Invest in Transformation: Tod Bolsinger on Trust and Transformation in Leadership

Aaron: 00:00:07

Hey there and welcome back to the Clarity Podcast. This podcast is all about providing clarity, insight and encouragement for life and mission.

And my name is Aaron Santmyire and I get to be your host. We have the phenomenal opportunity to have with us back on the podcast Tod Bolsinger.

As many of you listen to the first episode we did together, Canoeing the Mountains. Todd was a pastor. Now he's a consultant, and we discussed his book in the first interview, Canoeing the Mountains.

And he uses the backdrop of the explorers, Lewis and Clark, and how they had to adapt to the changing times and what they found right. They were looking for a pathway to the west and they ended up running into the Rocky Mountains. Today we're going to sit down and talk about.

He's written a series of four books and we're going to talk about one of them, Invest in Transformation. We begin by talking about there's no transformation without trust. But the reality of it is trust doesn't equal transformation.

Todd gives us great insights on if we want to see missional change, we must be diligent about certain things. Character, being consistent in our integrity, being honest with our shortcomings.

We talk a little about a quote he puts in a book about disappointing leaders or disappointing people at a rate they can tolerate.

Just an interesting thought and great to hear him unpack that Sometimes, you know, as leaders, sometimes the resistance we receive when we're looking to see transformation take place comes, comes from the people that we least expected it or people that wanted us to be a leader until we make changes that are not necessarily good for them. And then there's challenges, talks about, Todd shares about losses that are inevitable in the change process.

And then a different thought and theory that I hadn't heard before was this idea of a holding environment. What is a holding environment? How it impacts us and the importance in leading change. And so just a great time to sit down with Todd.

Really appreciated him investing in me and the missionaries and those who listen in to this podcast do want to ask you to continue to send your questions for Back Channel of Foth. That's where we get to sit down with Dick and get to learn from him and ask you to continue to subscribe to the podcast.

I know the podcast I subscribe to. They're the ones I listen to. Well, there's no time better than now to get started. So here we go. Greetings and welcome back to the Clarity podcast.

So excited to be here for our second episode with our friend Tod. Tod, welcome back to the podcast.

Todd: 00:02:34

It's Nice to be with you again, Aaron. Thank you for having me.

Aaron: 00:02:36

I got it right this time when the first time, the first time we were together, I said welcome back and you hadn't been back, but today, this one, you're back. So I got it right then.

Todd, for people that haven't listened to the first episode we did together, will you share a little bit about yourself before I start asking you some questions about Invest in Transformation?

Todd: 00:02:55

Yeah. So I spent 27 years as a pastor and lived in two different contexts, 17 of them as a senior pastor for a church that was in Californ.

And then I spent last 10 years at Fuller Theological Seminary, six years as a senior administrator, and then the last four years leading a church leadership institute that studies leadership change. And I run a consulting company. And that consulting company works every single day with leaders trying to faithfully navigate change.

And so that's the work I do with lots of churches, lots of nonprofits, groups like the Salvation army and World Vision and Young Life and universities and stuff like that. So lots of different contexts that I've been able to work in.

Aaron: 00:03:39

Awesome. Todd, in the last episode we did together, you shared about four books.

And I know in our communication, this is something you're very passionate about at the present time. Will you share about those four books? And then before we focus just on one of those.

Todd: 00:03:56

Yeah. So there's a series of books that I just put out this last year in August. They're called the Practicing Change series.

And these books are interesting to me and they mean a lot to me, Aaron, because they represent a question that a really good leader was asking me. And most of the time it was a really good leader making a mistake. And I had this experience last year.

I was asked by World Vision to come to Bangkok and do some work with them with their Vision Finance, where they work literally with micro funding, microfinance. And these are amazing people. I mean, they're remarkable. They're all over the world. They're doing this micro lending.

And one of the questions I was asking them, we were doing some strategic planning work, and one of the questions we were asking is like, so what is the challenge you're facing today that's going to require you to have to go through change? And they said stuff like, well, you know, microlending is all built on relationships.

It's on people who hold each other accountable so you can get a small amount of money as they build businesses, get their bring their families out of poverty, raise their communities up. So how are we going to do Microlending for refugees, for people who are never going to have a permanent address anymore.

