As a practitioner whose purpose for being is to help individuals develop their leadership skills, I am always looking for new ways to build leadership competency that are simultaneously sophisticated and simple. To be useful, leadership tools and frameworks need to meet the leadership demands of organizations that are becoming more complex—as Gary Hamel puts it, leaders need to “manage seemingly irreconcilable trade-offs”—and new tools need to be easy to master and usable right away.

At Chelsea C-Suite Solutions, we are currently working with an organization that is transitioning from a regional profit-centric structure to a borderless, matrix structure. There are dynamics and issues new to many leaders, and no surprise, their instinct is to use traditionally effective approaches to solving problems. The result has been frustration, inefficiency, resistance to change, feelings of being overwhelmed, and in darker moments, fears of inadequacy in meeting these new challenges.

Here’s an approach to help leaders that is incredibly simple—learn the art of reframing. What is often perceived as a “problem”—a situation with a unique right answer, might actually not be a problem at all. Maybe the organizational challenge is really an old “paradigm” that is no longer relevant or useful. Or maybe the situation is a “polarity”—a situation with two equally right answers that are interdependent—that needs to be “managed” by the leader, not solved. When leaders try to solve polarities, they (and everyone else) will get frustrated. When leaders try to solve a situation using an irrelevant paradigm, the result will be the same. Looked at another way, reframing actually frees up time by reducing the number of problems leaders are trying to “fix.”

The concept of a paradigm has been around a long time. Put simply, it is a way of seeing based on a shared set of assumptions. All mature organizations are full of paradigms. After all, they are extremely useful! They help us process a situation quickly in the moment, and consistently (e.g., the customer is always right). But when a paradigm is no longer useful, or irrelevant, we might be interpreting a situation as a problem incorrectly, and we could even be doing damage to the organization without realizing.

The concept of a polarity is also nothing new. “Polarity management” has been in practice since the early 90’s (around the same time Daniel Goleman introduced the term emotional intelligence). Polarities are particularly common in large, multi-national, multi-divisional organizations with multiple stakeholders. Also known as dilemmas or paradoxes, polarities reflect competing forces on opposite sides of a situation, and both forces need to be considered and tended to. Classic examples are cost versus quality, long-term versus short-term results, and customization versus standardization. There are literally dozens, and they have been written about extensively. Trying to find one right answer in a polarity usually results in one pole getting neglected. Leaders need to know how to recognize when the organization is veering too far towards one pole and course-correct. Polarities are to be managed, not solved.

When working with a leadership group, we like to break them into small teams (cross-functional to maximize fresh perspectives). We start by having each team brainstorm all of the issues or challenges present in their parts of the organization. After they’ve exhausted all the issues present today (and before depression sets in), we simply ask them to frame each issue as a problem, a paradigm or a polarity. Within minutes you start to see the light bulbs go off. Among peers, leaders have an easier time admitting or challenging each other that something might be an old paradigm or polarity to be managed. Even if you turn a few of a leader’s problems into something else, the release of anxiety is palpable in the room.

Letting go of old paradigms (which requires courage), or learning how to manage through polarities (for example, using a polarity map), can require some additional group learning or even individual coaching. But the first step is the critical step—recognizing what something actually is, then framing the situation in a way that allows leaders and teams to use their energy in the most useful and effective way.