I’m Good at My Job By David Sunde

I’m not sure my job is the point.

My job includes an office. Fluorescent lights I refused to use. An oak desk with analog file drawers I avoided. Bookshelves lined with reference tools I never had time to reference. And two chairs — the kind you find in a waiting room — which turned out to be the most useful thing in the room.

I led a department. Nine people under me. Five budgets. A whole lot of pop-ins — you get quick-questioned on the half-hour. The work was half putting out fires and half coaching emerging leaders to care for the people they served.

A Repeating Pattern

Every quarter we seemed to hire someone new. Every month we sat around a table and talked calendar, communications, and budgets. And every year, at the appointed time, I sat across from each person on my team in those two chairs and did their performance review.

The twenty-somethings coming in for those reviews often mistook it for being sent to the principal’s office without having done anything wrong. I could do the administration well enough. I wanted the relationships to be developmental. Sometimes they were.

I remember one review specifically—a young leader — competent, sincere. I had the form on my lap between us: growth areas, performance ratings, goals for the year. And I said something I said in every one of those meetings:

“I want you to remember that you’re more valuable to God than what you can do for this organization.”

She nodded. Wrote it down. I meant it.

And I drove home that night knowing I had said the truest thing in the room — and that the room had been designed to keep it from mattering.

When Competence Isn’t the Calling

If leadership has taught me anything, it’s that just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should. I’m not talking about building a job description around only the parts you enjoy — every real job includes tiresome work, and that’s actually helpful. I’m talking about the harder question: what happens when you’re genuinely competent at something that isn’t quite what you were called to?

I was leading, but I had lost the thing I was leading for. Though I was in ministry, I wondered if I had lost my ministry.

That’s the sentence I couldn’t say out loud for years. On paper, I was doing everything right — leading leaders, managing budgets, hiring decently, reminding my team who they were beyond their roles. But every one of those meetings was one degree further from the reason I’d wanted to do this in the first place.

The ache isn’t burnout. It isn’t laziness. It’s the dissonance of doing the work well and quietly suspecting the work isn’t the thing you were actually called to.

It’s saying the truest thing in the room and then filing it away, because the form on the desk has no column for it.

Inheritance or legacy?

Here’s what I’ve come to think, slowly. Most of what leaders spend their time on is program work—building the on-ramps, managing the systems, and recruiting to fill them. And programs aren’t wrong—they get people up to speed, help folks find a lane, and meet people where they are.

But programs don’t reproduce. They grow, or decline, or end. And programs don’t develop people. People develop people.

I wonder if this unnamed gap is the difference between an inheritance and a legacy. Both have value. Both are left behind. But an inheritance is something we leave for a person. A legacy is what we leave in them.

Programs are inheritance work — roads, buildings, systems, budgets. Legacy is what’s formed in the person walking those roads, and a person can only be formed by another person. That’s what the review meeting was reaching for, and the form couldn’t hold.

You Don’t Have to Quit

You don’t have to quit to change your aim. The job can stay the same. Nine people, five budgets, quarterly reviews. What changes is what you’re actually attending to in those rooms.

Delegation is overrated when it fails to be developmental. Recruitment is overrated when it fails to be formational. And competence is overrated when it becomes the point instead of the vehicle.

For now, just this:

What would change tomorrow if the job stayed the same but stopped being the point?

Who are you leaving something IN — not just FOR?

David Sunde is a writer, storyteller, and pastor-without-the-title who believes the best leaders learn to move without the ball, and he’s launching a new doctoral cohort in semiotics and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. He’s the author of Homegrown Disciples and Small-Batch Disciplemaking (NavPress) and writes on faith, culture, family, and leadership in the seams at davidsunde.com.

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