In Trust Center
The In Trust Center podcast is hosted by Matt Hufman. Walk alongside theological school leaders and innovators as they explore issues relevant to North American seminaries, all while helping institutions live out their missions more intentionally. Find more at intrust.org/podcast.
In Trust Center
Ep. 79: How leadership can change with Tod Bolsinger
A congregational leader and strategist, the Rev. Tod Bolsinger, Ph.D., discusses the need for adaptive leadership in theological education. Bolsinger shares insights from his latest book series, including tackling the challenges of leading through change, handling internal resistance, and realigning missions in a post-pandemic world. Bolsinger discusses rethinking old models and learning from experimentation. He emphasizes that effective transformation isn’t about working harder but adapting wisely.
Hello and welcome to the Intrama Center Podcast, where we connect with experts and innovators in theological education around topics important to theological school leaders. Thank you for joining us. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Good Governance Podcast. I'm Matt Huffman. With me today is the Reverend Dr. Todd Bolsinger of Fuller Theological Seminary. Now, Todd, first, welcome to the program.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. I'm glad to be with you.
SPEAKER_02:You've been a leadership expert, a strategist, a congregational leader, a pastor of a church. You've been a vice president of a theological school. You've led a lot of change initiatives you have written. And one of the things we're going to talk about today is this new series of books you have out. There are four of them about adaptive leadership. And they're really wonderful books. I was going to call them little. They're little in size. I think they're really big thoughts that you've broken down really well in a very timely manner. So we're going to start there. But first, welcome again. I'm glad to have you on the podcast.
SPEAKER_00:I'm glad to be here, Matt. I really am. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_02:So these these books are there's a series of books you've written. One is How Not to Waste a Crisis. Second is the mission always wins. Third is the invest in transformation. Fourth is leading through resistance. And I shouldn't say that that's the order, that's the order there in my Kindle. One of the interesting things, let's start with this, because you've got uh each of these has the title, and then, like, for instance, How Not to Waste a Crisis, Quit Trying Harder. You've got these imperatives in the title, um, which I love. Uh, but let's step back before we get there and talk a little bit about what it was from Canoeing the Mountains, which was 2015. Obviously, there was this little international thing that happened between then, this pandemic. But what is it that you saw from Canoeing the Mountains to now that gave you the sense that these books are needed?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So um, in 2020, I wrote a book called Tempered Resilience because um canoeing when I talked to people about adaptive change, they all wanted to talk about sabotage. And that was right before the pandemic. This is before the pandemic. People are still saying the biggest, most soul-sucking thing is when you're trying to bring change, your own people will sabotage the change. And so tempered resilience was about how to develop the formation needed to have the resilience and wisdom to take a group of people through through the resistance to change. And then the world blew up. And what happened in that time of the pandemic is I ended up on 170 webinars with people talking, like in conversation, about the changes they were trying to make. And we began to realize there were these themes where our best leaders, I mean, really good leaders, people with character and competence and eagerness, were making what I call the four big mistakes. They were just making the same mistakes over and over again. And that got me really curious. And then we were running a consulting company at the time, and you know, I still have. We started one in the middle of all that. And all my coaches and my consultants were saying the same thing. These four mistakes show up in our best leaders. So let's try to be as helpful as we can, really targeting those things with those people.
SPEAKER_02:Well, let's stop there for a second. I think that when you mentioned sabotage, one of the things I've heard in the field from folks was that was a really important point from them is that people are going to, whether willingly or knowingly, or sometimes unknowingly, sabotage the type of change you've got to make. That was a big realization in the field.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and what it did is it uh I think we named, and that wasn't me, it was Edmund Friedman who first talked about this, um, named something that almost every leader was going through and thought it was their fault. Instead of realizing it's, as Ed Friedman says, it's part and parcel of the leadership process. So if you're a college president or a seminary president or you're and you're a board and you do a big strategic plan process, and oh my gosh, the faculty doesn't want to do it. It's not that the faculty is stubborn, it's that people resist loss. And sabotage is not the bad things that evil people do, it's the human things that anxious people do. And one of the things that makes a group of people whose entire career has been about getting security, that's what tenure is. I get security and autonomy, is telling them that you're gonna have to take them through change, they get anxious and they will sabotage the change. I mean, so so it just began to normalize the experience that almost all of us were having and saying, okay, now how do I uh get prepared to be able to handle that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think one of the things that that helped some of the pastors I've talked to in various denominations is they pointed to that because they don't think in a Christian organization or a caring organization or a nonprofit that loves people that people actually sabotage the work they're doing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. It's by this is why really reinforcing that it's not about people doing bad things. It is really a very human thing to want the status quo. It's I always say whenever I'm working with groups, I say, don't forget that the word family and familiar have the same root word. So you take somebody and ask them to do something unfamiliar or step into an unfamiliar environment, or like say, teach online, and you're what's familiar is teaching in a classroom, they feel not just disoriented, they feel unfamlied. They feel abandoned at that moment. They feel like a little kid who's gone to Disney World and lost mom and dad on Main Street. Like it's not the happiest place on earth until they first run home to mama. And what happens is everybody wants to go back to the familiar, and that's because they're anxious, and that's what stops most transformative change processes.
