The capacity to hold competing demands may be one of the most important—and underdeveloped—skills in nonprofit leadership.
Nonprofit leaders are accustomed to making difficult decisions. We navigate competing priorities, limited resources, and the expectations of people who care deeply about our missions. We weigh what is possible against what is needed, and what is urgent against what is important.
But some of the most consequential challenges we face aren't problems that can be solved with a decision.
They're tensions that must be held.
Consider a board whose members genuinely enjoy working together. They value harmony, cultivate strong relationships, and have developed a culture of mutual respect. These are considerable strengths. But when a contentious issue comes before them, can they disagree as skillfully as they maintain the peace? Can they challenge one another's assumptions without jeopardizing the relationships they've worked so hard to build?
Or consider a department known for its productivity. Its members are efficient, focused, and consistently meet their goals. Yet somewhere along the way, they've lost the capacity for reflection, creativity, or even a little whimsy. Morale begins to suffer, but no one quite understands why. After all, by every measure of productivity, the team is succeeding.
In both cases, the challenge isn't to abandon what the organization does well. It's to develop the capacity to hold something that may feel like its opposite.
Harmony and disagreement. Productivity and reflection. Discipline and play.
Mature leadership requires more than knowing when to exercise our strengths. It asks us to recognize when those strengths need the companionship of their opposites.
When Our Strengths Become Limitations
Organizations, like individuals, tend to develop preferred ways of operating. Over time, those preferences become part of the culture.
A leadership team may pride itself on responsiveness. When a community need emerges, the team mobilizes quickly. People find ways to say yes, even when resources are stretched. Their willingness to respond is part of what makes the organization effective.
But what happens when responsiveness becomes an expectation that every need must be met?
Eventually, the organization may find itself overextended, its priorities diluted, and its people exhausted. The very quality that made it successful begins to undermine its capacity to sustain the work.
The answer isn't to become less compassionate or less responsive. It's to develop the complementary capacity to establish boundaries, differentiate among competing needs, and decide what the organization can responsibly undertake.
We see similar patterns in governance.
A board committed to accountability may gradually become overly involved in management decisions. A board that values executive autonomy may become reluctant to ask difficult questions. In both cases, an important responsibility becomes distorted when it is exercised without its counterpart.
The challenge isn't to choose between accountability and trust.
It's to practice both.
The Tension of Opposites
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that psychological development requires us to confront the tension of opposites within ourselves.
We naturally gravitate toward certain qualities and ways of understanding the world. Over time, we may become so identified with those preferences that their opposites seem undesirable, threatening, or simply wrong.
Jung used the term enantiodromia to describe the tendency of an excessively one-sided position to give rise to its opposite. What we neglect doesn't necessarily disappear. It may emerge in ways we neither anticipate nor welcome.
Although Jung was describing psychological processes, the idea offers a useful lens for understanding organizational behavior.
The board that prizes harmony may find itself consumed by conflict it never learned to navigate. The department that prizes productivity may experience disengagement, burnout, or resistance from people whose need for reflection, creativity, and connection has gone unattended.
The paradox is that the very qualities we seek to protect may be undermined by our unwillingness to engage their opposites.
A board that avoids disagreement to preserve relationships may ultimately damage those relationships through its avoidance. A leadership team that pushes relentlessly for productivity may find its effectiveness diminished by exhaustion and disengagement.
What we refuse to make room for consciously may eventually demand our attention in ways we cannot control.
These outcomes aren't inevitable. But they invite an important question:
What capacities have we neglected because we've become so practiced at their opposites?
The goal isn't to weaken our strengths. It's to recognize that our strengths are often sustained by capacities we have learned to undervalue.
Holding Tension Without Rushing to Resolve It
When leaders encounter competing perspectives, the temptation is often to resolve the disagreement as quickly as possible. We call for a vote, negotiate a compromise, or look for the position that will satisfy the greatest number of people.
But what if we resisted the urge to resolve the tension prematurely?
Consider a board divided over a proposed expansion. Some members see an opportunity to advance the mission and respond to an urgent community need. Others are concerned about financial exposure, organizational capacity, and the possibility of compromising existing programs.
Both perspectives deserve serious consideration.
Rather than treating the conversation as a contest between ambition and caution, the board might begin by exploring what each perspective reveals. What are the assumptions underlying their positions? What risks have they identified? What possibilities have they overlooked?
As the conversation deepens, something new may become possible. Perhaps the board discovers an opportunity for partnership, a different funding model, or an approach that wasn't apparent when the discussion began.
The result isn't necessarily a compromise between two competing positions. It may be an entirely new understanding of the challenge itself.
And sometimes, after thoughtful deliberation, the board will still need to choose one course of action over another. The value of holding the tension isn't that every disagreement produces a creative third option. It's that we allow competing perspectives to inform and potentially transform our understanding before we decide.
When Holding Tension Becomes Avoiding Responsibility
There is an important distinction between holding tension and refusing to make a decision.
Not every disagreement represents a polarity that must be carried indefinitely. Sometimes the board needs to approve a budget, address an executive performance concern, or determine whether a particular opportunity aligns with the mission.
These decisions have consequences, and delaying them can create problems of its own.
Likewise, cultivating disagreement doesn't mean tolerating disrespectful behavior or allowing the same arguments to be relitigated endlessly. Accountability remains essential.
Mature leadership requires discernment: knowing when to remain open to competing perspectives and when to exercise the responsibility to decide.
This is particularly important in the relationship between boards and executives.
Boards must provide meaningful oversight while respecting the executive's authority to manage the organization. Executives must remain accountable to the board while exercising the judgment and independence their positions require.
Neither responsibility disappears when the other becomes uncomfortable.
The work is to develop a relationship capable of sustaining both.
Building the Capacity to Hold More
What might this look like in practice?
It begins with paying attention to the tensions that repeatedly surface in an organization.
Where does the leadership team consistently favor action over reflection? Where does the board value agreement at the expense of honest conversation? Where has the desire to respond to every need made it difficult to establish priorities?
Rather than treating these patterns as isolated problems, leaders can begin asking what complementary capacity needs greater attention.
A board that values harmony might intentionally make more room for dissenting perspectives before important votes. An executive who excels at responding to emerging needs might create more disciplined opportunities for the team to evaluate capacity and priorities. A senior leadership team that moves quickly might establish regular space for reflection before committing to its next initiative.
These aren't prescriptions for permanent balance. Circumstances change, and different situations require different responses.
The point is to become more capable of recognizing what the moment requires, including when it calls us to exercise a strength that doesn't come naturally.
And that requires something more than a new meeting practice or decision-making framework.
It requires the willingness to be challenged.
Can we hear a competing perspective without immediately defending our own? Can we recognize the limitations of a strength we've come to value? Can we remain in relationship with colleagues whose judgments differ from ours?
These are not merely interpersonal skills. They are essential capacities for organizational leadership.
The Work of Mature Leadership
Nonprofit organizations exist in a world of competing needs and limited resources. We cannot eliminate those realities, and we shouldn't expect leadership to be free from tension.
We need conviction and humility. Accountability and trust. Responsiveness and boundaries. Action and reflection.
Each becomes more effective when we develop the capacity for its opposite.
Perhaps mature leadership isn't measured by how quickly we resolve competing demands, but by how thoughtfully we engage them—and by our willingness to let that engagement change our understanding.
Good leaders don't avoid tension.
They learn how to work with it.
And see it as a gift.