That's the problem we're going to take on. So I was stunned. I was so impressed by these folks. And the person who invited me, she's a person who's a vice president in charge of training.

And we were talking all the time I was there and we actually talked all the way to the airport. And when we got into like one of the layovers, we had a whole. The conversation just kept going.

And I thought to myself, I wish I had something I could give her that she could take home and work with a group of people.

And so I had this idea in my head and I asked my, I said if she was to go through the Los Angeles airport on her way back to Houston, which is where she was heading, and she was to walk into the bookstore and pull up a bottle of water and maybe a protein bar and a bottle of exced and pull a little book off the shelf that she could read on the plane two hours later, could she be done with that book and have a tool she could use with her team trying to navigate change? And these four books are built on that.

They're the four big mistakes that good change leaders make that they often stumble over and that they could just begin to learn about and then really quickly and then work with their team on them.

Aaron: 00:06:08

Wow. And so you mentioned those are, it's good leaders make.

So these aren't, these aren't the common mistakes that people that are not functioning leaders make, but these are the ones that good leaders make. Can you share just a little more about the importance of that?

Todd: 00:06:22

Yeah. So, for example, the four big mistakes. The first biggest mistake that all good leaders make is believing they can outwork every problem.

You give me a problem, I'm going to work hard. We're going to work really hard.

Those folks in Bangkok, they were putting hours and hours and months and months trying to figure out how to solve this problem that we're all. Every good leader I know is a hard worker.

If you think you can solve a problem by working really hard on what you've always done, you're going to be stuck. So I've got to help people quit trying harder and instead learn to retrain for new terrain.

Aaron: 00:06:57

And that's counterintuitive because most of us, most of us are double A driven personalities that we've got. You get to some point in your leadership because you worked harder than everybody else. And so anyway, yeah, that's exactly it.

Todd: 00:07:11

Yeah. The second one we talked about was almost every good leader is really good at winning over a group of people who are resistant to your idea.

You win over people, you make them happy, they're pleased. I mean, just think about how you've all.

Probably all had the experience where someone walked up to you and said, we're so glad that you're our leader. As a pastor, I can remember preaching a sermon and having somebody walk out in the patio and tell me, pastor Todd, my family loves you. We love you.

I mean, I'm like. I mean, I've had a plumber come to my house in the middle of the night. I paid them, but I didn't hug them. You know, like people hug us. They love us.

So the mistake good leaders make is thinking that if I can make everybody happy, then we can all make a ch change. If we can please all the stakeholders, if I can.

If I can at least make the important people happy, if we can please all the stakeholders, we're going to be happy. And the answer is, it's not that. It's not about pleasing the stakeholders. It's not about making. Deciding who wins. What wins is the mission.

Aaron: 00:08:09

It's a good word.

Todd: 00:08:10

Like, a leader has to be the one who says, our mission wins, not you, who's been here forever.

Not the old guard or not the donors or not the new me as the leader because I'm in charge, or the person who's been the president or the person who know the mission wins.

Aaron: 00:08:25

Yeah.

Todd: 00:08:26

And so the leadership not only needs to learn, keep learning, but the leadership has to be focused on keeping the mission as the main thing in front of us. And that's actually really hard when everybody's not quite sure. So those. Those two.

The third one, quickly, is having the mistake that people often make is when people push back against you, you have an idea. I want to be tough. I've got an idea. I want to make sure we do. When people push back against us sometimes, if we're not pleasers, we become bullies.

And we don't try to be. We're never. I mean, the good leaders aren't people who are actually trying to abuse people.

They're just people who are so convinced they're right that they don't want to give in. And what we're learning is you don't bring change by pushing back against pushback.

Pushback, when it comes to you, is part of people's process for buying in.

Aaron: 00:09:20

Wow.

Todd: 00:09:21

So you learn to let them push you back, push you, and you learn to pull them by you accompany through their own process of transformation.

Aaron: 00:09:32

Wow.

Todd: 00:09:33

And those three books, one's called how not to Waste a Crisis, Quit Trying Harder. The other one's called the Mission Always Wins. Quit Appeasing Stakeholders. The third one is Leading Through Resistance, Quit Pushing Back.