SPEAKER_02:There's a sense of nostalgia in theological education that I think often stymies or stifles change. We want the program, the seminary that we want it. We see it as, you know, if you went to a place with rolling hills and green grass and 150, 200-year-old buildings and a musty library that smells wonderful for those of us who love books, and and and now we're living post-pandemic in a very, very different world. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's but one of the most interesting parts I said to people is um we talk about church being hard to change, or industries or businesses, or military. Seminary is an 1,100-year-old business model that goes back to monasteries. So, in our heart of hearts, all of us who came through seminary feels like we spent time in a monastery. Like there is this idyllic, formative location that is built around this the come of the most life-transforming experiences that we could have deeply spiritual, deeply educational, really robust. And we are now leaders of those institutions because that worked for us. I mean, we love that stuff. So now you're trying to have a whole new generation of people who are trying to figure out how to get theological education where the very best people in ministry are already doing ministry. So asking them to like leave a church they love or a community or a second career and move to an idyllic little campus where you're going to take on debt and study a bunch of books and then go back and find a job, it just doesn't even feel like it computes in the same way. But those of us who are being most shaped by it, who have the most authority in decision making, have that old view of the past.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'll tell you, as somebody who's I've got a foot in a couple of different worlds in the church as a pastor, theological education at the intrust center, and in the the groups and the schools that I work with, I see these books that you've produced, and it's they're easy reads in terms of, you know, it's not going to take you months of trying to work through with lots of footnotes, but the the ideas are deep, they're thoughtful, they're impactful. Um talk to me a little bit about what your intent is. What do you want people to get out of these books?
SPEAKER_00:Well, the first thing is I want them to know that they really are rooted in genuine research. I mean, I am a I do have a PhD, and so I've done a lot of work, you know. You have. It's clear. It's clear. So, and I say that not because you know, I I need to have a pat on the back, but because I really want people to know this isn't just me showing up as a person who, you know, grew a mega church and is telling you, here's how I did it, because I didn't. I pastored congregations, I've been part of seminary education, I've been a senior administrator, I've been a leader in denominations, have lots of experience. But what I'm really drawing from is not just my own experience, but from what the research says. And then I think what I really want to do is say the whole point of that research is to see lives changed. That's why we're in this. That's like that's what our leadership's about, to see lives changed. And then when you when you recognize that, you realize it's gonna require us to do more work, not less. And I want these books to be very accessible so that people can get right to work uh applying them.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's clear as you read it. When I say they're not going to take, they're not the academic tomes or papers that you would see in leadership literature, but it's clear that it the work's been done um in in what you do. You you talk here again, there are four books. There's one about wait not wasting a crisis, the mission always wins, invest in transformation and leading through resistance. Are those kind of the four areas when you're talking about the four mistakes people were making?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it was. Wait, I it it was inspired to me, Matt, because I spent last year I was in Bangkok with World Vision Finance, and I was with a group of leaders. This is what I do in my consulting work, and I was with a whole group of leaders who were taking on a really big challenge. They do micro lending. So, how do you do micro lending, which is built on how communities keep each other accountable to pay back small loans so everybody can be raised up? How do you do micro lending with refugees who are not gonna have a permanent address, maybe ever? That was the problem we're taking on. And I was so impressed with them that I ended up in lots of conversations. And what I found was very often these really strategic, brilliant people were stuck in a few different ways, like thinking that if they just worked hard enough, they would come up with a solution. Like almost every leader I know thinks they can outwork the changing world. Right. And instead, they need a different way of thinking about the problem and seeing the problem, um, seeing the shifts that are needed before you start trying to solve a problem. And and all four of them point to one of the things I saw. Leaders who try really hard with their old best practices, leaders who believe that if I just get all the stakeholders to agree, we're all going to get everybody aligned. This is the this is the one that's most often in the seminary. You know, if you can get the faculty on board and the development team on board and the board on board and the president on board, well, then you can do it. So we spent a lot of time running around appeasing stakeholders and trying to cut win-win deals that after a while are a lose-lose for everybody. Having to teach leaders there's actually a different way to go about that challenge, but we haven't been taught that. And there's, you know, there's two more in the middle of that, too.