In a recent 5 Things in 5 Minutes, J.R. Briggs with Kairos Partnerships got me really thinking about tradeoffs. He shares:
“American economist and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution Thomas Sowell shared, ‘There are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.’ Much of leadership is about tradeoffs instead of solutions. In leadership it’s tempting to try and look for perfect solutions to problems. But they aren’t out there. This isn’t pessimism or cynicism; it’s reality. Fortunately, there are always tradeoffs.”
Priority is a singular word, and with the limitations of time, talent, and resources examining priorities in leadership means making tradeoffs. We trade our time with family for a client engagement trip, we trade another five emails for a walk outside to clear our minds after lunch, or we trade the launch of a new initiative for the sustainability of our most successful product.
Tradeoffs help us achieve our goals within the real limitations of our organizations and industries. They are not inherently good or bad, they are just real.
What intrigues me most, of late, is the tradeoff war that occurs between our ears; a war that has consequences and casualties—or rewards and benefits—depending upon our choices.
Amusement and responsibility are at war within us every moment of every day. We are constantly faced with choices between our comforts and our duties. In those moments when we succumb to our comforts, while the tradeoff might seem harmless at first, the consequences will eventually come.
And oftentimes we won’t see the full cost until it's too late.
We haven’t made choosing our responsibilities easy on ourselves, that’s for sure. On the battlefield of this war, we all carry a great enemy within our pockets everyday. Our smartphones offer access to an entire world of options—seemingly more interesting than the responsibilities before us—and before we know it, hours are lost down the rabbit hole of amusement.
Choosing amusement over responsibilities leads to missing goals, disappointing others, guilt, and regret. Maybe it felt good to binge watch that season of Friends in the moment, but when we see how we’ve failed to achieve a goal and hurt others, we often feel guilty. When we experience the loss of something we cared about—a promotion that we wanted or a target that we missed—we feel regret.
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And while these consequences become the ultimate price of choosing our amusement over our responsibilities, integrity is often the greatest casualty of the tradeoff war.
The US Army defines integrity in four words, “do what’s right”. Seems simple enough, but right and wrong are very difficult to discern in a relativistic society making integrity even harder to pin down on a broad scale. It’s easy to recognize in our daily actions though.
If the tradeoff you’re making involves a choice you are hiding from your employer, your family, or your community - it’s wrong. And hiding happens all the time in professional settings.
Soldiers hide in latrines to eat contraband chow, sleep, or read when they are supposed to be on guard. Employees hide in Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon instead of conducting their work. Leaders hide in meetings and strategy sessions when they are supposed to be on the field guiding their teams.
When one person hides, everybody hurts.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can fight the gravity of comfort by deploying our greatest weapon in the tradeoff war - discipline.
There are a lot of great ways to define discipline (biblically, grammatically, epidemiologically, and so forth). Command Sergeant Major Shelton R. Williamson offers this solid definition in the NCO Journal at Army University Press: “Discipline or "military discipline" as it is often referred, is defined as the state of order and obedience among personnel in a military organization and is characterized by the mens’ (read as humans’) prompt and willing responsiveness to orders and understanding compliance to regulation (emphases added).”
Adding the emphases illustrates that obedience is at the heart of discipline. Obedience is a salty word these days, but the reality is that we are all obedient to something. Author Paul David Tripp puts it this way, “Everybody worships; it’s just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.”
What or whom we serve is illustrated by where we give our time, talent, and resources in the tradeoff war. Rightly applied discipline in the tradeoff war is choosing obedience to your integrity, your goals, and your responsibilities instead of being obedient to your impulses.
When we deploy discipline in the tradeoff war—when we choose obedience to our integrity, our goals, and our responsibilities and we make the right calls with our limited gifts—we open ourselves to the rewards of responsibility: achievement, advancement, and growth. These rewards come with the benefits of self respect, pride of effort, trusting relationships, and the joy of walking in the light of our own skin, knowing that we fear nothing hidden in the crevices of our character.
Photo Credit: @yukie via Unsplash.
Cover Photo @tjump via Unsplash.