The Weight
The Weight
"Mistakes Good Leaders Make" with Tod Bolsinger
Tod Bolsinger has built his career on developing and empowering great leaders. In this conversation with Eddie and Chris, he talks about how leaders can leverage the trust they’ve built to make risky decisions with empathy and vulnerability, how to deal with pushback, and how important it is to acknowledge the losses that come with change.
Tod is the Vice-President for Vocation and Formation and Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he earned his Ph.D. in theology. He has served as Senior Pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church. He is the author of a series of leadership guides as well as the books Tempered Resilience and Canoeing the Mountains.
Resources:
Listen to Tod’s previous episode on The Weight, Adaptive Leadership
Buy Tod’s books at IVPress
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly:I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester:Today our guest is Todd Bolsinger. We've had Tod Bolsinger on the show before, discussing adaptive change, but he's got additional resources coming out for the books, for us right now.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah. Tod is a senior congregational strategist with Fuller Theological Seminary. He also does consulting with AE Sloan Leadership, and he is bringing, I would say, frameworks for leadership, executive leadership, from the world of politics and the world of business to church and to nonprofit leadership, and he has a series of really practical books on navigating change.
Eddie Rester:And what he does in those books is he helps leaders understand the mistakes we're making, but not mistakes because we don't know what we're doing or we're terrible people or failures at leadership, but because we're continuing to do the things that worked in a world where technical solutions move the ball forward. But in a world where things have changed, we have to learn from those mistakes.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah. I mean, the topics are ones that every leader will face. You know, what to do in a time of crisis, how to lead through resistance, how to make sure to keep the main thing the main thing, rather than appeasing stakeholders, and then also investing in transformation. What did you take away from the conversation Eddie?
Eddie Rester:It's so practical, and that's one of the things I enjoy when I get to talk to to Tod, is that he's really, he has this ability to break down complicated issues and really help us see through to the other side--how we can begin to change how we lead, but also how we can begin to change the organizations that we're leading. And so this is one of those podcasts, I think, if you are in any level of leadership of a local congregation, whether you're a pastor, a lay leader, or if you're just doing business, working in business right now and struggling with how do I deal with this world that we're in, just a lot of pragmatic pieces to help us out.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I'm going to take away from this conversation is the need to--I know this, but it's helpful to be told it again--to step away from the day-to-day to get what he calls on the balcony, which comes from some of his research. And he gives really clear questions for journaling and for thinking in the midst of maybe hard situations. And so, yeah, love the conversation. It was good. It was good to... He was very engaged in the conversation. I hope that you enjoy it, and we always love to have you with us on The Weight.[INTRO] The truth is, the world is growing more angry, more bitter and more cynical. People don't trust one another and we feel disconnected.
Eddie Rester:The way forward is not more tribalism. It's more curiosity that challenges what we believe, how we live, and how we treat one another. It's more conversation that inspires wisdom, healing, and hope.
Chris McAlilly:So we launched The Weight podcast as a space to cultivate sacred conversations with a wide range of voices at the intersection of culture and theology, art and technology, science and mental health, and we want you to be a part of it.
Eddie Rester:Join us each week for the next conversation on The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly:We're here today with Tod Bolsinger. Tod, thanks for joining the podcast again.
Tod Bolsinger:It's nice to be with you guys again. Thanks for having me back.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, it's great to see what you're up to these days and how it's going and, yeah, just we had a season there where we got to see and talk with each other, and it's been a bit so...
Tod Bolsinger:Well, it's nice to be with you again.
Chris McAlilly:You've got some new books that are coming out here in the fall. I'm not sure when we'll release this, but it'll be, I'm sure... It'll be in conjunction with the release of
Eddie Rester:In the fall. this conversation talking about change, and this is a topic that you've talked about a lot in leadership in different ways. But it sounds, from our prior conversation, like you're trying to get more practical, in some ways, kind of helping leaders think about mistakes that get made. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about kind of what you're trying to do with the project.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking. So you know, when I wrote "Canoeing the Mountains," it was all about, how do leaders have to change the way they lead, because the world is changing. Right? So it's about developing a new capacity to lead when the world in front of you is different than the world behind you. And then "Tempered Resilience" was a book that was all about so how do you handle the resistance of your people when they don't want to change because of the world around you. What these four books are is they are four small books, each of them, each of them take on one question. And what they really do is they take up one problem that a good leader often falls into when trying to lead change. And where it comes from is that our team works literally with leaders all over the world, and we kept coming back to these four mistakes good leaders make, and they weren't mistakes because they were making a mistake. They're mistakes because they were built on their strengths that now they couldn't apply to this changing world. And so we began to do some work on that. And so these four little books, each of them on a different one, each of them focusing on that same idea, one kind of mistake at a time.
