Humility vs. Confidence | Leadership Tensions | Part 3 of 10

Welcome back to the Impact Leadership Podcast! In today’s episode, Chip Parker is exploring yet another tension that we must find balance in as leaders: Humility vs. Confidence. Listen in as he shares how to be confident enough to move first, but also humble enough to hear feedback. Let’s dive in!

Thanks for listening to the Impact Leadership podcast! We are so glad that you're here. If you're looking to connect with Chip Parker, send him a message at chip@theorchardcc.org. New episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays. We'll catch you in the next episode!

Transcript

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Hey everybody, welcome into the Impact Leadership Podcast. My name is Chip Parker, and I'm the lead pastor at the Orchard Community Church, a multi-site church in North Central Florida working to impact lostness and impact the next generation. This podcast is all about helping you as a church leader grow your leadership to grow your impact. Let's hop into this week's conversation. All right. Well, welcome back into the conversation. I hope you've had a chance to go back and listen to the first two episodes in this conversation. But if you haven't, what we're talking about is how we balance decisions we need to make and tensions we need to hold inside of our leadership. Here's what I mean: just a quick catch up in case you've missed the last episodes or even forgotten what we even talked about, right? There are some tensions that we face in leadership that are tensions that really aren't problems to be solved. Rather, they're tensions that we have to hold in place. And if we lean too far to one side or the other, we cause damage inside of our organization. However, when that apparent tension is actually a decision that we do need to make and we need to land firmly on one side or the other, then when we treat it like a tension, what's going to happen is we are going to cause our culture around us to drift. When we just kind of try to walk that middle line, we're going to create damage in its own way. So maybe we would say it like this there are some decisions we need to make and there are some tensions we need to hold. Delayed decisions bring drift to our organization. Mismanaged tension brings damage to our organization. And a great example of one of these apparent tensions that is actually a decision is what we talked about last week when we looked at the apparent tension of identity and performance. You know, sometimes as leaders, what we do can sneakily become who we are. But the truth is we have to decide who we are, what we believe, and why we do the things we do to be our identity. Because if we build our identity just off of the performance that we are putting out there as leaders, we are going to be all over the place. If you don't get your identity settled, leadership is going to crush you. So if you missed that, go back and check it out last episode. Today, we're going to look at another apparent tension, and that is the tension in the leader of humility versus confidence. Humility versus confidence. And I'll go ahead and say it. I do believe that this indeed is a tension that we need to hold. Now, that may seem weird coming from a pastor, right? Shouldn't I, as a leader, as a pastor, value humility over confidence? Well, not really when it comes to leadership, because great leaders are both deeply humble and decisively confident. So if you are a leader, don't mishear me. You absolutely need to walk in humility. But if you're going to be an effective leader, you've got to have some confidence about you as well. And for me, this isn't like a 50-50 split. We are not 50% humble and 50% confident. We've got to be a hundred percent humble and a hundred percent as confident at least as we can be. So what does that mean? Why are those important? Well, I think number one, humility is what keeps you teachable as a leader. Now we've talked about this, at least around it, in several episodes on the podcast. That as a leader, one of your greatest dangers is that you become a lid to your organization. And you will become a lid to your organization if you stop growing in your leadership. Your organization is never going to outpace your leadership capabilities. So you have to continue to grow. You have to continue to learn. You have to continue to get better. Humility is what makes that possible. Humility is coming to the table and admitting you don't have all of the answers. There's things that you're not the best at. There's things that you need to learn. There's other people, get this, that you need to listen to. As a matter of fact, oftentimes the best leaders are not the smartest people at the table. Matter of fact, great leaders often invite people smarter than them to the table. I heard a pastor say it like this once. He said, I'm not the lead pastor because I'm the smartest. I'm the lead pastor because I got here first. I love that. That is humility. And humility is what's going to keep us teachable and able to continue to grow as leaders. On the flip side of that coin, it is confidence that actually enables us to lead. If you are not confident as a leader, you cannot lead. By definition, leaders have to go first. I was in a conversation a few weeks