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you talk about there are themes that come through this book, and one of those themes you just mentioned is is in adaptive leadership. It's not about working harder, it's not about outthinking the change, particularly in this time, which is interesting to me because we had a world pandemic. Uh in America, it was like overnight all of a sudden. I mean, I was I was on the cabinet of a university, and it and it was like night turned to day or day turned to night in that kind of speed. And then, of course, what what did our constituents want? Everybody wanted us to go back to the old way. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's almost like the the the air around us, the people around us, we all want this nostalgia, and yet all the research shows we're not going back there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, it's it's even more profound than that, and the fact that um the the theme, how not to waste a crisis, is built on Heifetz and Linsky's adaptive leadership work. And they said in a crisis, there's two phases. The first phase is where you just try to survive, they call it the acute phase. But the second phase is when leaders go, okay, we're probably going to survive. Now, what were the underlying issues that have been revealed in this crisis that we actually now could attend to? Like we now have the will to get at these things. So, in almost every school I know, they were forced to go online, forced to go online. Right. And what happened is bad online education, which I say is a little bit like having a bad praise band after you've had a really good choir, right? Right. Like, don't compare your choir led by your PhD choral conductor that's been singing these beautiful pieces and anthems forever, to like a three kids on a guitar that have the know a few chords, right? Just don't do it. But bad online education became an excuse for people to resist what could be the most transformative kind of education, which is a which is a kind a combination of both online and in person. That wherever that is going on, almost every marker is that students learn more, are excited about it more, but but we absolutely just want to go back to what was familiar. We just want to go back to the familiar. It's not even it's not even nostalgia, it's like it's unconscious. We just want to go back to do the stuff that we know how to do. We we default back to our bet old best practices, even when they no longer work.
SPEAKER_02:As I'm reading through your books, I'm thinking, well, what is it that you want to know? I mean, particularly, or what would you want people in theological education to know? What should they be thinking? Because right now, you you mentioned it, the pandemic and the the preceding years or the succeeding years have shown us the underlying issues.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So one is if you can't name it, you can't navigate it. So let's just name it. Let's name the fact that we are in the middle of a demographic cliff. We're not gonna have that, we are it's gonna be a long time until we see the numbers of people showing up at our schools the way they did the last 20 years, that we have had deep disruption educationally and deep disruption vocationally. And the church is also in decline in the United States. So, knowing these things to be true, what might we need to learn in order to fulfill our mission? Okay, and that's really where it starts. I mean, uh the key for me has been a little phrase that a mentor taught me that he learned from a mentor that he first learned on a El Toro Marine base in California, yeah, which is at the moment of crisis, you do not rise to the occasion, you default to your training. And most of us in theological education were trained to be specialists in the areas of our guilds. Right? So one of the I was a I was in charge of leading change initiatives at the seminary, and one professor walked up to me and said, Todd, you don't get it. No professor ever introduces themselves as a professor at. They introduce themselves as a professor of. I'm a professor of history, I'm a professor of New Testament, of theology, of literature, whatever. They don't think about the organization. The organization for them is like the arena that allows them to fulfill their calling as scholars and teachers. That's very hard for most of us who are trying to bring organizational change, like a president or a board, to confront. That's a shift that has to happen literally in the lives of the most important people on our in our community, our faculty and our staff and our donors, to have to reframe and rethink our mission built upon that is completely different than the way we're we were trained.
SPEAKER_02:I, you know, I had a conversation with a denomination official recently who told me that the way we disciple people in America is in churches is through our governance, you know, through our bylaws. The person was talking about how membership process becomes a discipleship method. And I walked away from that and and may have lost a little more hair as I was scratching my head, thinking there is some truth in that. We have forms of governance. You mentioned earlier in in one of the books, you talk about how stakeholders that we spend a lot of time trying to create win-wins, and you mentioned this here, that really end up lose-lose. Yeah. So we have governance structures. We have boards, we have presidents, we have deans, we have faculty, we have shared governance. Um, if I'm a board member, uh I start to think as I'm hearing this, is maybe we have the wrong structure, or maybe we're not using the structure right.