Eddie Rester:You know, it's interesting that you're approaching it that way, because"The Innovator's Dilemma." Great book. I recommend it to folks all the time. Written in the late 90s. They've updated along the way. Christensen wrote it. Great book, but one of the things he said is great companies don't fail because the leaders aren't playing to their strengths, or you hire terrible people or whatever, that it's really because they're playing to their strengths, the things that you would do in a normal season. And so many companies, and he's talking about companies, not churches there, they fail simply because they're doing the things that you would naturally want a successful leader or organization to do when all was going well.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, yeah. So the example, the first mistake there's this book, the first book is "How Not to Waste a Crisis." And what we learned during the crisis of COVID is that leaders are hard workers. They will work themselves to death. They will work themselves to death. They will work themselves to burnout because they love their people, especially church leaders and faith leaders. So their mistake is trying to outwork the problem. It's like paddling really hard in a river where there's no water. You can just paddle until you're exhausted. And what you have to actually teach them is you've got to stop trying harder, because you will try harder at your old best practice that no longer works. You've actually got to make a shift. You got to learn how to see a shift that's needed before you solve the problem, and giving people the eyes and the space to see the new problem before you start solving it is really hard for good leaders who are used to have working
Eddie Rester:I think that's so critical. Because when you problems. think, in our denomination, we're United Methodists. Right now, our Annual Conference is working real hard to solve the issues and the problems of a different generation, but using the same tools that they use to solve these problems of a different generation. And what you see is pastors and laity are just wearing themselves out doing this. So how do you quit? How do you break that habit? What's the habit that you use to
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, so every time I ask leaders, as I say oh, break the habit? and I say this, and they all start nodding. I'll go, "There is in your little voice, somebody's voice." In your head, there's somebody's voice. It's a coach, it's a teacher, it's your parent, and somebody who says,"Don't just stand there. Do something." What we have to actually teach people is, don't just do something, stand there for a second.
Eddie Rester:What do we get when we just stand there for a second? What happens?
Tod Bolsinger:What you learn to do is you stand there until you can see the shift that needs to happen. What is the shift of values? This is the adaptive language. Adaptive leadership is about knowing that you can't use your best practices, so you have to make a shift in values, attitudes or behaviors. I was talking with a pastor of an urban church just yesterday, and he said, "The big shift my people have to grapple with is our attitudes about the way we think about the poor, because we're a group of people who all pull themselves up by their own bootstraps." Like, they all remember when their parents were poor. So what they want to do is go, let's just get together and let's just cheer hard and tell people to work hard, and that'll do it. He said, because that they don't see the systemic issues that are different today than they were a generation ago.
Eddie Rester:Right.
Tod Bolsinger:And once we see it, then we can begin to experiment our way forward. Instead of going to big solutions, let's go to small solutions and learn our way forward. So good leaders are people who learn to lead the learning of your organization rather than keep relying on the old best practices. And we teach people that.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, I do think that, I mean, you rely in this book, and specifically in the chapter on seeing the shift before solving the problem, on the work of Ron Heifetz, which is in the background a lot of what you're doing, distilling the wisdom of this great organizational thinker who spent a lot of time talking about adaptive change. And just the difference between... I think it's worth stating again, for folks who may have not heard the first podcast we did with you, and we've been... Eddie, you were kind of dancing around it, but I think just articulating the difference between a technical problem and an adaptive one. What's the difference between? Go back to the ABCs of here's a technical problem, here's an adaptive problem. What's the difference?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, so Ronald Heifetz, who you mentioned, and his partner, Marty Linsky, developed this notion of adaptive leadership. And Marty Linsky wrote the forward for these books for me. I got to know him, and he wrote the
forward. And basically, this:a technical problem is a problem expert can solve. It doesn't mean that it's trivial. Like, I said, my dad got a heart bypass at age 84, 82 while he was in COVID, he had an expert do the heart bypass. You know when I get on a plane tomorrow to fly out of Dallas, and there might be a storm coming, I want a pilot who can fly through the storm.
Eddie Rester:Well trained.
Tod Bolsinger:Right, well trained, right. Experts can solve it. And most of us as pastors, are experts in certain things. We're experts with the scriptures. We're expert with people's souls. We're experts at a hospital bed. An adaptive challenge is when your best practices no longer work, and you no longer can be an expert, and what you have to do is you have to actually lead the learning by seeing the shift of values, attitudes, or behaviors. And you know, Christopher, that's what's so hard about adaptive leadership, is you literally have to lead, when you say to people, when they ask you, what do you do, and you have to say to them, "I don't know, but we're going to figure it out together."