ago and someone asked, Well, what makes a leader? And I blurted out, as I often do, followers. And they looked at me and said, Well, yeah, I guess that is true. Because you are not a leader unless you have followers. And they're following you because you are going first. And hear me, it takes confidence to do that. It takes confidence to say, here's where we're headed, here's how we're going to get there. Here's the way we're going to do it. Here's who we're going to do it with. And make all of these decisions. You have to have that. And if you lack that confidence as a leader, then people are going to pick up on that. And what is, you know, foggy in your mind is going to be cloudy in theirs. You have to be confident and lead with confidence. And hear me, if you're a pastor like I am, I think that confidence has to come from believing this is where God is leading me, and this is where God is leading my church. If you have that confidence, you can lead. But hear me, humility and confidence do not have to fight against each other. You know, I think that oftentimes in our culture, we want to treat humility and confidence as opposites. I don't think that's true at all. Confidence is not pride, and humility is not false humility. As a matter of fact, I would say that false humility and pride are the same thing, while humility and confidence are not opposites, they are complementary. As a matter of fact, true humility actually strengthens confidence. What do I mean by that? Well, I mentioned it in the last episode. There's a small book by pastor and author Tim Keller called The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness. In fact, if you need to pause the podcast right here, go to Amazon and order a copy of this book because in the book, Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, what Keller talks about is an idea that he first heard from C.S. Lewis. And it is that humility is not thinking less of yourself, not that you're terrible, you're dumb, you're untalented. It's not thinking less of yourself. It's simply thinking of yourself less, not being preoccupied with yourself. And that's where what we mentioned last week, Keller comes out and says, look, I don't care what you think about me, but I also don't care what I think about me. Now you may ask yourself, okay, if that is true humility, not thinking less of myself, just thinking of myself less, how does that strengthen confidence? Well, because it brings freedom. It brings freedom for you to say what you think, and yet you stay open to being wrong. Man, this is a perfect balance for leaders. We have to be confident enough to say what we think, to throw an idea out there, to pick a hill, to plant a flag, to lead the charge. But we also have to be humble enough to be open that we're wrong, you know? And I see this as such a hard tension for a lot of leaders to manage. Either they are overconfident and gonna tell you what they think and what they know, and God help you if you try to say that they're wrong, or they're gonna try to be so humble that they never go first, they never throw out an idea, they never put out a vision, they never actually lead. See, true leadership requires a hundred percent humility and a hundred percent confidence. We need to be confident enough to say what we believe and humble enough to be open to being wrong. And hear me, I think this is the tension that we manage humility versus confidence. If you force a decision here, you're either going to become arrogant or passive and ineffective. Both of those are going to undermine your leadership. So here's a couple of questions for you. Where are you right now overcompensating in your leadership? Because what is overcompensation? It is faking the security and confidence we feel. Where are you overcompensating because you're trying to push out more confidence than you really feel? Because when you're pushing out more than you feel, you're probably going to step into arrogance. So where are you overcompensating? And then let's ask the flip side of that. Where do you as a leader need to step up and step out? Where are do you as a leader need to say, you know what? This is what I believe I'm gonna go first. And yet you do so willing to be wrong. That's why you're unafraid to say it. Because being wrong, don't care what others think about you. I don't even care what I think about me. I am just trying to lead as best as I can. So let me leave you with this idea as we wind down this conversation today. The best leaders are confident enough to lead and humble enough to listen. One last thing before we end this conversation is just let me say if you are a leader, specifically in the local church context or even outside of it, I would love to be able to connect with you if I can help. If you would like, I'm gonna have my email in the show notes. Reach out to me. We can set up a time to connect because here's what I know leadership is bigger than any one of us. If we're truly gonna have an impact in our communities, we need to lean on each other and we need to learn from each other. So I would be more than happy to do what I can to connect with you and help you lead right where you are. So reach out, let us know how we can connect. But until then, we'll see you right back here next week on the Impact Leadership Podcast.