advertising agency) in 2010. This is an image that to one leader represents leadership.

I use images to assess leaders and guide them in leadership development. The model is called Visiva Leadership®. In this blog, we explore real-life case studies of the model at work. Let’s take a look now at this image.

The leader who chose this image is not just very intelligent: he is brilliant. Whoever has interacted with him has experienced his brilliance in his way of thinking, his way of looking at challenges with a different eye, and his way of disrupting the norm with innovation. But his intelligence brought with it a kind restlessness within himself, as no platform, situation, or opportunity was big enough for him. He was always in search of something more, something different, something new. He was seeking more from himself, more for the large team he was leading, and more for the organization he belonged to. He was admired and appreciated by his leaders and peers for his consistent and “towering” presence and for the impact he was having on the organization. However, a not-well-defined ‘something’ was off; there was tension and he was “rough around the edges,” as some phrased it.

This leader and I started to work together. The first day of our work he gave me this image and with a challenging half-smile, he said, “Now what?”

The interplay of image and narrative

I asked him to describe the image to me and explain why this image represented leadership to him; I asked for his narrative. I always do this: while the image in all its different elements and collective aspect is very meaningful, so is the description – the why – that the leader assigns to the image. We can be true to the translation and deeper meaning of the image by looking at and deciphering the different elements of the image while at the same time listening to the narrative. It is not only what the leader says, it is also what the leader does not say. Without the relationship between the image’s elements and the narrative, there is no dynamic energy. Without understanding the dynamic energy, there is no clarity on the issues we will need to manage.

Improbable and unthinkable packaging display

He started describing the “brilliant work” that the ad agency Leo Burnett Manila did when it was tasked to make Coke Zero stand out from the sea of bubbly beverages. Their evocative solution was to stack the soda in an inverted pyramid shape which visually separated Coke Zero from its competitors. A 13% sales increase occurred in stores that participated with the unique display idea. He continued by saying that the traditional pyramid concept has been “turned on its head” creating an even more “improbable and unthinkable” – until then – packaging display. In his own words: “It was just brilliant.”

He then switched the conversation to leadership. Leadership for him was to make the impossible possible. He stated that a leader should act as the base point of an inverted pyramid: it is a leader who needs to support the team, not the other way around. The leader is accountable for the success of the team. The inverted pyramid was a perfect visual for him. He thought of himself as the single element at the bottom on the floor. The rest of the pyramid was the team. That was his leadership style.

During our dialogues, it was evident that this leader had a clear vision and grounded determination of what his leadership style was and how he wanted to show up as a leader. As we continued our work and more elements emerged through our conversations, I asked him two questions: First, is this approach sustainable? And, second, are you expecting this same attitude from your leaders (direct reports)?

Question #1: Is this approach sustainable?

One of the elements that surfaced often during our conversation was his consistent need to balance his life. In his own words, he was trying “to balance way too many things at the same time.” His laser-focus on innovation and brilliant successes at work while supporting and leading his team plus simultaneously nurturing his family was creating a highly stressful personal situation. One consequence was that he was irritable and sometimes short-tempered at work; in other words, he was “rough around the edges.”

When I meet these crucial moments in dialogue with my clients, I always go back to the image. The answer and the guidance are always in the image. In this instance, if we look at the image, we understand that a lot of work and thoughtful structure is needed to create and to maintain balance in this improbable and unthinkable display. In physics, if two individual forces are of equal magnitude and opposite direction, then the forces are said to be balanced. The rule for something to be balanced is called the principle of moments: when an object is balanced, the sum of the clockwise moments is equal to the sum of the anticlockwise moments.

Going back to our leader: this balance requires an enormous effort! What was the energy he needed and the personal price that he was paying to create and sustain balance? Look at the image: can you feel the pressure of maintaining that improbable balance? For how long would this leader have been able to endure that effort? It was not sustainable. And this unsustainability was showing up for him in his behaviors that appeared “rough around the edges.” When we started to peel the onion around this concept of sustaining balance, the pyramid of Coke started to crumble down. He asked me one more time, “Now what?” This time he did not have a challenging half-smile; he was asking for a hand to pull him up again.

As an alternative to balance, we started exploring the concept of integration.

What if he was able to integrate the different aspects of his life instead of positioning them in competition and consequently pulling them in opposite directions? For example, would it be possible for him to integrate part of his personal life with work life by occasionally working from home? By doing so, so he could support his wife in looking after their 9-month-old daughter yet still be available to support his team at work. Or, again, would it be possible for him to integrate his direct reports into his thinking about new ways of innovating, instead of always feeding ideas to them?

What a new concept this was for him! Integration, from Latin integrat – means made whole. The deeper we went into our dialogue, the clearer it became for him that his attempt at balance meant he was living a divided life. By integrating, he had the possibility of living a life made whole.

Question #2: Are you expecting this same attitude from your leaders (direct reports)?

When we examined question number two – Are you expecting this same attitude from your leaders (direct reports)? – he smiled and said, “We don’t need to talk about this. I now prefer a flatter and more integrated display of Coke. But…the inverted pyramid was brilliant!”

Going deeper

It takes a long time and a lot of work to go deeper into the meaning of our symbolic life. And so, it was a long road and a lot of work for our leader to learn how to harmoniously integrate the forces of the opposites to allow him to show up with smoothed edges while supporting his team in a more generative and productive way. A “brilliant consequence” – as he put it – was that his team also learned how to integrate instead of balancing.

Do you balance your life or integrate your life? What is your image of leadership?