Chris McAlilly:I think that that phrase, being able and willing to say that in leadership, is an extraordinary, powerful thing when you're in a room with people, who everybody's looking at you to make the call and you don't say,"I know what the heck I'm doing." You say, instead, "I don't know, but that's okay. We have all the wisdom in the room that we need. We have intelligence. We have expertise. We've got all kinds of things. We have the capacity to learn what it is that we need to do, but I don't know yet what it is that we need to do." That kind of a statement in a room will And I've, you know, I got the benefit of watching and change the room. observing Eddie in executive leadership, in a role where I was working on Eddie's staff, and I watched them do that, and I watched the power of that kind of statement in the room. The team leans in, because what you're doing as a leader is you're entrusting, you're empowering and you're trusting your team to solve the problem as a team. And that's a really, it's a different model of, I think, collaborative leadership, rather than just, like, being a solo hero. I think the hard thing is getting to a place of just stepping back. And, you know, one of the things that Heifetz talks about, and that you talk about in that chapter, is getting on the balcony so that you can actually see, rather than being down in the weeds and actually solving the technical issues. How do you do that, like, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? I think of it as like a scheduling issue. Like, how do you schedule the time to actually get on the balcony to do that kind of deeper thinking and get that kind of perspective? I mean, seriously, I'm not just asking that theoretically. How the heck do you schedule the time to get that done?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, in one sense, what I tell people is, if you have a staff meeting, if you got a staff meeting, ask yourself the question, How come we don't take any time to ask the most important questions? Like, what's more important at this moment? There's something urgent but what's more important? And most people, I'll just say, if could you carve out a certain percentage of your staff meeting. You got a two hour staff meeting, give it 20 minutes where you're going to sit down and say, instead of solving a problem, we're going to learn to see our problem differently. We have a whole process we teach people on how to do observations, interpretations, questions, to explore, and then interventions. There's a process we teach people in the book. And we teach you how to do this with your team, because obviously the many leaders try to get up on the balcony, the best thing is taking your team to a balcony.
Eddie Rester:Right.
Tod Bolsinger:Look at the whole system and go, What do you observe? What do you notice? What do you see? Whose voice dio we need to get in the room? What are they going to see? Right? And when you do that and it becomes a habit, then what happens is, it energizes the team, because they're actually beginning to work on bigger challenges than just who owns what in the schedule, who owns what in the agenda. What are we going to put on the calendar? Who gets to use what room? Who's putting away the chairs?
Eddie Rester:Those are the worst staff meetings when we're on calendar, or yeah, who's doing what. But, you know, emails. Emails, people. But one, training a staff, training a group of leaders, and that's what it really is, to see and to hear and to listen. It requires an investment of time, because that's something. It's easy to do at one staff meeting or during one leadership gathering, and then fall right back into the trap of well, now we got problems to solve. Now we've got to figure out how we're doing Easter this year. Now we've got to figure out how to get the grass cut on time. You know? And it's real hard because we are so task-oriented that we don't want to stop and be still. One of the other things, and I want to push into one of the other books, where you talk about quit appeasing stakeholders. The mission always wins. Quit appeasing stakeholders. In these first two books, you could have pulled them right out of "The Innovator's Dilemma."
Tod Bolsinger:Right.
Eddie Rester:So rather than me talk about "The Innovator's Dilemma" again, what do you mean by that? What are these stakeholders, and how do they come between a church and its mission?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. So one of the first big mistakes that a good leader makes is thinking they can outwork a problem by trying hard. The second one is, I can basically get everybody. I can win the room. I can get everybody on board. I can please everybody. Just let me have a chance. What I'll do is I'll create a win-win solution that everybody is excited about, and then all this conflict will go away. And the problem is, the whole mindset was think win-win. And your biggest questions always have loss.
Eddie Rester:Right.
Chris McAlilly:Always have what?
Tod Bolsinger:Loss. There's always loss. One guy says, look for the loss. Marty Linsky, when I was with him, I said, "Marty, tell me the most important thing I can pass on to people who will never hear your voice," because he doesn't hang out with church people. And he said, "Tell them, it's always about loss."
Chris McAlilly:So what does that mean?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, what it really means is, think about this. As a pastor, you learn, hey, I'm going to get called to a bedside when someone's dying. I bring them the hope of the resurrection. Or I'm going to be with people when a marriage is falling apart. Or I'm going to be with people in tragedy. We all get chaplaincy training on how to help individuals go through loss and grief. Nobody ever tells us we've got to take an organization through loss and grief ,that they're going to choose so that their mission can go forward.
Eddie Rester:Wow.
Tod Bolsinger:So saying to folks, the goal here isn't to make everybody happy. The goal here is to get really clear on what our mission is and let the mission then determine what wins. Not the leader. Right? Not the not the preacher, not the leader, not the board, not the donors, not the new people, the old people, the people who've been here forever, the people outside the door. No, no, no. What's our mission? We get really clear on what our mission is.