Those three books all lead to this fourth one we're going to talk about called Invest in Transformation.

Aaron: 00:09:48

Wow. Wow. And that's something right there. I won't go that direction. But that idea of stop pushing back, I think it's just.

I think it's just natural to want to push back. But anyway, totally natural. Yeah, but it is. That's.

Anyway, it goes back to the adaptive leaders we need to be and not continue to do what's not working and was best practice. And that doesn't work. So you mentioned it doesn't work. So we don't need to be doing that. So no transformation without trust.

Can you just share a little bit about trust and transformation and the importance of having trust for this transformation?

Todd: 00:10:32

So the first thing we need to say is, there is no transformation without trust. Period. End of story. And all of us know this, right?

The crisis of leadership in almost every culture and almost every age is because we stop trusting our leaders. We trust. We don't trust our institutions. We don't trust people in legal, people in power. We don't trust our teachers. We get cynical.

Like we see this in the political age today. We see this. Right? Right. Trust is the currency. Like you, you require high. Trust is needed to bring change.

The mistake that leaders make is believing that if I am a completely trustworthy leader, that therefore we'll all get changed and be able to live out our mission. And that's not true. There's no transformation without trust. But trust is not transformation.

Trust requires the transformation requires the investment of trust.

Okay, so in other words, most transformation comes when you and I agree that for the sake of the mission, we are going to have to sacrifice something.

Aaron: 00:11:43

Okay?

Todd: 00:11:45

So when Jesus says to his disciples, look, son of man is going to be turned over to the. To his enemies and be raised up. On the third day, Peter says, not on my watch, boss.

Aaron: 00:12:01

Right, yeah.

Todd: 00:12:02

Peter says, no, no, no, no, no. Jesus's response to Peter is, get behind me, Satan. And I've always thought, if Jesus calls you Satan, it's a bad day. You just had a really bad day.

What was that he did that was so terrible? He literally said, you can trust me to not let you go through suffering. Instead, what he needed to say was, not my will be done, but yours.

And so for most leaders, the process of genuine transformation is one of having to let go of the things that got us here.

Aaron: 00:12:44

Okay.

Todd: 00:12:46

There's certain things we did that got us here. I would say that whenever I'm talking to leaders, I'll often say, like, tell me what your leadership superpower is.

Tell me the thing you did that you're really good at. You know, you're good at, like, you know, you. I mean, you're. I'm not asking you to brag, but just, you know, like. Like.

Like, somebody said to me, like, I'm. Like, I was one. Somebody said to me once.

You know, the thing I know that I'm really good at is when the team is down, I know how to read the room, and I know how to bring all the team back together. I can do that. Or maybe you're a person who, like, what you're great at is when we all get kind of lost in the fog. I'll go.

I can rock a Excel spreadsheet. I can figure out. Figure out the plan, or I can. I can create a strategy, or we have a person who works with me, Angela.

We joke that she could run a small country, and she jokes, and she looks at us and says, why should it be small? Right? Like, she can warmly and winsomely crush to do lists. It's what she does. She just gets stuff done. Right. Well, my superpower is talking.

It's not a big surprise. I'm a good talker. I've been talking. I can talk the pain off a barn on it.

I mean, you give me a joke, and I can get you three points and a poem out of it. I mean, I can make. When you keep going back to your old best practices, what it does is it builds trust, but it doesn't bring transformation.

Like, okay, we just did a great sermon series on reaching our neighbors. That was awesome. That was inspiring. But we haven't reached any neighbors.

Aaron: 00:14:17

Yeah. Wow. And I think that's where we're at today. As. As you said that this. This transformation without trust, and trust doesn't equal transformation.

And it's a. It's a challenge for us.

You share that leaders who want to see missional change, which a lot of the people listening to this podcast are people that are maybe missionaries living on fields, global workers, whatever you want to call them.

There's 145 countries that listening and planting the church in multiple different capacities, whether they're businesses, mission, whether they're actually planning the church, whether working in an English center, whether they're multiplicity of ways.

