Welcome to Friday 411, issue #114. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll manage the inevitable tensions that come with leadership.
1 Insight:
Leadership isn’t about solving every problem—it’s about living in the tension of competing demands. The best leaders don’t eliminate these tensions. They learn to manage them well.
Carol was in an unenviable situation.
She had a team member who was loved by everyone for his energy and kindness. He would drop anything he was doing to help a teammate. He was the kind of person who made the team feel like a family.
But his willingness to help others came with a cost.
He constantly lost sight of his own priorities. Tasks assigned to him were rarely completed on time, if at all. He chased the urgent over the important. Despite months of coaching and support, nothing changed.
Carol felt torn. She didn’t want to lose someone so beloved. But she also couldn’t ignore the damage he was doing to the team’s overall results.
This is what leadership feels like: living in the tension between competing priorities:
- Team and authority.
- Today and tomorrow.
- Care and accountability.
Andy Stanley describes the differences between problems and tensions. A problem, he said, needs to be solved, while a tension needs to be managed. He jokes that if balancing work and family were just a problem, the solution would be simple—just get rid of one.
But of course, it’s not that simple. Work and family aren’t problems you eliminate; they’re priorities you hold in tension. Sometimes one needs more attention than the other, but over time, you have to keep pulling each back into balance. Tensions like these require a both/and mindset, not an either/or fix.
In our work with leaders, we’ve found three tensions that leaders experience almost every day. These tensions explain why so many leaders feel frustrated, exhausted, or pulled in opposite directions.
Every leader must learn to manage these:
Tension #1: You’re On the Team, and You’re Also Different
Being a leader means you belong to the team, but you also carry authority that sets you apart.
You go to team lunches. You sit in the same meetings. You swap memes in the group text. But when it’s time to make the call, everyone turns to you.
Here’s the catch: the moment you step into leadership, your power changes the relationship. Your teammates might censor what they say around you. You might feel isolated. You’re one of them, but not exactly.
It can feel like you’re an imposter—pretending to be part of the team while holding back the whole truth of your role.
This feeling isn’t a sign something’s wrong. It’s a tension to manage. You’re on the team, but you’re not a player.
You need to be friendly but might not be friends with everyone. You need to be liked and respected while sometimes making unpopular decisions. You need to develop the Character to stay grounded, and the Community to stay connected.
Tension #2: The Already and the Not Yet
We learned the term “already and not yet” from theologian George Eldon Ladd, but it also applies to your leadership.
You live in two worlds: the already and the not yet.
The “not yet” is vision—the culture you’re trying to build, the goals you’re chasing, the legacy you hope to leave. It’s what could be and what you’re working to create.
The “already” is today—metrics, deadlines, budgets, people problems. It’s messy. It’s real. It’s what is.
Leaders have one foot firmly planted in the realities of today, while stretching the other foot to the hopes of the future.
If you live only in the “already,” you never progress because you can’t see past what the day brings. If you focus only on the “not yet,” you create a utopian vision that ignores today’s challenges.
This tension requires Clarity. As Jim Collins says, great leaders must “confront the brutal facts” while also maintaining unwavering faith in the future.
Tension #3: Results and Relationships
Every leader must hold people accountable to results and invest in relationships. But these two don’t always play nicely together.
There are weeks when you need to push the team hard. Deadlines loom. Clients are angry. Performance is down. But if you push people too long and too hard, they burn out.
Other times, you need to slow down and focus on the health of the team. Someone’s struggling. A new person joins the team. Cancer strikes one of your team members. But if you linger here too long, the work suffers.
You need to celebrate your people and have hard conversations. You need to show care and compassion while holding accountable. You need to deliver the results and build the relationships.
Great leaders don’t pick one or the other. They live in the tension of these two.
The Good News About Tension
Tensions won’t disappear. But you can get better at managing them.
Here are two simple ways to do that:
Talk openly with your team.
Most people on your team don’t realize the unique pressures leaders carry. When you name the tensions you’re navigating — like balancing results and relationships or being both part of the team and set apart — it helps your team better understand your decisions. It builds empathy and trust
Learn when to lean.
Think about a tightrope walker. The rope has to be tight for them to make it across. Without that tension, they’d wobble, sag, and fall. But tension alone isn’t enough — they also have to know when to shift their weight left or right to stay balanced.
Leadership is the same. You’ll constantly adjust. During a deadline crunch, you might lean harder into results. When your team is hurting, you might focus more on relationships. Some days, you’ll need to stand apart and lead decisively. Other days, you’ll lean in and listen like a teammate.
The key is to anticipate tensions and make intentional shifts before you feel an imbalance instead of waiting to react until you’ve already lost your footing.
1 Action
Pick one tension you’re feeling the most this week. Ask yourself: What would it look like to lead well in that tension — not escape it? Write it down. Then take one small step.