707: Andy Stanley & Sam Kaufman - Problems to Solve, Tensions to Manage, The 3 Questions Behind Every Great Decision, and The 7 Essentials of Enduring Leadership (What Great Leaders Do)

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book: The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global . If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guests:  Andy Stanley is the founder of North Point Ministries, which he started in Atlanta in 1995 and has grown into 8 churches across metro Atlanta and a network of more than 225 churches globally, serving over 200,000 people weekly. He's the author of more than 20 books, including Next Generation Leader , Visioneering , and Deep & Wide . His newest is What Great Leaders Do: 7 Essentials for Enduring Impact . He and his wife Sandra have three grown children and live in Atlanta. Sam Kaufman is the Chief Revenue Officer of Insight Global, a $5.3B talent, technical, and AI services firm. He started as an entry-level recruiter in 2004 and rose through the ranks to lead the company's core sales divisions. He's played a central role in Insight Global's transformation into a global talent and technical services organization, helping the company double in size over the past five years, and in 2026, he was named to Staffing Industry Analysts' Staffing 100 North America list, recognizing the most influential leaders in staffing. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Bucknell. Key Learnings Somebody saw it in him before he saw it in himself. Andy and Louie Giglio were the troublemakers in his dad's youth group. One morning after they'd disrupted everything, Mother Mary sat them down and told them they were leaders and needed to lead. Andy's reaction at the time: then I don't want to be a leader . She should have kicked them out, but she didn't. She kept giving them chances they didn't deserve and didn't handle well. She's about to turn 101 years old. She never had children of her own and to this day she calls them her sons. Now Andy does it for others. When he sees someone with a leadership gear, he tries to speak life into it and fan the flame, because that's what was done for him. Leadership is the most wonderful, dangerous gift. Every great thing that's happened in the world had a leader behind it. So did every terrible thing. People followed both for the same reason: the leader brought clarity to a dilemma, made a promise, and people leaned in. Andy thinks leaders are born, not made. His evidence: he's never met a leader who accomplished anything extraordinary who said they weren't a leader, then read two books or went to a conference and became one. Anyone can get better. "But you can make him a better singer and still never hand him a microphone." Problems to solve vs tensions to manage. Work-life balance is a tension. You don't solve it, you manage it. Every industry and every company has its own. "When you solve a tension, you create a problem." You can spot tension by the calendar. If it keeps reappearing on the agenda and somebody keeps saying didn't we just talk about this, you've been trying to solve something that was never a problem. Naming it changes the conversation. Once a team agrees they're looking at a tension, nobody is right and nobody is wrong, and people stop treating each other like enemies. Andy's team asks the question out loud once a month. Sam heard Andy teach this on a podcast and it moved through Insight Global in a week. He listened on the drive in, recognized the pattern live in his CEO's Thursday meeting, and shared it with 40 leaders in the room. It reached a 40,000 person company within days. Sam's read on why: they'd been having the same conversation for years and had never had the language for it. Nobody can promise certainty. You can give clarity. The only way to promise certainty is to know the future in detail. And the greater the uncertainty, the more the need for clarity is heightened. If there were no unc