Power of paradox propels UD’s Wendy Smith

Stengel recalled how Smith developed and launched a webinar series with the Women’s Leadership Initiative in the spring of 2020 to create and maintain connection during the COVID-19 pandemic. WLI ran three series — with 18 webinars — across three semesters.

“It was very important for Wendy to create community at a time when the world was shut down,” Stengel said. “The world was struggling. Big things were going on. What could we bring to women all over the world?”

The webinars attracted more than 5,000 people. They were dialing in from around the world — Germany, Africa, France and more, Stengel said.

“She’s an incredibly brilliant woman and also one of the most humble people I’ve ever worked with,” Stengel said. “She can make people feel invited in. She finds common ground with people very quickly. This has certainly helped her as a professor. And in the professional world, she can go from working with executives in a financial institution to a group of non-profit leaders. She just has an amazing way of connecting with people and bringing out the best of them. Her natural curiosity makes her really good at asking questions.”

Stengel, the Chief People Officer at BestEgg, a financial technology firm that is in the process of getting acquired by Barclay’s, said those connections have long-term effects.

“Barclay’s sent about 50 women through the Women’s Leadership Institute programs,” she said. “And now, as I am getting introduced to the women at Barclay’s — they’re saying, ‘Oh my, I remember you!’”

Stengel said she takes the paradoxical “both/and” approach to differences often.

“One of the biggest gifts of working with her was adopting that mindset,” Strengel said. “Over and over again, when two things seem impossible to reconcile — she would ask ‘How do we create ‘both/and’ instead of ‘either/or?’ I have used that extensively in my work.”

Persistent progress

It’s not magic, mind you. Forward progress requires struggle and the resilience to deal with setbacks, failure even. As any veteran researcher will attest, those experiences are many — and they provide important insight if you let them.

“There were plenty of times when things felt like they went wrong in my research or teaching, or maybe just didn’t go as right as I wanted,” Smith said. “There were the paper rejections from journals, the talks I gave that went flat, the classes I taught where I didn’t connect with the students, the times I shared my research and senior colleagues rejected it.

“In my early days, I would feel the sting of these moments for days, weeks. They would feel like a catastrophic failure. Over time I’ve learned several things. First, these moments are not failures, but signs that I’m trying something new. I actually worry now when I don’t have these moments as it suggests that I’m getting too comfortable and complacent.

“I also see these moments as a chance to learn, trying to get curious rather than concerned. To be fair, these moments that feel like failure still sting when they happen, but the sting only lasts for minutes — OK, maybe sometimes hours — but not days.

“What has continued to push me along in my work is how much I believe in the power of paradox theory to change how people live, lead and work.”

Embracing the tension of paradox — recognizing that contradictions exist, can’t be solved but also persist with interdependence — can be exhausting, Lewis said, but it’s essential.

“We are facing lots of challenges in our world today,” Smith said.  “Our research on paradox shows that we can all find much more creative approaches if we hold the space for multiple, competing ideas.” 

About the researcher

Wendy K. Smith is the Dana L. Johnson Professor of Management in the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner School of Business and Management. She studies how leaders effectively navigate complexity and has played a key role in development of paradox theory. She earned her undergraduate degree at Yale University and her doctorate at Harvard University/Harvard Business School. She joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in 2006 and was a co-founder of the Women’s Leadership Institute, which offered leadership development programs for students, faculty and professionals for eight years. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and has been on Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers for seven consecutive years, recognizing scholars whose publications rank among the top 1% of citations worldwide. She was named one of the Top 50 Management Thinkers for 2025 and received the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award in 2023.

About the Francis Alison Award

The Francis Alison Award was established in 1978 by the University of Delaware Board of Trustees. It is awarded annually to the faculty member who best characterizes the “scholar-schoolmaster,” as exemplified by the Rev. Dr. Francis Alison, who founded the institution that is now UD in 1743. His first class of students became distinguished statesmen, doctors, merchants and scholars. Three signed the Declaration of Independence, and one signed the U.S. Constitution. A list of previous winners is available online.