Eddie Rester:And you know, you feel like in the church, because And I always say that most people's mission statement is a motto, not a mission. It's a t shirt rather than a tool. You want a mission statement that is a tool for decision making, so we're good people, we love people. You love God, you love that you can figure out, just like, what you need to cut away, what you need to not do, so that we can get clear on the most important things we do. Decision, I would say, should remind you of incision. How do we discern what we're not going others. You want to, I don't want to use the word placate, to do so we can focus on the thing we need to do. And that makes people mad. People experience loss.
Tod Bolsinger:Mm hm. but you want to make sure that everybody feels good about it.
Eddie Rester:And one of the things that, the hard lesson for me as a people pleaser, is that maybe 80% of the folks will be happy, but chances are, it's always less than that, and you have to be... You have to get to a place as an organization where you're okay. There's going to be some grumpy people. Guy named Mike Slaughter is a pastor of a large United Methodist Church in Ohio, Ginghamsburg, Ohio. He said, you know, build success around your detractors. You're going to have the detractors, but live the mission in such a way that you're building this thing that they either have to decide I'm on board or I'm out the door.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah.
Eddie Rester:And get okay with that, yeah. But it's hard to do that.
Tod Bolsinger:Oh, it's really hard. It's really hard. Oh my gosh. These things are hard, actually, these. The reason why these are the same the mistakes good leaders make, is good leaders got to this point by basically being able to work really hard and do the kinds of things that make people trust you and are happy with you. Now, you have to be willing to learn, and you have to be willing to say the mission is more important than any of us.
Chris McAlilly:There's a phrase in the book that, when you're talking about, you know, building an organization around a mission where the mission always wins and it's disagree and commit.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:You want to speak to that? That comes out of a, you know, I think, you mentioned Andrew Grove, but you might tell the story.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. So Andrew Grove was at Intel, and he was very influential on lots of business leaders, and Jeff Bezos maybe is the most famous. His answer was, we need to have really candid conversations where we can deeply disagree, but eventually we're going to walk out this door and we got to do something. So whatever we disagree on, eventually we're going to have to stack hands and say, here's what we're doing, and the card that wins the hand is not the leader. The leader's job is to make sure the mission wins the hand. The mission wins. So once we decide this is what it means for us to fill and fulfill our mission, all of us, especially those of us who've disagreed, have to commit that we're going to support that mission. And that's hard, because most of us all have our own constituencies and our own groups and our own group of people. Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:It requires a lot of humility. I mean, you mentioned this in the book. It's not just we're going to take this thing where I want to go, but you're trying to protect and further a particular mission. And ultimately, I like this mentality, because it puts you in a posture of stewarding something that's not your own agenda.
Tod Bolsinger:Right.
Chris McAlilly:And I think the idea... I mean, in a lot of... I mean if you're in Christian leadership, or if you're leading a church or a Christian organization of any kind, if you're not the founder, then you've been entrusted with something that somebody else built. And so there's a sense you're entrusted with something. I think, when you are entrusted with something, especially in my case of being in a leadership position of an organization that's almost a couple centuries old, you have the accumulation of all of these things that are done, and, you know, things that get into the budget, that are legacy projects. And I think you got to have some way of evaluating all that stuff, especially in a season where most of American Christianity, regardless of its ideological bend, is in decline. And so I think a lot of the decisions that senior leaders are having to make are really around getting really, really disciplined about what is our mission now and then what is it, what are we going to have to cut so that we can invest more deeply in the thing that's going to move us forward. That's a really difficult set up. It's easy to narrate it. It's a much more difficult thing to do it with a team and a group of people.
Eddie Rester:Well, one of the things I'm thinking, sitting here thinking of, is scripture. I mean, when you read the book of Acts and people, when you read the book of Acts or the letters of Paul, there was a great tension between a lot of good intention, between the mission and the law and the mission and the law. And the mission, when you read the New Testament story of the Church, the mission always won. At times when there was significant loss for the Jewish Christians, who were bringing centuries, millennia of history and understanding and belief into this moment and who this Messiah could be. And yet there was loss.
Tod Bolsinger:You see it in Jesus's ministry. He shows up in places, and then he stops healing people, because he needs to move on. Or early on, a Gentile comes to him and he says, "I'm here for the lost sheep of Israel." A day is going to come when Pentecost is going to happen and it's going to be about the Gentiles. But at this moment, he's looking people in the eye and saying, "I'm so sorry. This is what I'm called to do."
Eddie Rester:Yeah.
Tod Bolsinger:And, you know, you said it so beautifully, Eddie, most of us as leaders are pleasers. So if people are happy with us, we think we're being faithful to God. And what we realize is what we really have to do is be willing to, in the words of Marty Linsky, disappoint people at a rate they can absorb. And that's what's really hard about the work.
Eddie Rester:And I think that's critical: at a rate they can absorb. Because I've known a lot of leaders who have run way out in front, and the loss has been incredible. There's a guy named Lovett Weems from Mississippi. He wrote a lot of books about church leadership. You know Lovett?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, I know the name. I've never met him, yeah.