But if they want to see missional change, they must be diligent about their character, the obligation to be consistent in their integrity, their candor, their courage and empathy to walk through change and to be honest with their shortcomings. You mentioned they're honest with their shortcomings.

What are some reasons that it's so important to be honest with our shortcomings if we want to see missional change?

Todd: 00:15:22

Well, there's two things. One is everybody else can already see them before you.

Aaron: 00:15:26

That's true.

Todd: 00:15:27

Right? Everyone. I mean, like, you're the last person to know your weaknesses.

I mean, or if you're really good at faking it and you're not the last person, you're dangerous, then.

Aaron: 00:15:36

Right?

Todd: 00:15:37

So if you really want to be a person who wants to see genuine transformation, like, I really want this to become a place. Like, I want this community, this.

This country, these neighborhoods, these people to know the love of God and to reveal God's justice and care for each other.

I want this community where I'm working right now with a large church in Houston that has said that it has gone into a gentrifying, transforming community that has been poor and been difficult, has been in a deep season of disruption. And they said, we want to have a missional presence in that community.

And instead of just starting, like, a campus church or like another, like, mega site or something, they said, no, we're going to actually go in and listen deeply to the neighbors and find out what they feel like will make their community better.

Like, in the name of Christ, how can we make everybody here experience what we would call the blessing of God's presence or the shalom of God of this area?

And what they came out was with this, they said, our neighborhood is changing so rapidly that if people could learn to develop relationships across differences, if people could learn to share and care about our whole community and not just themselves, and if people could learn to be inspired to serve others. This is just people. Neighbors said this. If good people came together, that would be great. They said, that's what we're going to be about.

We're going to be about that. In the name of Jesus, we're going to be about that.

Well, that requires them to, like, not just get a smoke machine and a band and throw up and, you know, run a cool service, but literally ask, how do we love our neighbors and how do we bring people together?

That kind of missional transformation requires them to be willing to ask some new questions and be willing to let some stuff go and that there's high trust, but. But trust requires the investment of transformation. And we have a process that we take people through where they learn how to do that as well.

Aaron: 00:17:36

Wow. You know, it made me. When you were talking to maybe think of a story.

When we were in Madagascar, we were in a rural village that is living very similar the way they've lived for hundreds of years. And so we get there and they're drinking out of the same water that.

The same creek or river that the cows are drinking out of, they're using it as the bathroom, all these things. So we thought what this community needs for transformation is need a well. You know, if we go in and we get put a well in, this is what they.

We didn't ask questions up front. We just went in with this assumption that this community, if they had a well, you know, it would solve a wealth of problems. I was the medical guy.

I was taking care of all the medical problems or a lot of the medical problems. So I thought this was going to be a solution. So we brought a well team in and they said, but we want to sit down and we want to ask questions.

And I said, well, we. It's obvious like, they need a well.

Like, I don't know what, but no, we're going to walk, we're going to do these questions, we're going to do these questions. And so they went through a day of asking, listening, asking questions. And I was treating people for medical problems.

At the end of the day, I said, you know, what did you find out? They said, well, I don't think they need a well. I'm like, no, no, that's what you all do. You do wells. They said, they told us they don't want a well.

If we put a well in, they're going to use it for their cows, but they can't. They're not going to drink that water. And so he said, unless you want to put a well in for their cows, you're wasting your time.

But it goes back to this idea. Sometimes we come in thinking that we have the.

We know what is going to need, needed for transformation without listening to the people and listening to the people we're trying to serve and people they're trying to care for. And anyway, sorry that I went on with the story. I love to tell stories, but that's one of them that made me think that, man, that. That's right.

That's it right there. That's it right there.

Todd: 00:19:19

So when you talk about how do you invest trust and transformation, one of the first things you do is you create what we call a holding environment. A holding environment is a group of people who learn to trust each other.

Well, they trust each other, they develop good relationships, good conversations like you just had. Listen deeply so that together we can work on the problem. Okay, but the difference is you're the medical guy, you come in and go, I know.

Put in a well. They did is they actually spent a day building a holding environment. We never called it that, but that's what it is.

They built trust where they told them the truth. And I remember when I was a pastor of a church, we did some work. Our church helped start a work in Malawi.