SPEAKER_00:Well, so think about this. If you ask the question, this is that that famous phrase that is often umtimes attributed to Edward Deming. Um, your your organization is perfectly designed for the results you're getting. Right. Right? So if you ask, so what is the purpose of our structure? Like, really, like what does our structure actually do? Most of the time, it's something that at one time was really necessary and admirable. But it may not be the structure that helps us today. So when my company goes and does work, we always tell people we will answer your structural questions last. We've got to answer first are your values, your culture, your mission. Once we get those things aligned, once we get your values and your culture aligned with your mission, we have a sense of what we're really about and why we're about it. Then we can ask structure that serves that. And then we can ask, and what is our brand? What is our public promise? And almost every time, every organization I know has gone the opposite way. We started by having a new campaign, right? Like a new, like a new marketing campaign, you know, like, you know, it's just whatever it is. It's like I said, I'm a Presbyterian. We like say, we'll take Presbyterian out of the name, we'll call ourselves the flood, and we think people will flood into the church, right? And then we start changing the structure, we'll change the org chart, we'll change the and then we come back to these bigger issues because they're much harder. But adaptive change is change at the deeper level. It's a change when you don't know, you don't not have a best practice. So you have to actually shift values, attitudes, and behaviors. How easily do people shift values, attitudes, and behaviors? And how do you discern what you shouldn't shift? What you shouldn't shouldn't shift. So stuff like um, should we have a PhD program? We've always had a PhD program. To fulfill our mission today, do we need a PhD program? That's a very difficult conversation to have, especially when you have faculty who came because they want to work with PhD students. Like I know of a seminary that rejected having a PhD program because they said that's not our mission. If we're gonna actually be a seminary that equips people to become uh clergy in our denomination, we do not need a PhD program. The faculty were mad because you know what nothing is better for a faculty than a PhD student. That raises your own, you know, uh esteem and everything else. That's a hard call. That was a hard call by a really clear leader. And that's one of the parts that we find ourselves in a lot today is we want to we want to change, we have to get to the infrastructure, but what we really got to get clear on is what are our values? What is our mission? What is our culture? When those things are aligned, the other two can come.
SPEAKER_02:We're in this what would you call transformative time, tumultuous time, historic moment. People are, you know, we got tired of that talking about those terms in the pandemic, but it's really true. Now we're living afterwards in a world in which, as you say, people found they could do education online, they could do banking online, church online. Um, as I look at this and you're talking about adaptive leadership for a seminary, for a theological school, um, what I'm hearing you say is start getting your more your values and your mission aligned. Yeah. Then what?
SPEAKER_00:Well, once you get clear, I said once you get clear on your values, like for example, I don't think online is a panacea for everything. There's things online doesn't do well, right? Online does not let me hug my kids. Like now I'm more connected to my adult children because of technology than I ever was with my parents. But I spend much more money on plane tickets because I want to hug their neck, right? Like, so there's a it's it's never gonna just be a quick fix, even a technological fix. It's gotta come back to what is the deepest thing that we're called to do. And this is what's hard is that for most of us, we have competing values. And getting clear on the fact that we try to solve competing values with win-wins, when very often what we have to do is make hard decisions on win-lose. Lose maybe you're number two instead of number one, or it's one-one A, or now it's this because it's always been that and it may come back. But that clarity is a hard conversation to have when you're afraid you're gonna lose good people or you're gonna lose donors, or it's gonna be controversial. Um, that's that, but that clarity is what's really needed. It's that clarity that allows you to have health that you can then invest in the changes that you need to make, the transformation to make.
SPEAKER_02:So for a school, that may be we're not going to we're not trying to be the worldwide leader in X. It may be you don't need a PhD program, or maybe you do, yeah. Um, depending on what you're doing, but finding that clarity.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. Yep. And it's stuff like um, like for in many schools, asking the question like what um many institutions fall into the trap of believing the goal is to preserve the institution.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:I tell pastors all the time I work with a lot of church leaders, and I was working, um I was working with a group here in New York. If you've ever been to New York City, you know there's just all these beautiful cathedrals that have been built in different neighborhoods over the years, and a lot of them are sparsely attended. They're some of them are lovely and robust and stuff. And I said, My goal is not to make sure your church survives. Paul's churches didn't survive. But you and I are here. So let's get really clear that the mission of God is bigger than any institution, and that we're gonna have to then really grapple with what does it mean for us to be willing to learn and face loss and navigate competing values and experiment because we don't know, and then face the resistance that's gonna come with resilience. And that's the little checklist that I teach my students about adaptive leadership. That's it. Those are those five qualities that are uh show up as adaptive challenges.
