Greatness and Sacrifice

What are you committed to? What are you willing to sacrifice?

These are questions that we’ve been exploring lately as our practice and collective evolve. These are questions I’ve been exploring with clients as we talk about leadership changes, strategic shifts, building vision, setting goals. This is a conversation most of us avoid.

We have so many people telling us that it’s possible to “have it all.” We know this isn’t true, but our hearts want to believe it. Just look at your personal finances. You can have your Starbucks drink everyday, but that $50+ a week then goes to that drink and can’t go anywhere else.

Just like our money, we have a finite amount of time and energy. We set our goals or make our plans without thinking about the time and energy these things will take. That needs to change. We need to go deeper. Staying at the surface is dangerous.

I recently visited with a young professional who was one year into a new career. She had spent several years with a large organization where she was fairly “anonymous.” She had a lot of flexibility to work from home, and the workload was balanced because the company had a lot of resources. On the flip side, she felt like her position and her work didn’t matter much, and that she didn’t have a voice when it came to decision making.

She changed direction and came on board with a much smaller organization and team. One that runs very lean, has a high volume of work, works at a fast pace, and has very high expectations for quality of work output. She was expected to be at work everyday of the week but did have flexibility for appointments, etc. She enjoyed having a voice at the table, she loved the team approach, and the culture of the organization.

After some time, the responsibility of being at work everyday started impacting things at home (little kids, drive time, etc.). The pace of the work and the expectations put her under a lot of stress and pressure. The team was very reliant upon the quantity and quality of her work because they ran so lean. Things began to break down.

We visited about the reality of the situation, and I invited her to consider and name what she liked about this new role and organization and what she didn’t. Together we began to realize she wanted all the positives but didn’t enjoy the responsibility and level of ownership required…and that’s OK. That was the reality. In this season of her life, her priorities were different than what this role and organization allowed for. As leaders, we need to be better about facing this reality for ourselves, and be brave enough to have these conversations with others.

When this gets out of balance, we allow a few people to carry the load and sacrifice a lot for many…but allow those many to reap the rewards. This leads to burnout of good people and setting others up for failure – an unrealistic expectation of what’s required. What’s more, this model doesn’t allow people to learn and grow appropriately.

Another team I work with is in the midst of a leadership transition. The reality is that the current leader has sacrificed a lot to position this organization well, and make the impossible possible when it comes to setting and achieving big goals. She has been committed to making the organization a priority. She was willing to dream big and do whatever it took to realize those big dreams.

Others on the team are signaling they don’t want this. They do not want to sacrifice family time. They want things to be easier and more comfortable. They desire to slow the pace. What we have had to start to talk about is the fact that this will naturally mean lower expectations and less stellar outcomes/lower goal attainment. And that’s OK…as long as someone is willing to take responsibility for having that conversation and thinking through the downstream impacts. Who is willing to take ownership of that?

As teams and organizations, when we don’t have these conversations we start to get sloppy. We set these high goals, aren’t willing to do what it takes to bring them into reality and we cut corners, make excuses, and fall into mediocrity.

Our natural desire as humans and leaders is to want comfort and growth, greatness and ease. These things may coexist in a period of luck, but cannot be sustained over time. Greatness requires sacrifice.

As leaders, we need to be opening up space for these conversations. Talking about our goals and going deeper into the time, energy, tradeoffs and sacrifices required. When we can get aligned here, culture and strategy come together in an incredible way and we become very intentional about the impact we make on our families, communities, clients and our world.

What are we committed to? What do we want? What outcomes do we want to achieve? What are we willing to sacrifice? What are our non-negotiables? What must be maintained? We build the how alongside the what, and the being alongside the doing.

In our business, we build in our non-negotiables first. Each of us is committed to our personal healing and learning journey and we are committed to our collective growth journey. We calendar in all of our planning time, our quarterly retreat time, our celebration time, and our weekly meetings. We are intentional about the format of all those and we commit to a level of preparation so these are high quality and meaningful. Our first priority is that we will model what we are encouraging and inviting others to: how to live, lead and work with intention.

We’re also committed to specific ways that we interact with each other and with our clients. We strive to be wholehearted and open. This means we have to have whitespace in our day and purposefully schedule in rest, meditation and other practices that keep us present, centered and grounded. We have accountability to each other when we see one another sliding into habits and practices that are counter to this commitment.

We are consistently talking about commitments and sacrifices, and adjusting accordingly. These conversations are tough and uncomfortable…but they are necessary. They change as we change and evolve as our collective evolves. In some seasons we intentionally sacrifice a lot and in some we pull back. The more we have these open conversations, the easier they get and the more we live into our ideal picture of our practice, our lives and the way we want to be in the world.

My hope for you is to make time to go deeper with your family, your team, any other group you are part of. What we want to do is where the conversation starts. Don’t let it end there. Openly discuss what it takes to get there…what we are committed to and what we may have to sacrifice to see that dream and vision come to life. This is where the magic happens and this is what the world needs.