And one of the things we did, I traveled to Malawi and we said, okay, we know what you guys need. And we had the same thing. We had the well solution. All everybody's walking five miles to get water, we'll put in a well.

They said, no, what we want you to do is help us put in a school. We said, why would you want us to put in a school?

They said, because if you get put in a school, our children will learn how to eventually give us a well.

Aaron: 00:20:19

Wow.

Todd: 00:20:20

You give us a well and we still won't have our children educated.

Aaron: 00:20:24

Yeah, okay.

Todd: 00:20:25

It's their priorities, not ours. Now, once we listen to them, then we could develop trust.

So the first thing you do is you create a holding environment, which is a little bit the way example I use. It's a little bit like cooking with a Dutch oven, like a big old cast iron Dutch oven.

You need something that can handle the heat, and it can also be monitor that heat well so that you can have a long slow cook that will transform that into a stew. You need to have the right amount of heat over the right amount of time without it burning.

And a good Dutch oven, a good cast iron pot is like a holding environment. That's what you do when you build trust.

You build trust to create the environment where we can have the hard conversations we need to that will lead to transformation. That's one of the first things. And you just, it, you just modeled it deeply by going, okay, took me the expert out of the room.

Put a group of people together and what they do, they listen and they develop trust. And we can, we can, we can work with them.

Aaron: 00:21:21

Yeah.

You know, and the one thing for a medical person is you're, you know, you basically you see patients every 15 minutes, so you're normally looking, hearing a problem, and the patients don't want you to wait days to figure out the problem. They want an answer in six or seven minutes so they can go on with their day.

And that's been a challenge for me when it comes to a lot of these areas because I get into the six or seven minute mode and not deep listening to what's really going on. And you mentioned about what the surface problem versus or what's really going on there. Yeah, it's been a challenge of mine.

Todd: 00:21:55

So what you're describing is, and this I think is important, especially for the folks that you get to work with is technical problems are not trivial problems. Technical problems mean an expert can solve it.

So way to think about it is you've often medical people are actually brought in to solve technical problems. So my dad is 82 years old. During COVID he had a heart valve go out.

Now I would say Covid saved my dad's life because he was sheltered in place and he wasn't doing what my 82 year old dad would be doing, which is working because that's what he does every day. He'd be working, he would have fallen over dead on the sidewalk.

But because he was home, sheltered in place, being trying to be safe in Covid, my father was able to. When he stopped breathing, well, my stepmom could see it, get him to a doctor. The doctor did a heart valve transplant. That's a technical solution.

Like that's an expert did it. When I asked my dad, how do you feel about going to see this doctor? He said, my guy said to me, Mr. Bolsinger, I know you're nervous.

He goes, I'm not nervous. No, you're nervous. But I do five of these a week. I got you. That's what you want.

The problem is my dad needs to also change his life so that he doesn't keep going through heart valves. Yeah, that's the adaptive challenge.

Aaron: 00:23:17

Wow.

Todd: 00:23:18

It's both.

Aaron: 00:23:19

Yeah. And it's, it's being able to figure out which is which in different season holding environment. So I just want to ask one more question on that.

Is there an ideal amount of people that you have in. In the, in the. Would you say a holding environment? Is that what it was? Correct.

Todd: 00:23:36

Yeah, it's a holding environment. That's the phrase that's used by Heifetz and Linsky, the adaptive leadership.

Aaron: 00:23:41

So is it, is it depend on the size of the. Is there.

Todd: 00:23:44

Is.

Aaron: 00:23:44

Are two people, is that too small? Is 100 people too large? Depends.

Todd: 00:23:52

Yeah, it depends on the work you're doing.

Aaron: 00:23:53

Okay.

Todd: 00:23:54

The very often I think you want to, usually you want to in Most leadership processes that we talk about, bringing organizational change, they've had. There's different names for these groups. One guy, John Carter, called them a guiding coalition. Right. So it's eight to 12 people.

I always think, start with a small. And I used canoeing the mountains. The book I wrote had a core of discovery. It had 28 people, right. So they.

They used 28 people to discover the whole North American continent.

So it's a smaller group of people who are going to develop, who are going to do deep listening, developing trust, doing the work together, and developing the capacity to be able to explore the hard, deeper underlying questions, the places where we're going to need to let go of the past in order to try new things. So it's usually, you know, so when we.

