Most leaders know the feeling of a decision that follows them home and sits on their chest a little longer than they expected. For me, it’s usually what keeps the hamster in my brain running on its wheel all night. Whenever I get the chance to sit with my dear friend John Maxwell, I walk away with pages of notes, and last week was no exception. I love bringing those lessons back to all of you, and one of them has stayed with me ever since. John calls it the WEIGHT WE CARRY, and he explained that weight only exists because what we do matters. If our decisions didn’t touch anyone’s life, they wouldn’t feel heavy at all.
History is full of leaders who felt that weight. Abraham Lincoln couldn’t sleep the night he won the presidency, because he knew he didn’t yet have the experience the job demanded. (If Lincoln lost sleep over it, I think the rest of us can forgive ourselves for the occasional 2 a.m. session staring at the ceiling.)
Thankfully, John has a way of making even the heaviest topics easier to carry. For those of you who don’t know him, John is a former pastor and one of the foremost leadership authors in the world. He’s also one of the funniest people I know, because he’s always willing to laugh at himself and reminds us that every leader needs to do the same.
He talked about Moses, who led roughly a million people through the desert for forty years, most of whom probably complained the entire way. John joked that if he had been in Moses’s sandals, his request would have been, “Well, let some of my people go,” meaning Pharaoh could keep the complainers. (Even if you aren’t religious, it’s hard not to chuckle at that one.)
Once the laughter settled, what stayed with me most was his point that the weight comes from two places: what we do with our responsibility and how we go about doing it. The way we deliver a hard decision shapes whether people walk away feeling lifted or crushed by it, which is why thoughtful change management matters so much when an organization goes through a shift.
John then asked a question that hit very close to home, which was whether we cry for our people. He said that if we don’t, we should probably stop leading them, because caring for people is the responsibility we accepted when we took the role. Anyone who has sat with me on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day knows I tear up rather easily (I’ve fully accepted that I’m the leader who needs a tissue within reach).
I feel the weight most when I make an organization-wide decision, one that will impact the 900 families who rely on ITBD. Being in the position to make these decisions is a blessing, and it makes the weight a little heavier every year. Sunny and I carry that responsibility with us every single day. It’s also the reason we think so carefully about every decision, especially the ones that change people’s roles and lives.
John summed it up in a line I’ve written on more than one notepad since: victory belongs to the team, and failure belongs to the leader. Carrying the weight well means handing the credit to the people who earned it and keeping the responsibility for what went wrong on your own shoulders, because your team needs to know you’ll stand in front of them when things get hard.
So the next time a decision keeps you up at night, take it as a sign that you care about the people on the other side of it, and let that care shape how you show up for them in the morning.