SPEAKER_02:Well, let's talk about that because you you have and one of the things I love about your book is you have these wonderful illustrations, kind of like New Yorker style illustrations. They're smart, they're memorable. Um, but you talk about transfer or or experimentation and and that it's gonna fail. I mean, you have a the picture is is I won't I'm gonna put links to your books on our web page so folks can get it and buy it themselves and look at it, but the the image is memorable, yeah, is that we don't seem to do failure well. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I was working with a group of folks in Silicon Valley, and they have this phrase that you'll hear in Silicon Valley where they're doing tech stuff. It is fail fast, learn fast. If you fail fast, you'll learn fast. Fail fast, learn fast. And then a venture capitalist piped in and said, and fail cheap, it's my money.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right?
SPEAKER_00:So fail fast, fail cheap, learn fast. I've reframed that to say, look, if you're learning, you're not failing. So the first thing to do is reframe the question. The question isn't, did it work? The question is always, what did we learn? And if you can look, what did you learn? So when I was leading an initiative at the school, it was all on vocation formation. And when we started assessing students on how they felt about their formation, we found there was this interesting gap that the students who are in our residential campus, like with our best professors in our most idyllic location, were not reporting that they were not as satisfied and being formed as fast as our students in our regional campuses. So at first we thought, oh, it has must be something to do with the campuses. It wasn't. It was in our regional campuses, we were using a hybrid methodology where these were all people who came from a church setting or a community setting. They did stuff online and they also came together once a once a year for a week. They used to call that seminary camp. It was like the best week of their lives, and they were so tight and they kept those connections over the miles with their peers. And now I've built my entire doctor of ministry on this model. It wasn't what we set out to look for. We were not assessing that, but it's what we found. Like we learned that there is a model of forming leaders that keeps them in their context and then pulls them to an environment where they can develop deep relationships, but over time can be really transformative. And so today it's the only way I'll teach. Now, that's because I learned it. I wasn't looking for it, but it's what I learned. And that became really valuable. And teaching people, if you're learning, you're not failing, don't ask, did it work? Ask what we learned.
SPEAKER_02:As we start to wrap up, and this has been a wonderful conversation. Um I want to address this. You know, in seminary leadership and governance, there's a there's an executive leader, there's a board. And often a lot of this stuff is passed down to the executive leader. You don't see this at the board level, maybe. Board's supposed to be setting certain things and working at a certain level. What's your advice to boards in this?
SPEAKER_00:So, my favorite work on board work came from um Richard Chate. It's on governance's leadership. It's my favorite model. I like it better than some of the other ones. And one of the reasons I like it is it says, hey, boards have their own work to do, but that includes also being able to every now and then get up on a balcony with the executive team and ask, what are some of the things out there that we should be looking at? And so I think a good board understands that it needs to do its work of maintaining the mission and creating an environment for a leadership team to be able to explore, experiment, come back with insights, make decisions. Um, many boards pit themselves against the, but too many, too many boards think the president is the president, we're Congress, and we have to be opposing. No, we're actually one leadership team with lots of different responsibilities. We need to know our responsibilities, we need to do the ones that are our part, but we also need to all be having, you know, stacking hands on and looking in the same direction. I had a president once say, and who is on our board, say, you know, the biggest problem in most universities, he said one university he said was 28,000 faculty, staff, and students all unified around a common parking problem. It was the only thing they could agree on. That's bad news. If we can set all find out there's a certain mission that we're all agreed on, and then we can do our different roles, board is a different role than executive leadership, which is a different role than faculty leadership, then I think we can actually work together collaboratively. In a good way.
SPEAKER_02:Is there anything I haven't asked that I should have?
SPEAKER_00:I don't think so. I think if we ever talk again, we'll talk about we'll talk more about uh the whole notion of sabotage because I think we need to keep talking about that, but that's it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, we'll do that. Todd, this has been an outstanding conversation. I appreciate your willingness to share your wisdom with us. Um and as I said, at intrust.org slash podcast, I'll post more links to uh Todd's webpage, to the Amazon links for the books, um, and we'll certainly talk about more about this, and maybe we'll talk about sabotage the next time we chat. Todd, thanks so much for being here.
SPEAKER_01:You're welcome.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you for listening to the Intrust Center's Good Governance Podcast. For more information about this podcast, other episodes, and additional resources, visit intrust.org.