Eddie Rester:So one of the things in one of his books that
Tod Bolsinger:Oooh.
Eddie Rester:And I've held on to that since seminary. he wrote is that change implies judgment.
Tod Bolsinger:Oh, yeah.
Eddie Rester:Change implies judgment. So anytime when it's the right change for the right reasons, somebody is still going
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. That's exactly it. to feel judged because of what they held on to for so long. But
Chris McAlilly:I think it also leads to the, of the four books, the one that I'm struggling the most to understand is this idea that's that loss that you're talking about. that you should quit relying on trust. That doesn't make any sense to me.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, because Patrick Lencioni is going to come after you on that.
Tod Bolsinger:I know.
Chris McAlilly:What are you doing, man? Like trust, especially in this environment, the one thing that we need to cultivate, rather than to quit relying upon. So you're going to have to help me with that one. I don't, I don't.
Eddie Rester:Our listeners can't see. We're on Zoom right now, and Tod's over here smiling like we've walked into a trap.
Chris McAlilly:Well, this is where I'm this is where I'm losing you, Tod. You're gonna have to help me out.
Tod Bolsinger:Okay, so I tell people all the time, there is no transformation without trust. Bottom line, no transformation with trust. When we're recording this, in a week where I've heard of three major leaders who had to either step down or get criticized because they violated trusts, and we all know that there is no transformation without trust. So you have to build trust. You cannot lead without trust. The coach who, the guy who coached me for three years, Jim Osterhaus, used to say trust is earned like a thermostat. You function at a high level of trust that takes a long time to get the temperature up there. But it is lost like a light switch. There's no transformation without trust, but trust is not transformation. Transformation comes from investing trust. If you squander it, you can't invest it. You invest trust by having people be willing, trust you enough, to be willing to go through transformation they don't want to go through. Like they begin to go... Like you just described, what was it about the Gentiles, like all of a sudden, to say, for Paul to say to mostly Jewish Christians, the Gospel is more than you. It is to the world. Trust me. I'm handling the scriptures well. Trust me, I'm showing you the truth that comes from your own Hebrew Scriptures. You can trust me, because I'm a person of integrity. First Thessalonians is an entire tract about we came to you and we treated you like parents nurturing children. We did not come and exploit you. So now this is what it's going to require of you. And so the problem about relying on trust is in many leaders' views, if everybody trusts me, then obviously we're going to be able to do our mission. And what they don't get is you have to actually invest that trust into the mission. It's like having a big bank account and you want to do a building project. Well, you can't keep the big bank account...
Eddie Rester:And do the building project.
Tod Bolsinger:And do the building project. You have to invest that bank account in the building project, which also means you can't run out of the money in the bank, or you're gonna have a half-done building. So it's, this is the most tricky part. I mean, I was smiling because this is the one that almost all the leaders... Like, I'm working so hard to be a person of character... I mean, think about this way. How many leaders do you notice and stuff like I've been like, I've been a personal character. I've been faithful, I've done all these things, and my people don't want to change.
Eddie Rester:Yeah.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah.
Eddie Rester:So when you started talking about that, what I started thinking about was a leader, trust immensely. He came to a church I was serving, spent three or four days with my leaders and my people, and I'm driving him to the airport. And he said, "Man, Eddie, your people trust you." He says,"There's deep trust, but it's time to play your chips."
Tod Bolsinger:Uh huh. There you go.
Eddie Rester:I think that's what you're talking about, isn't it?
Tod Bolsinger:Exactly.
Eddie Rester:It's a moment where you have to say to your people, trusting, this trust we've all built up isn't enough. Now we have to risk that trust to choose the mission, to choose transformation, to choose the change. And it changed. That one little comment on the way to the airport was so significant for me, and I think you're exactly right, and we want to build up trust. No transformation without trust. But so often that becomes we just keep accruing trust until the day that it's too late. They look at you and like, well, everything's falling down around us. What have we done?
Tod Bolsinger:Or even worse, I was talking with a pastor yesterday. I mean, so we do a lot of consulting with lots of different really good leaders in the middle of change. I was talking to pastor yesterday. He said, you know, this church was in shambles. It was in shambles when he got there, and they have recovered. They are now the highest attendance they ever had, the highest built, you know, budget they've ever had. They actually came out of COVID stronger than they ever had. I mean, he's just a remarkable leader. He said, the challenge I have is they keep thinking that this is all about whatever I want to do. I said, yeah, their only challenge now is figuring out how to keep you until you retire. They don't actually want to change. They want to just, they just want to keep you. So you're getting frustrated because you're now saying stuff like, God has blessed us, so we should go figure out how to impact our city. And they go, You know what? If you want to, that's okay. But the truth is, all we want to know is, are you happy in the job? Do you like it? Do you like it here? Are you? They want to keep you as pastor. You want them to be transformed as disciples, and now it's going to be a challenge. You're going to actually have to press them and talk about things and lead them into things.
