Navigating Leadership Paradoxes: Trust Vs. Truth, Confidence Vs. Competence, Authenticity Vs. Performance, Skill Vs. Luck, Long-term Vs. Short-term. Let’s explore.

1. Trust Vs. Truth
Leaders often have a close-knit inner circle built on trust that has been nurtured over the years. While trust is comforting, confronting hard truths can be difficult.

To ensure truth doesn't become the first casualty, consider incentivizing your inner circle to embrace honesty.

In history, wise ministers employed court jesters to deliver hard truths with a touch of humour. The need for jesters in itself is a sign of a leadership crisis.

2. Confidence Vs. Competence
Do not confuse confidence for competence, they are not the same. Beware of those who exude confidence without the backing of genuine expertise. Confident people raise their hands when the most competent are reluctant.

Confidence is “I do not know so what, I can always learn” and confidence is also “I need to know everything about the subject and minimize failure”.

Innovation/start-ups arise from brash confidence but you want to fly in an aircraft designed with quiet confidence.

Leadership is about getting the best out of both extremes.

3. Authenticity Vs. Performance
Leadership often demands a performative aspect, projecting vision and confidence to rally teams to achieve results. Also, everyone tries to deliver their best performance when they meet/present to leaders.

However, the pressure to perform can create disharmony between one's inner self and outward projection, leading to exhaustion.

Performance at critical times is inevitable but performance at all times is neither authentic nor leadership.

4. Skills Vs. Luck
It is impossible to isolate skills from luck in success but both play a part. Whilst you can learn the skill but luck cannot be taught. However, you can increase your luck surface area by (Passionate) Doing X (Effective) Telling not once but repeatedly. It is not 100X repetitions, it's 100x iterations.

5. Long-term Vs. Short-term
Berkshire results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions – that would be about one every five years – Leaders get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions.

Amazon led by Jeff Bezos was not profitable for almost 20 years. Steve Jobs led Apple for nearly 25 years.

Compounding over the long term creates extraordinary value, but the average CXO tenure for public companies is 5 years.

what do you think?

Note: Views are personal and certainly not investment advice.

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