Tempered Resilience

How Leaders Are Formed in the Crucible of Change

Tod Bolsinger

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780830841646, 9780830841646
• eBook ISBN: 9780830841653
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Leadership

Christian Book Award Finalist

What type of leadership is needed in a moment that demands adaptive change?

Tod Bolsinger, author of Canoeing the Mountains, is uniquely positioned to explore the qualities of adaptive leadership in contexts ranging from churches to nonprofit organizations. He deftly examines both the external challenges we face and the internal resistance that holds us back.

Bolsinger writes: "To temper describes the process of heating, holding, hammering, cooling, and reheating that adds stress to raw iron until it becomes a glistening knife blade or chisel tip." When reflection and relationships are combined into a life of deliberate practice, leaders become both stronger and more flexible. As a result, these resilient leaders are able to offer greater wisdom and skill to the organizations they serve.

Also available: Tempered Resilience Study Guide

1

The Crises of Leading Change

Failures of Nerve and
Failures of Heart

The battles the Greek heroes had to fight were against their enemies.

The battles their Jewish counterparts had to fight were against themselves:

their fears, their hesitations, their sense of unworthiness.

JONATHAN SACKS

I believe there exists throughout America today a rampant sabotaging of leaders who try to stand tall amid the raging anxiety-storms of our time . . . whenever a [group] is driven by anxiety, what will also always be present is a failure of nerve among its leaders.

EDWIN H. FRIEDMAN

TOD, GIVE US YOUR PITCH. Treat us as if we are the people who you would ask to fund this if it was a new start-up company.”

I smiled broadly. “Glad to do so,” I said as I forwarded the PowerPoint presentation to the first slide.

I was in a conference room provided by a law office, meeting with a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists on a famous street in Palo Alto, California. We were there to discuss a change initiative I had been tasked to spearhead at the seminary where I am a senior administrator. They were not there to fund the initiative but to give me feedback on it using their expertise as venture capitalists and philanthropists.

As I took a deep breath to launch into my presentation, a former McKinsey consultant interrupted, “Sorry,” he said. “Before you start just tell us, who this new service is supposed to help? Who is your target customer, as it were?” We all chuckled. Seminaries, churches, and Christian nonprofits don’t often refer to the people we serve as “customers.” But I got the point.

“No problem,” I said, “Fuller Seminary wants to serve ministry leaders and pastors who want to grow as spiritual leaders and help the people in their churches and organizations grow spiritually but don’t necessarily need the expense or commitment of graduate-level education.”

There were nods all around the room, so I began.

Twelve minutes later I finished my presentation. I could see smiles around the room as if they were sharing an inside joke. The former McKinsey consultant said, “You have been doing that presentation a lot around the seminary, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I responded. “Faculty groups, senior administrators, staff groups from which I am trying to recruit people to my team. Why?”

“Because your presentation didn’t tell us why this would help ministry leaders but why this was a good strategy for the school. You gave us a pitch that tried to sell us on how your plan would help the seminary, not how the seminary would better serve the church or make a difference in the world.”

I could feel my face flush with embarrassment. They were kind, but I knew that a glaring blind spot had been revealed. I also realized how thoroughly I had been influenced by my institutional context and the worries of my colleagues.

Only three years earlier I had been brought to the seminary as both a former alum with two degrees and as an outsider who had spent the past twenty-five years as the pastor of a congregation, leadership consultant, and executive coach. I was supposed to be the voice of the church speaking into and shaping the academic environment in a more formative direction. And while, in my presentation, I had used the language of making an impact on the greater church, I had defaulted—almost unconsciously—to what would help our institution and not what would truly help our institution serve the real needs of people.

Back to the conference room in Silicon Valley. The most senior leader in the room spoke up next. “Tod, look, there is only really one thing that matters if you are going to try to lead something innovative: Does it fix a real problem?” He continued, “Can you tell us what pain point in the world or the church your seminary’s new project would be trying to address?”

I still feel sheepish looking back on it now, but these Silicon Valley leaders were reminding me that genuine leadership must be focused on a vision that is beyond the profit, success, or even survival of the institution. It must be focused on the needs of real people in the real world.

Very quickly, the conversation with the Silicon Valley venture capitalists moved from what the school wanted me to do to what the world needed to have done. And this not only refocused my sense of what was required of me as a leader but also the constant temptation that every leader faces.

In Canoeing the Mountains, I defined leadership as “energizing a community of people toward their transformation to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.”1 For Christians the motivating factor for leadership is mission. Christian leadership is fundamentally about gathering people together to become a community to grow in order to accomplish something that needs to be done in the name of Christ. That mission is focused on a need or pain point that if addressed would further the redemptive purposes of God in the world. It is the desire to be a tangible, particular, and contextual answer to the prayer of Jesus, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth. . . .”