Eddie Rester:And maybe they won't want you to stay as pastor till you retire. I mean, clergy, we're a weird bunch, and if you're a church member out there listening, know that we have a deep desire for you to trust us, love us, listen to us, but sometimes we need your permission to say, lead us.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, that's right. And I do think one of the DT, like they have tremors? things that's helped me recently to move from a place of just trying to cultivate trust and to really think about what are the next steps that we're going to need to take as a church or as a Yeah, detox. She described as, like, a detox experience. And team, as a staff and a leadership team. It really was a friend of mine who's recently gone on sabbatical, and she's a remarkable leader. She's a founder of a church, and she's young. I mean, she's in her 40s, but she's got excellent mentors and coaches that are working with her, and she's struggling as she steps away on sabbatical, in part because I think, you know, especially founding pastors, I think the church is very much connected to that individual. And so to step away, I think for the first time, I mean, it's hard. It's like she was describing it as a, I don't know, like a recovery journey, like, what is it? What is it when an addict stops drinking, you know. Like, what is that? What is that reality that's called, uh... she said, you know, this is only going to be worse at retirement. And it's like, you know what, that's a really helpful frame to begin thinking, I'm 41, but for me to begin thinking about, what does the end look like? You know, I've friends of mine that are talking at the end of their career, they're senior leaders, and they're thinking about succession planning, so they're beginning to think about what comes after me. And I just think that's a wise question to ask at a younger, I mean, for me at a younger age, because I think then it says, it forces me to not just accrue trust, but to think about where do I want to lead and then who will follow me. You know, who will be coming after? And that's just, I don't know. For me, it's a really helpful reframe. I don't want to, I want to make sure we get to the last book, because I do think leading through resistance... I do think that's a really difficult skill to manage, because resistance always comes. It comes in various forms, and it can come in surprising ways. You know, I think it can come sometimes from the places where you least expect it, and you can be caught off guard by it. One of the things you talk about is, you know, one is, don't let them push you around. But a skill set to acquire would be to start with two shared convictions. What do you mean by that?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, so you have to have two shared convictions when you start. One conviction you have to have is, we all agree on the most important things about who we are. We call this our charism. This is the unique gift that is our church. These are the values that are so important that we will not let them go. If we let them go, we stop being who we are. And they're usually really basic and really simple, but they're also really unique to the church. So like you say, this is true... Like with one church I work with, I work with a church, they said, look, this has always been a church that has worked with people at the margins. We are really good with addicts. We are really good with people who are in recovery or people who are recovering in their lives. So we've gotta continue to realize that that's what God gave us to do, and we're gonna continue to The second thing and conviction is we are gonna have absolutely do. have to let go of some things in order for us to be faithful in a changing world. So we gotta get clear on what will never change, and we gotta get clear on that we have to be ready to face loss, to change everything else, and once we're clear on what will never change and who we are and what's important to us and what the changing world requires of us, that it's going to require us to change, that now we can begin to have a conversation. And the question about resistance, which is so powerful, is when, if you hear me talk about this, you think, okay, I want to get up on the balcony. I want to see the problems. We're going to identify the shifts. We're going to be clear about our mission. I'm willing to invest trust in transformation. When you get resistance, which you will get every time, the temptation is to just think your job is to keep pushing through the resistance. And it's actually not. The way you bring change is by pulling people into the process. You pull them by. You attune to them emotionally. You help accompany them into the process of change. The example I use in the book is I talked to people who were good at Jiu Jitsu, and three different people who are good at Jiu Jitsu. I have never done Jiu Jitsu. I talked to three different instructors. They said the reason we got into jiu jitsu is jiu jitsu is a martial art you do from your back. You do it when you are in a vulnerable position, and you don't try to overpower someone. You try to actually move them by. And the three of the people I've talked to, they were all committed to being jiu jitsu instructors, because they worked with women's self defense with women who had either been sex trafficked or experienced sexual assault, and it was a way of giving them the capacity to defend themselves in a vulnerable position. And what most of us as leaders do is we never want to feel vulnerable, so we muscle up and we get tough and we get angry and we get prophetic.
Eddie Rester:Or control the room.
