Feeling Good vs. Doing Good | Tensions | Part 10 of 10

We’re back today with the final episode of our series all about leadership tensions, and today we’re looking at feeling good vs. doing good. Listen in as Chip Parker explores how to build a leadership, life and organization centered on our calling instead of comfort. Let’s jump right in!

Thanks for listening to the Impact Leadership podcast! We are so glad that you're here. If you're looking to connect with Chip Parker, send him a message at chip@theorchardcc.org. New episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays. We'll catch you in the next episode!

Transcript

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Hey everybody, welcome into the Impact Leadership Podcast. My name is Chip Parker and I'm the lead pastor at the Orchard Community Church, a multi-site church in North Central Florida working to impact lostness and impact the next generation. This podcast is all about helping you as a church leader grow your leadership to grow your impact. Let's hop into this week's conversation. All right. Well, we are winding down the longest conversation we have ever had on the podcast, where we are episode 10 in this conversation of tensions that we face as leaders. And what we've been talking about, if this is your first jumping on point, is that as leaders, like we're all going to face tensions. There are tensions that we have to deal with, no matter if you are a coach, if you are a pastor, if you are a CEO, or if you're just a parent, there are tensions that you're going to have to face in every kind of leadership. The problem is that some of those tensions aren't really tensions, they are decisions that we need to make. And if we treat those decisions as tensions, we are going to wind up doing damage to whatever it is that we're leading. Today is a great example of that. We're going to look at the apparent tension of feeling good versus doing good. As leaders, do we choose what feels good or do we choose that that actually does good? And again, I don't think it's going to be a secret, even once you hear that apparent tension, that this is a decision we need to make. As leaders, we need to make sure that we choose what does good over what feels good every single time. Now, the issue is we treat this like attention because when we do what feels good, well, it feels good. You know, it it encourages us, it makes us feel like, man, we are crushing it. People love us. This is amazing. But the truth is, it will often undermine our leadership in the long run. And more than that, it will slow limit or even detour the growth and mission of our organizations. So we have to make sure that when we are leading, we choose what does good over what feels good every single time. Let me give you an example of this. This is an example that, you know, may hit home if you are in a church context or if you lead in a church context, and I don't know how you're gonna feel about it, but it's just the truth. One of the things that we have found in church context is that short-term mission trips don't always do good on the mission field. When we just drop in and do random mission projects in various countries, they don't often do as much good as we would like to see. Now, I'm gonna caveat that and say it doesn't do good for the people that we are going to on the mission field because we're there, then we're gone and they're left with nothing usually. But I think it does do good for the people. That's why at the orchard we still invest in these trips. We still invest in short-term missions because it does good for the people on the trip, but it really doesn't do as much good for the people who are there. What does good is when we invest in long-term missionaries who are on the ground, long-term missionaries who pick up their lives and move to these countries to invest there over the long haul. What does good is when we keep taking maybe these short-term mission trips over the period of 18 years to the same churches and neighborhoods in the Bahamas where we have built long-term relationships. When we look at this, we would say, hey, that does good, but maybe just the hitting a place and going on a trip once every now and then, it might feel good. Hey, we're going on a mission trip, doesn't really do good. And so as leaders, sometimes we have to make the uncomfortable decisions of saying, hey, that that feels good, but if it's not gonna do good, is it something that we should really be investing in? When we focus on the things that do good, we are gonna face criticism. It's gonna be uncomfortable and people are gonna take their shots. They're gonna have things to say. When we do what feels good, man, that's when you get all the applause. People love it. They pat you on the back. When we do what's good, we're gonna have to deal with conflict because it's gonna lead to some hard conversations. When we do what just feels good, we're gonna get all kinds of affirmation because everybody loves it. It feels good. When we do good, it's gonna make us make hard choices. But when we just do what feels good, we can keep everyone happy. See, that's why what's doing good is so difficult, and yet it's important. It's essential. As leaders, the reason we are leaders is so that we can make those hard choices, we can handle the criticism, and we can lean in to help the conflict. Because at the end of the day, what we are trying to accomplish through the mission of our organization is what we are entrusted with. But when we treat this like attention and try to balance those things that do good and feel good, what we're gonna happen is we're slowly gonna build