One of the biggest challenges to leading others is that sometimes you just don’t feel like leading. Whether it’s a moment when those you’re leading are being difficult, or you’d rather be having fun, or you have to make a tough decision, or any of a hundred other matters that you just don’t feel like going through, leading often doesn’t feel good.
Here’s the key: if we only lead when we feel like leading, we aren’t leaders! Leadership requires that we do the right thing regardless of how it feels at the moment. Mark Lutz, our Discipleship Pastor at New Life, talks about fifteen minute decisions versus fifteen year decisions. A fifteen minute decision is made based on how you’re feeling at the moment. You have a deadline coming up, but the phone rings and a friend asks, “Would you like to go to the movie tonight?” (Or the ball game, or for a bike ride, or anything that sounds like fun to you.) How do you respond? If you respond by how you feel, or how it would feel to spend the evening with your friend, which is a fifteen minute response, you may well have a fun evening, while pushing off the deadline. Maybe you can still make the deadline, or maybe you miss it. Either way your leadership takes a back seat to your feelings, and you take a step backward in your leadership, especially the effectiveness of your leadership fifteen years from now.
On the other hand, if your friend calls and you’re caught up on your leadership tasks, meaning you have some margin in your schedule, investing an evening with the friend will feel good AND it will add value to your life. Investing time and energy in developing meaningful friendships is a fifteen year decision, because fifteen years down the road you’re going to need some good friends. So, it isn’t always a black and white matter when it comes to what you do with your time at any given moment. The point is when the opportunity comes to avoid leadership by doing something that’s more fun, or that will make you feel better in the moment, how you determine what to do needs to be based on the fifteen year view, rather than the fifteen minute view.
I’ll be following up on this topic tomorrow as we talk about how important it is to schedule our time as leaders, so we know whether an “opportunity’ is actually an opportunity or a time waster that’s really a fifteen minute decision. For today let’s consider one specific time when it will always feel better in the next fifteen minutes not to do what we know we need to do as leaders: when we have to make a tough decision or face a task that we absolutely know we are going to dislike in the short-term. Some have referred to this as “eating the frog.” In other words, if you have to make a difficult decision, or you have to do something that you don’t want to do in the short-term, because it won’t feel good in the moment, that is your “frog.” So, when is the best time to eat a frog? NOW. The reason it’s now, is because it’s never going to feel good to eat the frog, and the longer we put it off, the more time we waste in thinking about having to do it. Great leaders learn to eat the frog first thing in the morning, that way the rest of the day is free to pursue the easier matters on the agenda. Once again, the morning is the best time to eat the frog if we must eat it in order to be an effective leader. Sometimes we end up eating frogs that weren’t ours to eat in the first place. Maybe we ought to have delegated the task to someone else, for whom it would have been enjoyable. Maybe it was a frog no one needed to eat in the first place.
Leadership always involves making choices, and the choices we must make when we don’t feel like eating the frog center around knowing whether it’s our frog to eat in the first place, and if it is eating it as soon as possible. That way we’ll feel better the rest of the day. I have found time and time again that the things I dread doing, are the things that make me feel the best AFTER I’ve done them. That’s why it’s so important not to lead based on our feelings, but based on prioritizing our calendars and doing the next most important thing on the agenda, whether it tastes like frog or not!
Here’s to leading better by eating your biggest frog–today! (Trust me, you’ll feel a lot better AFTER you’ve eaten it!)