Tod Bolsinger:Or control, right? And you realize to actually move people through change, you actually have to take them through it. You have to attune with them and use empathy and accompaniment to bring people into the process of transformation. And it's one of the reasons why it's a very hard skill, but once you have it, once you know it and see it, you'll never unsee it, because you realize, oh, people begin to lower their guard, because even if they don't 100% agree with where you want to take us, they want to be accompanied by you in this process
Chris McAlilly:That is so beautiful and brilliant. It is. And the phrase that I want to latch on to is attuning to where someone is emotionally. I do think, you know, if I'm thinking about, in our context, and I'm in a context where we're in a very conservative state, but I'm also serving in a progressive university community, and everybody is worried that the progressive folks are going to take the church off the rails in a liberal direction, and the conservative folks are going to take the church off the rails in a conservative direction. So I'm constantly having to accompany people through a process of cultural change while also re-articulating what are the non-negotiable things that make us who we are as the church? And I do think that one of the things that I found is that if you'll sit with someone long enough--I don't think this is a leadership skill. I think this is just being human. You know, if you'll sit with somebody long enough to hear their story and how they develop the convictions that they have, there's always some kind of sacred core there. And you get to a moment in every conversation, it never fails, that I'll get to this moment in a conversation where it's like, this is the holy, sacred thing within your story that helps me understand who you are. And if I can get to that point with the person and, you know, and I'm accompanying them, they're accompanying me as we, together, figure out where the heck the Spirit may be leading us together. It's a really powerful, beautiful thing that can happen. It also is scary, because it involves risk. You have to risk engaging someone who you don't know how they're coming at you, because people come at you with all kinds of
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, so here's just like one skill we teach stuff.
Eddie Rester:Which is very different than the world people when we're working with them and said, look, you're in expects. When somebody, in the church, pushes back real hard. the middle of it. You lay out a plan or a vision or a purpose or What they're bracing for is they're bracing for the pushback. They're already preparing well, the leadership, a decision to make, and somebody starts pushing back on it, your the pastor, is going to come back at me, so I've got to be ready. So Tod, when you talk about, hey, let's talk, let's be vulnerable, it creates a very different culture in the life of the church. And I think that's part of what you're talking about, is creating a very different culture of conflict within life. Conflict is going to happen, but it's a very different culture of conflict. response is to want to argue them into why you're right. Right.
Tod Bolsinger:Your goal is, I want to say something to get you to say, "Okay, you're right. I see it. You're right." Change your goal. Make your goal to say something back to them that makes them say, "That's right. That is my concern. That's right." If you can say back to them, so you're pushing back, because I hear what you're concerned about is that if we start making these changes, you're concerned that we are going to go liberal and lose our souls, or you're concerned that we're not going to protect people who've been around this community. Or your concern, what I hear you saying, right, is that your concern is that we are losing something precious to you, and that precious thing you want to make sure we hear, is that right? And they go, "That's right." And when you say it back to them, and they give you a"That's right," what happens is their brain and yours are now beginging to be attuned. Now you can have a conversation about the next step forward.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, so one of the things that I just want to lift up, one of the dimensions of the structure of the book that I think is really helpful. You kind of teach the new skill set. You know, start with the two shared convictions. What's non-negotiable? What does a changing world require of us? And then at the end of the chapter, you offer a balcony session. So getting on the balcony, either as an individual, leader or as a team. And I just want to highlight the questions from this particular section, because I do think they just solidify what we've been talking about. So this is the balcony section for learning the skill set of starting with two shared convictions: Take a few moments to consider the leadership challenge in front of you. Write the answers to these questions and keep them someplace you can access. What is the core purpose and the values that must be preserved? And then what is the threat or disruption that requires some kind of change initiative to preserve them? What objections do you anticipate? How would you articulate the conviction about the changes necessary to adapt the core purpose and values to a changing world? And then what do you think would happen if you were to name them out loud to people you believe would be most resistant to change? That's so helpful. And it's just a way of... That gives you 20 minutes of a leadership meeting where you lift up those questions, or one of those four questions, whatever is most important on that particular day for your team. And that's the way the book is structured. So I think one of the best things about this is that... I mean, there's all kinds of actionable items within it that can be cut up and contextualized, and so I don't know. I think if you're a leader that's trying to figure out what the heck to do next, it may be a good set of resources for you to engage. If you're struggling with trying to quit appeasing stakeholders, or if you're really dealing with a lot of pushback right now, because these are things that we all deal with. They just, they just are.
Tod Bolsinger:And just to say, these are things good leaders deal with. Because the reason why you're sitting in leadership is because you were a hard working person who made people happy because you did a good job. Like, all those things are true, right? This is why it is so complicated.
Eddie Rester:And going back again to "The Innovator's Dilemma." I've been holding back, Tod, on this.
Tod Bolsinger:It's, actually, it's so fun Eddie, because I love that book, and very few people ever talk to me about it.
Eddie Rester:More leaders ought to, particularly if you are an established congregation or established organization and you're beginning to see the upstarts coming, you need to be reading this book, because it's exactly that. The things that got us here will not get us there.
Tod Bolsinger:Right.
