I’ve grown leery of oversimplified management clichés. Take the old line: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” often attributed to Peter Drucker. I get what Drucker was after. But where I come from, culture doesn’t eat strategy. And strategy doesn’t eat culture. BOTH matter. Both are essential to results, working in harmony:

Bad strategy + good culture = fail. A motivated team executing the wrong strategy won’t build an enduring, high-value business. 

Good strategy + bad culture = fail. A smart strategy will die in the hands of a disengaged or toxic team.

Good strategy + good culture = mutually reinforcing excellence. An engaged team makes the strategy stronger. And strategic success will make the team more engaged.

This is the trap of either/or thinking. It reduces the real complexity of leadership into false choices (Which is more important: strategy or culture?) that sound clever but don’t hold up in practice. And when you’re leading a PE-backed company full of interdependencies, false choices can become a real problem. 

Why? Because the very nature of the job involves managing competing demands. Driving growth and expanding EBITDA margins. Hitting this quarter’s targets and driving long-term enterprise value. If you want to excel as a PE leader, you must do both, often simultaneously. 

The most successful leaders don’t play “either/or.” They embrace the tension of “both/and.” Both/and thinking makes for stronger leadership and better problem-solving. Here’s how: 

BETTER LEADERSHIP: SIX PARADOXES EVERY PE LEADER MUST EMBRACE

One reason both/and thinking matters is that it makes you a more effective leader.

Jim Collins spotted this in Good to Great. The leaders who achieved enduring greatness weren’t single-threaded superheroes. They were walking paradoxes—fiercely ambitious about the company’s success and deeply humble about themselves. That unlikely, paradoxical combination separated the leaders of the great companies from the leaders of good ones.

Modern research confirms what Collins observed. Studies on the “paradox mindset” show that leaders who can hold competing demands—like innovation and efficiency, or stability and change—perform better and operate more creatively than those who default to trade-offs (Miron-Spektor et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2015; Zheng et al., 2023).

Less effective leaders collapse to one side. Meanwhile, strong leaders—who may eventually overweight one dimension or the other—carry both for as long as possible. They don’t see opposites as contradictions. They see them as complements that, held together, unlock better thinking and stronger performance.

Let’s make this real. Here are six paradoxes strong PE leaders must learn to hold:

Confident and Humble. Have the confidence to make tough calls, and the humility to admit what you don’t know. Overconfidence blinds you to risk. Excessive humility erodes trust and credibility.

Short-Term and Long-Term. Private equity doesn’t give you the luxury of choosing. You’ve got to hit this quarter’s EBITDA targets and build the kind of company a buyer will pay up for years down the road.

Trust Data and Trust Gut. Data grounds you in facts. Gut captures the context—the team dynamics, the intangibles, the pattern recognition. Strong leaders tune in to both as they make decisions.

Drive Hard and Show Heart. Strong PE leaders are hard-charging. But if all you bring is pressure, you’ll burn your people out. Drive without care creates stress and churn. Care without drive creates complacency and mediocrity.

Stay Focused and Stay Flexible. You need commitment to the plan. But in the sort of VUCA world we’re all operating in, being rigid about sticking to a plan is suicide. The best leaders know when to stay the course and when to adapt. 

Lead from the Front and Empower from Behind. Sometimes your team needs to see you step forward and take the helm. Other times, they need you to create the space to for them to do the same. Great leaders know when to step forward, and when to step aside.

If that all sounds hard, it is. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas… and still function.” For PE-backed leaders, holding these paradoxes is first-rate leadership. As Jim Collins showed us, the ability to hold both is what separates the good from the great.

BETTER PROBLEM SOLVING: TURNING TENSION INTO CREATIVITY

Being a both/and leader isn’t just about how you show up. It’s also how you solve problems.

A lot of the time, PE execs don’t get stuck because they lack answers. They get stuck because they framed the question too narrowly in the first place. Frame a challenge as “Should we chase growth or protect margin?” and you’ve boxed yourself in from the get-go. You’ve trapped yourself and your team inside a false choice. 

But you can flip the script by asking “How do we accelerate growth and protect margin?” and suddenly the conversation shifts. Now you’re exploring mix shifts, phased pricing plays, and sequencing investments thoughtfully over time. The possibilities multiply the moment you treat tension as a feature, not a bug, and make it part of the design brief. 

Leaders who adopt this paradox mindset generate more innovative, high-quality solutions. (Miron-Spektor et al., 2018). This tension doesn’t block creativity. It ignites it.

Here are three practical ways to put both/and thinking to work in problem-solving and decision-making:

Start by framing it as A and B. Whatever the issue, rewrite the problem to hold both sides: “Grow revenue and protect margin.” This simple shift expands the solution space. Sure, you may end up overweighting one or the other, but you’ll generate more (and better) options than if you start with either/or.

Push for combo moves. Don’t let the team pick sides too quickly. Force at least five “both/and” options on the table before you default to, “No, we have to pick one.” 

Use time as a lever. One way to make both/and thinking real is by sequencing. Sometimes the path to achieving both is thinking across time. For example, if your board is demanding growth and margin expansion be part of the long-term value creation plan, maybe you emphasize growth this year to get the revenue engine cranking, then shift focus next year to translating that growth into higher margins. By playing with time as a dimension, you turn what looks like a trade-off into a progression.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Private equity leadership is paradox work. Sure, the job rewards decisiveness. But don't confuse being decisive with picking a side. The best leaders hold the tension. They deliver EBITDA today and build enterprise value tomorrow, they drive hard and care deeply, they trust the data and trust their gut.

The either/or crowd will tell you that you have to choose. The both/and leaders know better. They know that the magic happens in the tension, not in the retreat from it.