The first time I really felt the weight of leadership, it wasn’t on a hard day. It was a quiet one.
I was looking at my team and realized that the people on it had handed me their time, their effort, and in some cases their family’s stability. That isn’t just weight. It’s stewardship. How I led wasn’t just about getting things done. It was about who they became, what kind of culture they lived inside every day, and the small decisions they’d make when I wasn’t in the room.
That’s a responsibility I want to take seriously. It’s also one I’m still learning to carry well.
I’ve watched two kinds of leaders carry that weight, and the difference shows up in how their teams feel on a Tuesday morning.
The first is the forcer. They push hard toward a destination and assume everyone else can carry what they carry. The hill needs to be charged. The numbers need to hit. The team needs to keep up. Forcers aren’t bad people. Most are deeply committed and working harder than anyone. But the cost shows up over time. You start to see disillusionment, burnout, frustration. People who used to bring their best now do the minimum. The forcer assumes the weight they’re built to carry is the same weight everyone else can carry, and that assumption quietly breaks people.
The second is the filler. They believe people show up best when they know what they’re doing matters. So they spend their energy filling their team with purpose, not pressure. They make sure people are seen, that the value they bring is named, that they have an identity in the work and not just a quota in it. Fillers can still ask hard things. They still expect excellence. But the weight they hand someone is calibrated to that person, and the why is always part of it.
Neither approach is automatic, and honestly neither is inherently bad. They produce very different cultures.
You can build something real on pressure. It works for a season. It rarely lasts.
The Three Kinds of Happiness
Somewhere in figuring this out, I started thinking about happiness in three layers.
The first is temporal. The new car, the bonus, the dopamine of a notification. It’s real, and it feels great in the moment, but it doesn’t last. By morning, you’re back where you started.
The second is flow. The kind of work where you sit down at nine and look up to find it’s two and you have no idea where the time went. Flow is what makes a job feel like a craft instead of a grind. It’s tied to skill, mastery, and being challenged at the edge of what you can do.
The third, and the most lasting, is being part of something bigger than yourself. The sense that what you’re doing matters in a way that doesn’t depend on you personally getting the credit. For me, that’s where Kingdom work lives. The most fulfilled people on the team are the ones who feel like the work is connected to a purpose they didn’t invent and won’t outlive. When people have that, the work changes shape. They still work hard. But the work is feeding them instead of draining them.
Most of what culture sells us is the first kind. The grasp at something just out of reach that will finally make it all click. It’s a fragile foundation, and you can feel it when an organization is built on it. Everyone is reaching for the next milestone, and no one is filled by the work itself.
Forcers tend to lead from the first two. Hit the number, charge the hill, find your flow on the way. Fillers lead from the third. Here’s why this matters, here’s why your part of it matters, here’s who we are when we do it.
A forcer can build a company. A filler builds a culture that builds the company.
The Culture I Want to See
I’m still learning how to lead this way. Filling people up takes more intention than pushing them, especially when the pressure is high and the easy move is to drive harder.
The culture I want to see is one where people are filled, not pushed. Where the weight is real, but the why is real too. Where work feeds people more than it drains them. That kind of culture doesn’t come from a leadership framework or a quarterly initiative. It comes from a Kingdom mindset. From believing that the people on the team aren’t just labor toward a destination, they’re image-bearers entrusted to you for a season. That changes everything about how you lead.
That’s the kind of culture I want to be part of. It’s the kind I’m trying to build. And it starts with how I carry the weight that’s been handed to me.