The Leadership Skill We Need To Learn: Managing Competing Values

Why the Competing Values Framework fascinates me on ways to understand organizational culture, leadership, and change.

Learning about how to navigate complexity is a fascianting, especially in a leadership context.

Finishing my first semester at the Master’s in Public Administration through the University of Victoria has been both anchoring and stretching. The notable course was Leadership and Ethics in the Public Sector (ADMN 507), which looked at how public leadership involves self-awareness and understanding others to mobilize effort in complex environments, using ethical frameworks and practical strategies to analyze, motivate, and manage people, teams, and change across organizational boundaries.

In this course, we learned about organizational effectiveness and leadership through the Competing Values Framework. This was one of the frameworks that really stuck with me. Throughout the term, we closely studied the framework through the book Becoming a Master Manager: A Competing Values Approach. This book argues against the assumption that there is one “best” way to manage and instead makes a strong argument for dealing with tensions, trade-offs, and competing demands. That experience made me think more deeply about leadership and organizational culture, and it gave me a useful way to talk about why organizations that mean well frequently have trouble balancing what matters most.

The Competing Values Framework works for a simple reason: it does not pretend that the contradictions at the heart of organizational life can be solved. It names them and asks leaders to deal with them honestly.

CVF starts from an observation that is both uncomfortable and accurate. Organizations are not coherent machines moving toward a single, shared definition of success. They are sites of ongoing tension. They are pulled at the same time toward stability and change, toward taking care of what is inside the organization and competing in what lies outside it. From this perspective, leadership is not about identifying the “right” culture and enforcing it. It is about navigating trade-offs that never fully disappear.

That framing alone sets the framework apart. Instead of asking, “What kind of culture should we have?”, CVF asks a more difficult and more useful question: What are we privileging right now, and what are we neglecting as a result?

At the center of the framework are two tensions that quietly shape most organizational decisions. The first is stability versus flexibility. Do we prioritize control, predictability, and consistency, or adaptability, learning, and responsiveness? The second is internal focus versus external focus. Are we oriented primarily toward people, processes, and cohesion, or toward markets, competition, and measurable outcomes?

When these tensions intersect, they form four quadrants—Clan, Adhocracy, Market, and Hierarchy—each representing a different way of defining effectiveness. What is striking is how immediately recognizable these logics are. Most people do not need them explained so much as surfaced and named.

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It’s wrong to think of these quadrants as permanent identities, as if organizations should pick one and stick with it forever. CVF says the opposite. These values exist together, compete with each other, and change how people act at the same time. Organizational effectiveness is less about picking the “right” quadrant and more about how well executives handle the conflict between them.

Each quadrant offers a coherent answer to the question of what effectiveness looks like. Trouble arises when one answer crowds out the others.

Take the Clan quadrant. This is the area of trust, collaboration, and belonging. Organizations that excel here prioritize relationships, promote shared values, and view leadership as a relational activity. When this works successfully, engagement is high, and employees feel linked to their jobs. When it takes precedence over balance, responsibility suffers, unpleasant talks are avoided, and trade-offs become personal rather than strategic.

The Adhocracy quadrant looks both outward and forward. It prioritizes exploration, innovation, and expansion. Leadership in this domain is about visualizing futures and rallying people to achieve them. This is where creativity flourishes, and novel ideas arise. Organizations may also lose focus if novelty takes precedence over execution.

The Market quadrant provides a distinct type of clarity. It questions whether the organization is genuinely producing results. Are goals met? Are the outcomes improving? Competition, accountability, and performance are important here. When kept properly, this focus generates velocity and direction. When overemphasized, it can destroy trust and reduce individuals to tools for achieving goals.

Then there’s Hierarchy, the most misunderstood of the four. It prioritizes structure, method, dependability, and control. These principles are essential in public administration, healthcare, and other regulated environments; they govern risk management and legitimacy. The issue is not hierarchy itself, but rigidity, which occurs when regulations exist long after the problems they are intended to solve have changed.

This is why the word competing matters so much. CVF makes explicit what many leaders already experience intuitively: progress in one area can undermine progress in another. Tight controls can suppress innovation. Relentless performance pressure can hollow out trust. A strong relational culture can slide into complacency. These are not failures of leadership; they are the predictable consequences of unbalanced values.

The framework does not offer an escape from these tensions. It offers a way to work through them. Leadership, in this sense, becomes less about consistency and more about judgment—knowing which values to emphasize in which moments, and understanding the costs of doing so.

This is also what makes CVF such a useful diagnostic tool. When organizations map themselves across the four quadrants, they often uncover gaps between what they say they value and what they actually reward. They talk about innovation, but reinforce compliance. They claim to be people-centred, but design systems that punish vulnerability. Seeing these patterns clearly does not fix them overnight, but it does change the conversation. It shifts discussions from defensiveness to design.