Leadership is called into action when there is a problem outside of the organization that needs to be addressed and the organization needs to change in order to take on that challenge.

For most of us this is straightforward enough. Indeed, those of us called to leadership are motivated by words like transformation and mission. We are eager to make a difference, meet a need, and, if we are people of Christian faith, see God’s reign made manifest in our towns, churches, and organizations. Leadership, as my Silicon Valley counselors were reminding me, is called into action when there is a problem outside of the organization that needs to be addressed and the organization needs to change in order to take on that challenge.

One of the genuine crises of Christian leadership today is how inward focused it is. A movement founded on the salvation and transformation of the world often becomes consumed with helping a congregation, an organization, or educational institution survive, stay together, or deal with rampant anxiety (often all at the same time). It’s not enough to turn around a declining church, resolve conflict, restore a sense of community, regain a business’s market share, return an organization to sustainability, or even “save the company.” The question before any leader of an organization is “save the company for what?”

The Challenge of Adaptive Leadership

The man across the table from me was a generous and successful businessman. He had already given a considerable donation to the work my team was spearheading at the seminary, and we were asking him for even more resources.

He looked at me and asked, “So if another seminary asks you to share what you are learning, what will you do? What will you say to them?”

“It’s already happened,” I told him. “I have already spoken to a dozen or more schools and seminaries. And when they call, we tell them everything. Everything we have learned. Every mistake we have made. Every pothole to avoid. Everything we haven’t yet tried. We share it all.” We talked about that what he was funding through us was bigger than us. That what we are trying to do in leadership formation is bigger than any one school. Soon we were talking about Elon Musk’s work with Tesla and how he had made the plans for the batteries on his electric vehicles an open-source technology, sharing all of the patents so that other companies could accelerate the vehicles that he believed would help fight climate change.2

Developing adaptive capacity, that is, the personal and organizational transformation of leaders and their people to apply and adapt their core values in a rapidly changing context, is the greatest challenge of adaptive leadership.

“The real challenge,” I said, “is not figuring out the new plans but changing the factories that are used to building on the old plans.” I explained that even if we gave every so-called competitor our plans for innovating Christian leadership formation and theological education, they would have to change their own organizational cultures. That is, both the leaders and their organizations need to adapt.

Adaptive leadership, as developed by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, is an approach to organizational problem-solving that starts with diagnosis: Is this problem something that an expert can solve or not? Is this something that requires us to apply a solution that already exists, or does it fall outside of our current knowledge and expertise and therefore will require learning (and usually result in loss)?3

Adaptive challenges are the true tests of leadership. They are challenges that go beyond the technical solutions of resident experts or best practices, or even the organization’s current knowledge. They arise when the world around us has changed but we continue to live on the successes of the past. They are challenges that cannot be solved through compromise or win-win scenarios, or by adding another ministry or staff person to the team. They demand that leaders make hard choices about what to preserve and to let go. They are challenges that require people to learn and to change, that require leaders to experience and navigate profound loss.4

As we shall repeatedly see, developing adaptive capacity, that is, the personal and organizational transformation of leaders and their people to apply and adapt their core values in a rapidly changing context, is the greatest challenge of adaptive leadership.5 Groups are hardwired to believe that survival usually means reinforcing the way things have always been. So when an organization feels stress, the default behavior of most organizational leaders is to solve the problems for our organizations rather than change our organizations for meeting the needs of the world. The result is that instead of undergoing transformation to be more effective in our mission to serve the world, organizations unconsciously reinforce the very status quo that is not working.

The default behavior of most organizational leaders is to solve problems for our organizations rather than change our organizations for meeting the needs of the world.

So, to restore their flagging attendance or lagging donations, churches keep offering the programs they have always loved and try to fill the facilities that they invested in building. Schools want to attract students to maintain the faculty who have come to research within the safety of tenure and the resources of an academic community. Nonprofit organizations that were once an innovative solution to a real problem become, after a time, organizations whose own survival is now the core purpose ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Smith’s Forge
• 1 The Crises of Leading Change: Failures of Nerve and Failures of Heart
• 2 Resilience: The Raw Material of a Tempered Leader
• 3 Working: Leaders Are Formed in Leading
• 4 Heating: Strength Is Forged in Self-Reflection
• 5 Holding: Vulnerable Leadership Requires Relational Security
• 6 Hammering: Stress Makes a Leader
• 7 Hewing: Resilience Takes Practice
• 8 Tempering: Resilience Comes Through a Rhythm of Leading and Not Leading
• Epilogue: Why Is This So Hard?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Resources for Going Deeper
• Also by Tod Bolsinger
• Praise for Tempered Resilience
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright