Comfortability with Ambiguity

I’ve thought about this trait over the last 10 years or so. Leadership books and studies will tell you this is a trait of a high-level leader: to be comfortable when things aren’t clear. Not to be satisfied or passive, but to be comfortable operating in tension. I see a lot of young leaders striving for more leadership but tend to be too rigid in their expectations of their environment meeting their personal preferences of organization, and ultimately lack the ability to live in nuance. This thinking tends to lead to a false equation, that ambiguity = disorganization. Though this could be the case in some circumstances, I think ambiguity is inevitable in the life of a leader in any good organization doing great things.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not necessarily referring to things like the direction/vision of an organization or how a place will achieve its goals. As leaders, it’s our job to make things as clear as possible, especially when communicating with our staff, church, etc. We ALSO can’t use this principle as an excuse to not do our job well or not push for clarity.

BUT the reality is that the more leadership you are given > the more people you lead > the more complex problems you have to solve > and the more things don’t align in your mind the way you want them to >, therefore, causing a level of ambiguity that you have to live in. You start to realize that things become less objective and more subjective. It seems that the most successful leaders are comfortable with this ambiguity.

So food for thought:

Could the thing holding you back from that promotion or more leadership be a lack of demonstration that you can solve complex problems while living in the cloudiness of those very issues?

- Todd Rukes