What the Hardest Leadership Moments Teach Us: Lessons from Polarities and Crucible Experiences
In This Article
Why today's most difficult leadership challenges are often polarities, not problems with clear solutions
How Barry Johnson's polarity framework helps leaders navigate competing institutional priorities
What Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas mean by crucible experiences, and why they shape exceptional leaders
Reflection questions that help leaders move from reacting under pressure to leading from purpose and values
Why managing polarities and learning through crucible experiences are essential capabilities for today's academic leaders
Research-based leadership practices are an essential part of every leader's toolkit. They help us navigate difficult conversations, build stronger teams, make better decisions, and lead more effectively.
But today's higher education leaders increasingly face challenges that no framework can resolve on its own. These moments demand something deeper: the ability to navigate competing values, exercise sound judgment, and lead from a clear sense of purpose.
In this article, we explore two powerful leadership concepts that can help. Barry Johnson's work on polarities offers a way to understand the enduring tensions leaders must manage, while Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas' research on crucible experiences helps explain how those moments ultimately shape us as leaders. Together, they provide a practical lens for leading when there are no perfect answers.
Today, leadership is less about choosing between competing priorities and more about managing the tensions between them.
The idea of polarities was developed by Barry Johnson, an organizational development pioneer whose work has influenced business, healthcare, government, and higher education for more than four decades. Polarities are not problems to solve but tensions to manage. Problems have solutions. Polarities involve two values that are both necessary and become harmful when one is consistently favored at the expense of the other.
Polarities are rife in higher education leadership: preserving academic traditions while embracing innovation, maintaining rigorous shared governance while making decisions quickly enough to respond to changing conditions, protecting academic quality while pursuing financial sustainability, or balancing departmental autonomy with institutional alignment.
Leaders can assume they must choose between competing priorities, when the real challenge is learning how to leverage both over time. When dealing with polarities, the goal is not to eliminate the tension but to recognize that success comes from moving thoughtfully between complementary strengths.
As a framework, polarities helps us to understand that these tensions are normal and enduring. It also explains why leading through them can feel so difficult.
Leadership is forged in the most difficult moments
We learn the most about leadership when it is the hardest. Leadership tests us, and invites us to dig deep and think about what is most important and how we want to show up. The path forward is ours alone to choose.
Warren Bennis and Robert J. Thomas described these defining challenges as crucible experiences. In their research with exceptional leaders, published in the Harvard Business Review, they found that the leaders who have the greatest impact are often shaped not by routine success, but by experiences that test their judgment, challenge their assumptions, and force them to rethink who they are as leaders. Crucible experiences are not necessarily dramatic public crises. They are moments of profound challenge that require leaders to make difficult choices, learn from adversity, and emerge with greater clarity, resilience, and purpose.
Higher education today is creating crucible experiences with remarkable frequency. A president confronting an unexpected budget deficit, a provost deciding whether to invest scarce resources in emerging academic programs while protecting long-standing departments, a dean navigating faculty resistance to organizational change, or an academic leader responding to rapidly evolving expectations around artificial intelligence, student success, or public trust. None of these situations offers a perfect solution. Every option carries benefits, costs, and unintended consequences. Leaders cannot wait for certainty because certainty rarely arrives. They must draw on their values, engage others thoughtfully, and make the best decisions possible with incomplete information.
Managing a polarity is often what creates a crucible experience. When leaders must hold two legitimate values in tension and make consequential decisions without perfect information, they are not simply solving a problem. They are being shaped by it.
Reflecting In and Through a Crucible Experience
When leaders find themselves in one of these defining moments, try starting with questions. Reflection creates the space to move beyond reacting to immediate pressures and instead lead from purpose, judgment, and character.
What is this situation asking of me as a leader? What qualities or capabilities does this moment require that I may not have needed before?
Which of my values feel most important to protect right now? If those values come into conflict, which will ultimately guide my decision?
What fears, assumptions, or personal preferences might be influencing my thinking? How can I separate those from what the institution truly needs?
Whose perspectives do I most need to understand before deciding? Where might I be listening too narrowly or overlooking important voices?
If this decision became a defining story of my leadership, what would I hope people would say about how I approached it?
When I look back on this moment five years from now, what decision will I be proud to have made, even if it was difficult in the moment?
These questions rarely produce immediate answers, however taking the time to ask them will help you to navigate challenging situations with greater clarity, integrity, and intentionality.
Final Thoughts
Higher education has always required leaders to navigate competing values. What is different today is the intensity, speed, and frequency with which those tensions arise. Financial pressures, demographic shifts, political scrutiny, technological disruption, and changing learner expectations have made polarities more visible and crucible experiences more common than at any point in recent memory.
Barry Johnson's work reminds us that many leadership challenges are not problems to solve but tensions to manage. Bennis and Thomas remind us that it is precisely in managing those tensions that leaders are forged. Together, these ideas offer a powerful lens for understanding leadership today. One explains the nature of the challenge. The other explains how leaders are transformed by meeting it.
The leaders who will shape the future of higher education will not be those who find perfect answers. They will be those who develop the wisdom to hold competing truths, the courage to act despite uncertainty, and the character to grow through the crucible experiences that define every meaningful leadership journey.
Ready to Navigate Your Institution's Next Leadership Challenge?
The most difficult leadership moments rarely come with clear answers. Whether you are leading through organizational change, navigating competing institutional priorities, or supporting a leadership team facing significant uncertainty, you do not have to do it alone.
Academic Leadership Group partners with presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs, and executive leadership teams to strengthen leadership capacity, guide organizational change, and help institutions navigate their most important moments with clarity and confidence.
If your institution is facing one of these defining moments, we'd welcome a conversation about how we can help.
Contact Academic Leadership Group to learn more about our executive coaching, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness services.
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Leading Through Uncertainty: What Academic Leaders Need Now
Real Tools for Real Challenges: A Practical Guide for Academic Leaders