a leadership life and an organization that's centered on our comfort instead of our calling. One of the things that my team hears all the time is does this move the ball down the field? Are we moving the ball down the field? Because at the end of the day, if what we're doing is just feeling good, not moving the ball down the field and actually doing good, then we are probably wasting our time. So here's a question for you to think where are you choosing comfort over impact in your leadership? Where are you choosing what's comfortable over what is actually impactful? What is actually doing good? Because not everything that feels good is doing good. And it takes a great leader to know the difference. So I hope that one is helpful to you. But what we want to do before we wind down this conversation we've been having over these leadership tensions is I just want to end with a quick summary of these 10 tensions and whether they're actually tensions or not. So in the first episode, we talked about tensions we hold versus decisions we make. And the truth is that's a framework that we have to work with in. We have to know what to hold and what to decide. And when we don't choose correctly, when we mislabel, when we misidentify, it creates a drift in our organization or does damage to our organization. When it comes to identity versus performance, that's a decision. Identity is our foundation, it is who we are and our performance must flow from it. Choose identity every time. So performance doesn't become your identity. Next one we talked about was humility versus confidence. As leaders, this isn't a decision. This is a tension because we have to lead with confidence. Nobody wants to follow a leader who's not confident in where they're leading, but we have to remain teachable and humble along the way. We have to make sure that we don't fall into either ditch of arrogance or passivity. The next tension is grace versus accountability. And again, this is a tension. A healthy culture in your organization is gonna require you to be a leader who can lean into grace and lean into accountability. If you choose grace over accountability, you're gonna create entitlement. If you choose accountability over grace, you're gonna create fear. The next tension we looked at was accessibility versus boundaries. Now, this is a tension that we have to hold, but it is a difficult tension that we have to hold. As leaders, it is our job to be present, but to not always be available. Because if we are always available, we are gonna burn out. But if we are never present, we are gonna be disconnected from the people that we lead. The next one we look at is clarity versus complexity. This isn't attention, this is a decision. We have to choose clarity every time. Now, that doesn't mean we're not gonna deal with complexity. As leaders, we are called to understand complexity, but we have to communicate and lead with clarity. Oftentimes in our organizations, we find that confusion is something that we just disguise as nuance when it's just we haven't been clear. The next one is control versus empowerment. Again, this is a tension. We want to maintain control while we lead, but we are not gonna lead well if we're not empowering others. We have to provide direction, we have to provide boundaries, but we also have to multiply leaders. We have to make sure that we don't choose control and create bottlenecks or just choose to let everybody do everything and create chaos. Getting close to the end, we've talked recently about fruitfulness versus faithfulness. Again, this is a tension. I know if you're in the church world, this may feel like a decision. Don't we want to choose faithfulness over fruitfulness? But I think that's a false dichotomy. We have to make sure that we are being faithful to what we've been called to do. But at the same time, if we're not bearing fruit, then we haven't been faithful. We have to make sure that we never go so far as to be a results at all cost kind of leader, but we also have to make sure that we don't settle for stagnation and ineffectiveness in our leadership because we know that God is a God of growth. Last week we talked about the important versus the urgent. Again, this is attention. We have to make sure that we balance those things well while never letting the urgent completely crowd out the important. We have to learn how to protect what matters most. We can never live in constant reaction mode, dealing with every problem, every issue that pops up at any given time. And we just finished today talking about feeling good versus doing good. And this one, again, is a decision. We have to choose impact over comfort every single time. So I hope as a leader, this conversation has helped you begin to think through some tensions or apparent tensions you're facing in your leadership and helps you to handle them in a much more effective and impactful way. One last thing before we end this conversation is just let me say if you are a leader, specifically in the local church context or even outside of it, I would love to be able to connect with you if I can help. If you would like, I'm gonna have my email in the show notes. Reach out to me. We can set up a time to connect because here's what I know leadership is bigger than any one of us. If we're truly going to have an impact in our communities, we need to lean on each other and we need to learn from each other. So I would be more than happy to do what I can to connect with you and help you lead right where you are. So reach out, let us know how we can connect. But until then, we'll see you right back here next week on the Impact Leadership Podcast.