Eddie Rester:Particularly in a moment of adaptive change, where the rules seem to have changed on you, and the things that you've relied on forever are not playing out, but most leaders just double down. What I appreciate most about this series, Tod, is that it's a series. You can pull one of the little books and work your way through, work through it with your staff or your leaders in a moment, or spend some time, spend some time over six months or a year, and really begin to rethink how you're meeting the moment. Is that how you hope people will use it? Or what's what's your hope?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, when I first started talking to And then she could literally go, oh, I'm going to get 10 copies. InterVarsity press about publishing, and I said, I just returned from Bangkok working with World Vision Finance, and here they were talking about massive issues, like, how do you do micro lending with refugees? I mean complicated, difficult issues. And the leader I was with was this remarkable person And we can all talk about this on Wednesday, because everybody who's doing training and development for International. And I literally thought to myself, if she and I flew back from Bangkok and we went to the LA Airport. She lives in Houston, she had to keep going on. I had a vision in my head of her like going into the airport bookstore, pulling out like a bottle of Excedrin or a Power Bar, a bottle of water, and grabbing this, one of these little books off the shelf. She could read it between LA and Houston on the flight, two and a half hours. could get a copy overnighted them, or download it on Kindle, and they could read them. And we could talk about it. I wanted something they could put into practice right now that was not a technical fix, that actually right now would enable them to develop their skill set for leading change. And you can just pick whichever one of these is the challenge that you're facing, and you can use it right now. Two hours later, you finish reading it, your whole team reads it in two hours, and now you got lots of conversation.
Chris McAlilly:What would you say... I mean, so I want to just... We only have a little bit more time together today. So that's what you're writing for others. What are some of the things that you're reading that's helpful to you? You know, you've processed adaptive change, and you've done a lot of work in kind of distilling this in ways that are particularly helpful for Christian leaders. Are there other models of leadership that you're discovering that you're finding helpful for your own continued learning?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. So the biggest pieces that I'm working at the moment, the larger project I'm working on is really the failure of discipleship that happened during COVID. Lot of folks are coming out with, like, you know, exhortations about how we need deeper discipleship, and how we need new conceptual models and all that stuff. What I want to do is, I think discipleship is really an adaptive challenge that goes to the heart of the church. And so what I'm working on now is the way in which adaptive leadership is applied toward the formation and development of adults. How, if we want to have mature Christians, how are mature adults and mature leaders developed? And how can we rethink our Christian discipleship as something that God wants us to become? Like a group of people who, by nature, naturally respond to a crisis with love of neighbor, instead of division and polarization, which is what we mostly saw during COVID. And so that's the bigger challenge I'm working on. And so I'm doing a lot of reading in those areas and a lot of study and a lot of conversation with pastors and old churches. I got a large Methodist Church in Brentwood, Tennessee asked me to come down and just talk all about discipleships they could begin to work on. Tonight, I'm going to work with a Bible Church in Texas that's working on what is the formation needed for our church to reach neighbors who are different than us. We're a multicultural neighborhood, and we're not used to stepping to loving neighbors who are different than us. So how do we rethink the formation and discipleship we need to do. And that's the next big project.
Eddie Rester:I can't wait to read that one.
Chris McAlilly:Is there any particular either group, organization, or resource that you found particularly helpful for your own thinking about how adaptive leadership might be applied to the formation of adults?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah, there's basically, there's kind of three overlapping circles. There's a guy named Jim Wilder, who's a neuro theologian. He's got a book called "The Other Half of Church," which is really about the non-cognitive ways in which formation happens. And the easy way to think about this is think about the fact that your children are more shaped by your love for them, your care for them, their security, and their family. You grow healthy children and grow healthy people in ways that are not all about cognition. They're not all about doctrines and believing the right thing. So that's one. Jim Wilder's work has been important to me. The other one is Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy talk about deliberately developmental organizations. These are companies that commit to creating an environment where not only do they have a bottom line of delivering their products and services in a way that their shareholders will like, but they deliberately develop their people. And I think you know, what a church is a deliberately developmental organization. I call that an intentionally formative community. And so it's those two models of those two. And then of course, in the center of it is there's these stories about these remarkable communities of people who, like the community of Le Chambon, where people in World War Two, without anything except for just the decision to do so rescued 5,000 Jews from the gas chambers because they just said, our job is to love our neighbor, and they're our neighbors. And they were just unremarked... There was no big initiative, no big debate, no big struggle. They just naturally did. And I want to ask the question, what does it mean for us to create those kinds of communities?
Eddie Rester:And if folks aren't familiar with that story before the book comes out, you should go look up that story of what that community in France did, how they resisted beautifully out of love. It's a incredible story. Tod, thank you for your time today. It's always a pleasure to be with you, to catch up with what you're working on, and blessings to you and all that you've got. Hope it goes well with the church tonight.
Tod Bolsinger:Thank you. Thank you very much.
Eddie Rester:[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
Chris McAlilly:If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guests, you can go to theweightpodcast.com.[END OUTRO]