Wendy Smith – Capitalising on Tension in Conversation

Wendy Smith is a professor of management at the Alfred Lerner College of Business & Economics, co-founder of the Women’s Leadership Initiative and author of the book Both/And Thinking. She is an advocate for bold leadership, and much of her work focuses on helping leaders and teams navigate paradoxes. We have invited Wendy Smith to talk about how we can get better at embracing paradoxes and go from either/or to both/and thinking.

The key topics covered in this episode are: 

• How we can embrace and invite tensions into the organisation 
• How paradox invites us to honour different points of view 
• How we can capitalise on friction 
• The importance of being transparent and vulnerable as a leader 
• Inviting ourselves to think about a different possibility space 
• How we can change questions from either/or to both/and 

 For references, links, and other episodes, visit the podcast homepage here.