This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on culture. He is also an NBA fan who grew up in Salt Lake City during the John Stockton-Karl Malone era of the Utah Jazz.
As someone who studies culture and leadership (and who also loves the NBA), I’ve been thinking a lot about Warriors coach Steve Kerr and Jonathan Kuminga, the 23-year-old forward Golden State traded away last month.
In recent seasons, Kerr struggled to integrate younger players such as Kuminga, oscillating between providing developmental opportunities and reverting to veteran-centered lineups to chase wins. The result has been tension between honoring the existing culture of empowerment and crafting a learning-oriented future culture in which new identities and capabilities can genuinely take root.
This is a problem I repeatedly see.
As I work with business leaders from any industry, they consistently feel the same way: trapped between building a culture for either the present or the future.
Leaders play a huge role in building culture. That is easy to acknowledge. What is much harder to see is how leaders manage two key paradoxes that always emerge within a culture: the chorus paradox and the harvest paradox.
The “chorus paradox” requires a leader to balance the tension between singing from the same song sheet while enabling distinct voices. When can we act as one, and when do we leverage the fact that we are many different people working together? The “harvest paradox” requires a leader to balance the tension between harvesting results today and cultivating the soil for tomorrow. When do we focus on the future, and when do we focus on the present?
Managing paradoxes is hard. Not surprisingly, a growing body of research shows that leaders who develop a paradoxical mindset — the ability to hold and work with competing demands simultaneously — build stronger, more adaptive organizations.
- In research on entrepreneurship and startups, founders who balance discipline with experimentation are more likely to scale successful businesses rather than flame out after early growth. (citations)
- In research on top management teams (c-suites), firms whose executives embrace strategic tensions (such as efficiency and innovation, or global integration and local responsiveness) outperform those that consistently privilege one pole over the other.
- In research on groups, teams led by paradox-minded leaders show higher creativity, better decision quality and greater long-term performance precisely because leaders are aware of and engage with these tensions. (citations)
There are also personal benefits. Leaders who cultivate paradoxical thinking tend to experience greater cognitive complexity, emotional resilience and learning agility. Rather than being trapped in cycles of over-control or over-accommodation, they develop the capacity to shift frames, tolerate discomfort and remain curious under pressure. This doesn’t remove strain, but changes its meaning. Tension becomes not just something to manage, but something to work with.
What makes cultural paradoxes so difficult is that leaders are constantly tempted to simplify and only emphasize one side of the paradox.
The Warriors under Kerr have been widely praised for building an inclusive, psychologically safe culture — one that emphasizes finding joy, empowers player voice and accommodates strong personalities such as Draymond Green. Kerr seemingly solved the Chorus Paradox by erring on the side of enabling distinct voices. This culture unlocked extraordinary performance and sustained excellence, including four NBA titles.
Yet even in this celebrated environment, the Harvest Paradox loomed. The Warriors once famously suggested that they were managing two timelines. But Kerr coached with a focus on younger players fitting into a system designed for older players. Rather than balancing the present and the future, Kerr was harvesting now without planting for tomorrow.
By contrast, the Memphis Grizzlies have handled each paradox in an opposite way.
Early in the season, first-year head coach Tuomas Iisalo implemented an offensive system that rotated players in and out in “shifts” similar to how coaches manage groups of players’ minutes in hockey. When star player Ja Morant bristled, Iisalo used his authority to push everyone to conform to his system, and Morant was suspended. Iisalo erred on the side of singing from the same sheet of music to manage the Chorus Paradox.
However, that very system provides more opportunities to develop young players for the future, meaning that the team is focusing on the developmental side of the Harvest Paradox.
These cases show how unforgiving cultural paradoxes can be. Lean too heavily into inclusion and player development, and current performance falters. Lean too far into authority, and current performance and a productive future never form. Leaders are rarely punished for emphasizing only half of either paradox in the short term — clarity feels safe, decisiveness offers the illusion of intelligence. But cultures quietly accumulate the costs of imbalance until it suddenly appears as stalled development, brittle performance or identity conflict.
As a final example of balancing these cultural paradoxes, consider the Denver Nuggets.
The team’s former coach, Mike Malone, was known for emphasizing authority, structure and immediate performance standards. The organization improved its competitiveness, but criticism grew that Malone struggled to develop younger players and create enough space for learning and growth. Several players who were marginalized or underdeveloped during that period are now flourishing after a coaching change.
The new coach, David Adelman, has focused on current performance while also creating more time for players whom Malone did not play. Adelman’s finding a balance in the Harvest Paradox.
One reason Adelman can do that is by reducing the focus on authority and giving players a greater voice. At the end of last year, he described his approach to the Chorus Paradox this way: “This is their team. What they want to do next year, and the goals they have. It’s going to come down to what they want. I’m there to help shepherd that, but this is about them and the success they’ve had.”
Culture is tricky. Small choices aggregate into long-term trends in performance and engagement. In this sense, building culture is not just about installing values but about managing the Chorus and Harvest Paradoxes. The real work of leadership happens not in choosing sides, but in designing conditions that allow both sides to remain alive and available when needed.
Leaders don’t shape culture by making it comfortable. They shape it by making its uncomfortable tensions productive.
