Premise:
One of the biggest struggles that we, as leaders, need to deal with is the need to balance activities that lead to high performance today, while getting the team ready to deliver high performance in the future or, in other words, display contextual ambidexterity, as defined by Gibson and Birkinshaw in their MIT Sloan Management Review article in 2004.
This creates tension. In a fast-changing context, what drives high performance today, usually is not what drives high performance in the future.
And it is easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much in delivering current performance while ignoring the preparation needed to deliver high performance in the future.
This imbalance shows up in our behaviors.
Unclear Expectations:
This is a big red flag. If our teams feel that we apply different yard sticks to measure performance of different people, without clear rationale, everyone is confused and can incite workplace paralysis.
This can happen when we reward some people for delivering high performance in the present and at other times, we reward people for preparing us to deliver high performance in the future.
This is clearly evident in Gallup’s 2024 annual engagement survey. The survey found that just 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work — down 10 points from a high of 56% in 2020.
Clarity of expectations was one of the sharpest-declining of all 12 engagement elements Gallup tracks.
Action insight
At every possible instance, it is best to call this out explicitly – when we are rewarding for current high performance and when we are rewarding for future high performance. This can avoid creating confusion among people that could lead them to losing initiative.
Information hoarding:
If we are seen or even perceived to be withholding context or information that would help our teams understand our decisions, it can spark a feeling of detachment.
While there may be situations where we are not allowed to share the contexts freely, by admitting as such, and telling people that there are some very valid reasons for the action can help our teams to continue to trust us and stay engaged with their work.
A Deloitte-backed study published in MIT Sloan Management Review found that trusting employees are 260% more motivated to work, have 41% lower rates of absenteeism, and are 50% less likely to look for another job — yet most employers overestimate their workforce’s trust level by almost 40%.
This study tells us that irrespective of how much we believe that the teams trust us, we need to constantly work on improving the same.
Action insight:
At every opportunity that we can, we should be open and honest with the team on our rationale and the context within which we are making the decisions we are making so that we increase their trust in us.
Mixed messaging:
This is where the rubber hits the road. We state something as important while starve it of our time, money and attention and end up incentivizing something else.
Most of the times, we end up stating something as important (for preparing ourselves for the future) and invest in something else (to deliver high performance today).
There is enough research that shows the impact of our behaviors on how our teams behave. Whatever we signal through our actions shape which mode teams operate in.
This confusion means that our teams might feel that there is no clear path to follow to succeed. They are always left second guessing and will ultimately do what we incentivize and not what we expect.
Action insight:
We need to be clear in our messaging about our intention (delivering high performance today vs preparing for high performance in the future) for every action or decision we make. Let’s be explicit. This helps our teams act accordingly.
Modeling Helplessness:
As leaders, sometimes we display resignation and helplessness (sometimes, for some very valid reasons) and demonstrate that there’s not much agency that we have in our situation.
When we do this, we end up with a team that will not take any initiative. This is what researchers call – Learnt helplessness.
Action insight:
Even if we do feel helpless in any given situation, it is our responsibility to find a ray of hope and agency for us and our teams. This is an integral part of our job.
Our Investments
Usually, we invest in (time, money and energy) activities that leads to current performance and set expectations on what we need to be ready to continue to deliver high performance.
However, once we are aware of this distinction, we can then be explicit about this with our teams. We can explain to our teams, that as a team, we need to deliver high performance today but also be able to do the same in the mid-to-long term.
If we can call out our decisions – current performance and, expectations – future performance, it makes it easier for our teams to understand our investment decisions and also become clear about what is expected out of them.
Action Insight:
Being clear and intentional about how much time are we investing in delivering current performance vs how much are we investing in getting ready to deliver future performance helps us bring clarity to our teams and what is expected from them.
Depending upon how much needs to change in the present of us to be future ready, we need to decide on the right mix of activities or investments we need to make today to be future ready.
Conclusion:
The leaders who navigate this well are not the ones who find the perfect balance between today and tomorrow — that balance doesn’t exist as a fixed point. It has to be recalibrated constantly, quarter by quarter, sometimes week by week, as conditions shift and pressures mount.
What distinguishes them is something simpler: they make the tension visible. They name it for their teams. They say, explicitly, this decision is about performing now and this investment is about being ready for what comes next.
That act of naming — unglamorous, repetitive, easy to skip — is what keeps teams from having to guess. And teams that don’t have to guess, can focus their energy on the work itself rather than on decoding their leader’s priorities.
The cost of getting this wrong is not a bad quarter. Gallup’s 2024 data puts the global cost of disengagement — much of it driven by exactly this kind of expectation ambiguity — at $438 billion in lost productivity. The cost of getting it right is a habit: the discipline of speaking in two time zones at once, every time you make a decision that touches either one.
It is our responsibility as a leader to not only deliver today but also create conditions and be ready to deliver high performance in the future.
That is the job.
