Balance this tension. Don't eliminate it.

Most managers want clarity and control, but the reality is, building a business is messy. 

It’s full of tension. 

Not the toxic kind—I'm talking about productive tension.

Great businesses are built by holding two seemingly opposing truths in balance. 

If you kill one, the other often collapses shortly after.

For example, if you drastically cut quality without balancing it with customer satisfaction, you’d kill your business.

Which is why it’s critical to put checks and balances in place for important decisions. 

Here are a few that I’ve faced in the past:

Reducing labour vs. Maintaining the customer experience

Do it wrong and you lose the magic. Spend too freely and your margins disappear.

Speed vs. Quality

Move fast and break things? Or slow down and perfect what you have? The answer is rarely just one. It’s both, depending on the circumstances (ie high priority project or time-sensitive opportunity)

Vision vs. Execution

Too much vision and strategic chat without tangible traction is all just hot air. Too much execution without vision leads to climbing the wrong mountain.

Empowering the team vs. Maintaining standards

Freedom without accountability leads to complete chaos. Control without autonomy squashes talent and breeds disinterest.

Culture vs Performance

Too often, culture gets protected at the expense of performance. Or performance is demanded without balancing a safe culture.

How do you navigate these?

You lean into the tension they create—Use each as a counterweight, forcing you to check your blind spot before making key decisions.

I like to call them lenses. 

I imagine myself using a massive magnifying glass to look at a single part of my business, through a single point of view. 

Then I switch lenses and look at the same thing again to give me two different perspectives.

One of the most common would be that last point above. 

Culture vs performance. 

How to hold people accountable and still have people enjoy coming to work.

Often:

We avoid hard conversations.

We tolerate underperformance.

We let “being nice” trump “being excellent.”

And while you go about your year trying to keep people ‘happy’ or keep the peace, you sacrifice high performance and really good results. 

If you were to hold them in balance, you might look through each lens (culture and performance) and land on seemingly opposing words like these:

Safe and Demanding.

Are we creating an environment that’s psychologically safe and relentlessly focused on high standards?

Then it’s not a compromise. This is where you’re holding a creative tension.

Using at least two lenses during decision making can be applied to nearly everything in your business.

Here’s how you might implement it using the above examples:

Efficiency and Customer Experience

Will this change increase team efficiency without making the experience feel colder or more transactional?

What emotional cues (tone, energy, delight) will still signal to the customer that we care, even with less labour?

Speed and Quality

Is this a time-sensitive opportunity where “done fast” matters more than “done perfectly”?

What’s the reputational risk if this isn’t polished—will customers feel it? Could we polish it later?

Empowering the Team and Maintaining Standards

Are we giving the team enough room to solve the problem their way (Autonomy)?

Are we still clear on what success looks like and holding people to it (Accountability)?

Culture and Performance

Do people feel safe to speak up, share challenges, and be themselves (Safety)?

Are we still demanding high-quality output and delivering on expectations (Standards)?

At the end of the day, lots of people in business are trained and incentivised to think and see things through their ONE lens. It’s rare when you find people willing to balance tension to find better solutions. 

But that’s what it takes to build seriously kick arse companies that this world needs. 

It's the hard work of being an entrepreneur or a good leader these days. Gluing together opposing forces. 

When you choose to do it, your team, your business, your customers and the world will be better for it.