I swing a bat left-handed. I throw right-handed. When I bowl, I try each hand a couple of times and go with whatever feels good that day, which is usually a sign that neither hand is particularly good at bowling. But when I eat, my fork only goes in my left hand. If I try to eat right-handed, it feels wrong.

I mention this because I am, by most definitions, ambidextrous, and yet my body has still sorted itself into strong preferences depending on the task. In the beginning, both hands had the same capacity to do the task well. With practice, however, whichever hand I decided to use as my default became the dominant one, and the other hand quietly lost ground.

I have been thinking about this because of a concept that is gaining traction in leadership research called ambidextrous leadership.

Where the Term Comes From and Why it Matters

The term comes out of organizational theory, most notably Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman’s 2004 Harvard Business Review article, “The Ambidextrous Organization.” Their research looked at 35 attempts at breakthrough innovation across 15 business units in nine industries. Efforts with a 90% success rate kept the new, exploratory work as a structurally separate unit from the rest of the business, but senior leadership kept equal tabs on the innovation side of the house and core business operations.

Companies that tried to immediately integrate innovative ideas into existing structures or left innovation teams without support from senior leadership saw little to no success. Ultimately, the organizations that could run the present business well while building an entirely different future business, at the same time, without letting either cannibalize the other, were the ones that actually pulled it off.

O’Reilly and Tushman found that ambidextrous organizations needed ambidextrous senior leaders, executives who could hold the discipline of maintaining the current system while sparking their entrepreneurial instincts at the same time, and who could be, as one of the leaders in their research put it, “consistently inconsistent.”

This is where my batting and throwing and bowling and eating come back in. Many of the leaders I know did not start their careers already lopsided toward running the present or building the future. They developed that lean the same way I developed a dominant throwing arm, through years of practice at whatever the job mostly demanded of them. 

A principal who spends a decade managing master schedules, compliance calendars, and the daily needs of a school builds real strength in running the present. A leader who spends years incubating a pilot program or a new school model builds real strength in building the future. Neither leader has lost the capacity for the other mode, but if asked to do the opposite of what they’ve been practicing, they might feel like a fish out of water.

Complementary to this exploration of ambidextrous leadership is Katie Martin’s article on Why School Systems Need Embedded R&D to Evolve

Belief is Central to Long-Term Success of this Structure

What ambidextrous leadership calls for is a genuine belief (proven through action) that running the present and building the future are equally legitimate work. You can shift a leader’s mindset about the importance of building the future and see no change in what they actually do with their calendar, their budget, or their next hire. You can also mandate new behaviors, a new schedule, a new committee, a new innovation team, and watch it fall short of expectations because the underlying instinct for how to lead was never stretched.

It’s critical to note that this is not a challenge for one person to solve alone. Ambidextrous leadership does not have to live inside a single leader. What actually needs to be ambidextrous is the leadership team.

O’Reilly and Tushman make this point themselves, even though it tends to get lost in the shorthand of “the ambidextrous leader.” What holds their most successful cases together is not one executive equally gifted at running the present and building the future. It is a senior team integrated through a shared vision and shared values, with everyone rewarded for the health of the whole system rather than just their own piece of it.

Katie Martin and I have learned a version of this firsthand in building Learner-Centered Collaborative as Co-CEOs. Before we ever formalized that structure, our board asked us to look at what actually makes shared leadership work, and the answer was not two people with identical skills splitting a workload down the middle. It was complementary strengths rather than competing expertise, deep trust, clearly defined roles, and frequent enough communication that neither of us is ever guessing what the other one is carrying.

Translate that same logic to running the present and building the future, and the weight comes off any one leader’s shoulders. 

A superintendent whose gift is optimizing the systems already in place does not need to personally dream up the district’s next new school model. A principal who thrives on building something nobody at the district has tried before does not need to personally own the compliance calendar and the budget cycle that keep the system running. What both of them need, and what the team as a whole needs, is a genuine, shared belief that the other person’s work matters exactly as much as their own.

It is not either the operators or the innovators who carry the real weight of leading a school system. If the team starts reading it as either/or, a belief will begin to take shape about what work “counts” as real leadership. Both halves have to be named, out loud and often, as equally serious work, done by people who each get to lean into what they are actually good at rather than being asked to become equally strong in both hands.

I still eat with my left hand and throw with my right, and I have no plans to retrain either one. I also have strengths in finance and operations, and less so in other areas. Rather than trying to bolster my weaknesses, I’m far more interested in finding complementary leaders and colleagues who fill those gaps, love the work in those areas, and collectively believe all of our work furthers our mission to redesign the future of public education. That’s what ambidextrous leadership is all about.

Did you know Learner-Centered Collaborative offers leadership coaching to school and district leaders? With decades of K-12 leadership experience across our team, we are here to support your learner-centered journey. Reach out to us here to learn more.