Wendy Smith

Our world is increasingly complex. Leaders need new approaches to be effective. Building on her bestselling book, Both/And Thinking, Wendy Smith draws on over 25 years of research to show how our typical leadership approaches fail us. She argues that effectively leading in this complex world requires us to embrace organizational paradoxes and apply both/and thinking to value competing demands. She animates these ideas with examples from leaders in large companies such as Unilever, and LEGO, to social enterprises and NGOs.

This session can support the growth and development of leaders whether your organization is grappling with strategic challenges around innovation and change, sustainability, diversity and inclusion, employee wellness – or seeks new ways to confront the challenges of our times. Participants will leave this session with new language and strategies for leadership.

Our lives are riddled with ongoing tensions. We face a tug-of-war between our work demands and the rest of our lives, being productive while also ensuring our well-being, performing well while also learning new skills. Wendy Smith argues that it is not IF we face tensions, but how we do so. She shows how we resort to either/or approaches to address these challenges and why that approach is limited at best and detrimental at worst. She then draws on 25 years of research to offer an alternative both/and approach. Animated by provocative stories and powerful research findings, this session will leave people seeing their challenges in a new light and inspired to draw on tensions as a strength to embrace rather than an obstacle to avoid.

This session is often valuable as leadership development for any level of the company.

Our challenges do not come from the problems we face, but how we face our problems. In this talk, Wendy Smith helps us to see how quickly we fall into either/or traps that diminish diversity and exacerbates detrimental conflict. She then draws on her award-winning research along with her co-authors to describe the nature and approaches to build a paradox mindset. This session will leave participants feeling inspired and equipped with practices to build a paradox mindset to work through conflicts and tensions.

In advance, participants often take the free Paradox Mindset Inventory assessment. As an add-on, leaders can opt for an anonymous analysis of participants Paradox Mindset Inventory averages. This session is valuable in any leadership development context or for a group of leaders seeking to make strategic change.

Long-term organizational success depends on the ability to innovate and change. Yet innovation leads most employees to feel anxious and resistant. Wendy Smith draws on over 25 years of research to suggest that we can embrace change with a both/and mindset – simultaneously valuing the past while looking toward the future. She animates this talk with examples from IBM, Netflix, CISCO, as well as nonprofits, schools, and other organizations.

This session can help leaders and employees in any organization navigate a change effort. Participants will leave this session with new language and strategies for addressing innovation and change.

Our world is facing grand challenges. Organizational leaders are increasingly stepping up to be part of the solution, not the problem. But doing so creates tensions –profit or planet, mission or market, social or financial. In this talk, Wendy Smith draws on her research in large organizations like Unilever to award winning social enterprises like Digital Divide Data and Shorefast to argue for a both/and approach to sustainability and offer specific tools and strategies.

This session is valuable for leaders and employees in any organization confronting the tensions of sustainability. Participants will leave this session with new language and strategies for confronting sustainability.

Women leaders often feel stuck ‘between a rock and hard place’ – confronting ongoing tensions between being competent yet cooperative, assertive yet diplomatic, independent and collaborative, career oriented yet family oriented. Moreover, women of color grapple with increased tensions of intersectionality that surface between race and gender. These tensions often leave women feeling forced to choose between the opposing demands. In this talk, Wendy Smith integrates her academic research on paradoxes with her work as Faculty Director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative to suggest alternative approach. She invites participants to lean into these tensions as paradoxes, drawing on their opposing sparks as a source of power rather than pain.

This session is valuable for an audience of women and nonbinary people that seek to bring their full selves to their leadership, as well as men interested in being more effective allies. Participants will leave this session with new language and strategies for addressing diversity in general and enabling gender equity in particular.