Ambidextrous Innovation Leadership Training & Workshops
Dr Gaia Grant talking about her unique approach to Ambidextrous Future-Ready Leadership
Tirian supports organisation transformation through ambidextrous future-ready leadership. Our research in this area is cutting-edge, critically relevant to contemporary leadership challenges, and highly practical.
What is ambidextrous leadership?
Ambidextrous leaders are those who can deal with the complex competing demands of our current rapid fast change world. They are able to look to the future at the same time as focusing on current needs. Ambidextrous leaders pursue rapid breakthrough innovations to ensure relevance and competitiveness into the future. They also ensure incremental developments required to gradually build systems and structures. This ambidextrous approach ensures innovation and growth is sustainable.
Why do we need future-ready ambidextrous leadership?
In today’s rapidly changing landscape, effective leadership is critical to navigate competing demands and manage disruptive innovation. Research highlights that successful leaders embrace multiple perspectives simultaneously, fostering learning, creativity, and resilience. Ambidextrous leadership emerges as a solution, allowing leaders to balance seemingly contradictory requirements – such as breakthrough innovation versus incremental development or purpose versus profit.
What does it mean to be an ‘ambidextrous leader’?
Leaders that can recognize and work with these tensions are able to deal most effectively with complex problems. Ambidextrous leadership will then foster learning and creativity, build flexibility and resilience, and unleash human potential — all of which lead to higher energy and engagement and improved performance over the long term.
So how is it possible to become an ambidextrous leader?
Becoming an ambidextrous leader involves embracing the contradictions, developing integrative thinking, and managing the competing demands simultaneously.
How can I learn ambidextrous thinking?
It is possible to develop ambidextrous thinking and eventually ambidextrous leadership by learning to identify and accept ambiguities. This is achievable through developing both/and thinking, rather than focusing on simple either/or thinking. An example might be to consider how it is important to pursue both purpose and profit – rather than thinking you need to pursue either purpose or profit.
How is it possible to create an ambidextrous organization?
Ambidextrous organizations have been designed to enable and support both breakthrough innovation and incremental change. This can usually be done in one of two ways: through ‘structural ambidexterity’, in which each function sits in different areas of the organization; or through ‘contextual ambidexterity’, in which individuals learn ambidextrous thinking and are able to approach their work as ambidextrous leaders who can address both perspectives simultaneously – no matter what their role is. If managed effectively contextual ambidexterity will build ambidextrous leaders throughout the organization and will ultimately allow for the greatest adaptability and the most sustainable growth.
Adapted from Grant, G. & Grant, A. (2016). Why leaders and organizations need to become ambidextrous. Australian Institute of Management, August.