Competing Values in a prominent, urban-adjacent First Nation distinguished by advanced governance frameworks, extensive program delivery mechanisms, and complex intergovernmental relationships

The Competing Values Framework (CVF) has helped me put into words leadership difficulties that were hard to define before. In the past, the Squamish Nation government was more invested in Control and Compete than in Collaborate and Create. This difference changed how decisions were made, what leaders were supposed to do, and where problems continued popping up. This orientation wasn’t the intent, but political accountability, legal risk, community scrutiny, and precedent all place pressure on control, consistency, and performance, making them reasonable aims. But over time, these goals made it tougher for people to learn, think of new ideas, and work together to tackle really hard and complex issues. CVF makes it clear that these were expected trade-offs, not one-time failures.

Innovation was especially hard in a workplace that was afraid of taking risks and followed some kind of rules. Relying on unwritten rules and institutional memory, which only a few people had, made it less safe to do new things. Leaders were supposed to come up with flexible solutions while working under systems that punished people who didn’t follow the rules. From the CVF perspective, this shows that a strong hierarchy is pushing out the adhocracy ideals that are needed for long-term innovation.

Structural design made these stresses much stronger. With as many as ten to fourteen department heads reporting directly to the Council, elected officials and top executives were forced to deal with practical details, which made it harder to stay focused on strategy. This setup created silos and competition for attention and resources within the company, and it was unclear who was in charge of the cross-cutting priorities. From a CVF point of view, there was a lot of pressure to be accountable, but there weren’t enough ways to work together and coordinate.

Lastly, a lack of clear policies made it hard for people to work together. In many cases, informal customs took the place of formal policy, which led to confusion and inconsistency. Hierarchical norms and defensive routines made people less likely to ask questions, and specialized groups worked with very little collaboration between them. As a result, transaction costs were high and progress on complicated, interconnected problems was delayed. CVF points this out as a lack of clan and adhocracy skills, such as shared ownership, collaboration across boundaries, and learning-oriented conversation.

From a Competing Values Framework perspective, addressing these challenges requires deliberate rebalancing rather than abandoning control or accountability. CVF would recommend intentionally strengthening Collaborate and Create capacities alongside existing Control and Compete strengths by formalizing clear but enabling policies, redesigning structures to reduce overload and support coordination, and creating protected spaces for experimentation and learning. This includes clarifying decision rights, investing in cross-departmental leadership forums, and legitimizing calculated risk-taking so innovation is not personally or politically punitive. Over time, cultivating shared ownership, trust, and adaptive problem-solving capacity allows the organization to meet accountability demands while improving resilience, integration, and long-term effectiveness.

CVF is helping me make sense of how well-meaning cultural and structural choices led to repeated leadership problems and where rebalancing would have made the organization stronger.

True organizational change by making complexity more visible and navigable

Culture change efforts often fail because they rely on vague aspirations: be more innovative, be more collaborative, be more accountable. CVF forces specificity. Becoming more innovative means loosening certain controls. Becoming more people-centred means rethinking how performance is defined and managed. Every shift involves trade-offs, and the framework makes those trade-offs visible.

At the individual level, CVF is quietly demanding. It suggests that many leaders are not under-skilled, but over-specialized. Under pressure, they default to familiar patterns—control, inspiration, competition, or care. Leadership development, through this lens, is about expanding range: being able to support without avoiding accountability, to drive results without burning people out, to innovate without destabilizing the system.

In a management landscape full of certainty presented as insight, I’m intrigued by the fact that CVF offers something far more useful: a language for complexity. It does not tell leaders what to think. It helps them see what they are already living with more clearly.

Whether you work in Indigenous governments, non-Indigenous public institutions, or the non-profit sector, the Competing Values Framework is well worth engaging with. It found that it provides a disciplined way to make sense of organizational challenges that are often felt but poorly articulated, and it helps leaders think more realistically about pathways forward—especially in environments where competing expectations, accountabilities, and values are not the exception, but the norm.

What allows the Competing Values Framework to be useful in my mind is that it aligns culture, strategy, and performance without pretending they are the same thing. It recognizes that organizations operate in changing environments, where yesterday’s strengths can become today’s constraints. Balance is never achieved once and for all; it is continually renegotiated.

What CVF offered me was not a verdict on what was “wrong,” but a clearer understanding of why these tensions kept recurring. The challenges were not primarily about individual competence or commitment. They were structural and cultural, rooted in an imbalance of values that shaped behaviour, incentives, and expectations.

That realization has changed how I think about leadership. It has shifted my focus from fixing symptoms to understanding systems, and from searching for the “right” approach to learning how to hold competing demands more deliberately. In that sense, the framework didn’t simplify the work—it made its complexity more visible. But it also makes it more navigable.