Right now we're working with Wycliffe Bible translators, and they've asked us to come in and work with them to prepare for the future. And they've asked us to work with not only their executive team, but three layers deep in the organization. Right.

They're very aware that Bible translation is changing. And so they're going to need to prepare for a dramatically changing world. They've asked our company to help them.

Their holding environment is whoever they are going to be having to make the hard decisions and who's going to develop the relationships out of that? That's what's going to happen.

Aaron: 00:25:15

And that kind of leads me to my second point. You share in the. Or one of my questions. You share in the book a quote about disappointing people at a rate that they can absorb.

And sometimes making those hard decisions is disappointing people at the rate they can. They can absorb. Can you share why? Some reasons you put that in the. In the book and just for us to.

I've quoted it multiple, giving you credit for including it in the book. And it's good advertisement for the book, but I've shared it a lot because sometimes as a leader, that's what I feel like I'm doing.

So anyway, will you share a little bit about it?

Todd: 00:25:54

Yeah. So it's from Marty Linsky, who's. Hi, Fitz and Linsky, the adaptive leadership guys.

He said that originally and he said leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb. And what he was basically pointing to is this. If you're just solving people's problems, like my dad's heart valve transplant, nobody's disappointed.

And that's great. You show up with your medical. Give. Give somebody a diagnosis, help them with stuff. Oh, yeah, it's great.

There's nothing wrong with that, leadership requires people to go through transformation. So when you look at them and say, you know, I can't fix this with a pill.

Aaron: 00:26:27

Yeah.

Todd: 00:26:28

I can't solve this with a sermon. We can't just get a smoke machine and a kicking band and bring the gospel like we. We actually are going to have to be transformed.

Most people are deeply disappointed, and their disappointment leads them to resistance. They resist the loss. And so what you realize is that all transformative leadership requires people to deal with loss. You're taking them through loss.

Aaron: 00:27:01

Yeah.

Todd: 00:27:02

It's at the heart of Jesus's work, too. Right. Unless a seed falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Aaron: 00:27:10

Yeah.

Todd: 00:27:11

Right. You leave your nets, follow Jesus, pick up your cross, follow Jesus. You ask to be on the right and the left, you get in trouble.

Be the servant of all you can be like Jesus. It. It's loss. It's taking people through loss, and it's taking people through loss for something bigger than themselves.

So one of the first things we do in the Invest in Transformation book is we get really, really clear on what's the thing that is unique about us that we're not going to let go of. What's our charism, what's our gift, what's our deepest values? Because we're going to have to get ready to lose a lot of stuff.

It's probably going to be hard. But here's what we're going to preserve, no matter what it.

And when we preserve that, and we talk about that, and we understand that to be the charism, the gift that we give, the gift that we have that is unique about us, then we can pay attention to how that charism addresses the changing world and requires transformation.

Aaron: 00:28:14

Yeah. Wow. Good word. Good word. And one of the other things, and my wife and I have talked about it a few times, is this idea you share in the book.

I'd never heard somebody communicate it. Experience. You experience it, but you'd never heard somebody put it in words.

And it was this idea that the resistance we can often receive is from those who asked us to lead. It can be. It can be surprising because sometimes you share that.

You know, normally people ask us to lead because we think we're going to better their life. Right.

And then when we make decisions, hard decisions that don't necessarily better their life, then you can be surprised when they're the ones quitting or they're the ones walking way, or they're the ones that are, you know, shooting the darts. How do you, how do you coach leaders to face these surprises and not just quit or not just bury their heads head in the sand.

When the people that ask them to lead are now the ones that they feel like are the ones that are struggling.

Todd: 00:29:14

So this is probably the bulk of the work that we do. Our con consult, my coaching, our consulting, our company does. If the first thing we do is help people learn.

There's a different way of leading when you don't know what you're doing, when the world has changed, when you're leading on uncharted territory off the map. You need a different kind of leading, which is adaptive leadership.

The second thing we teach them is you will not succeed alone, but you haven't succeeded until you survive the sabotage.

Aaron: 00:29:46

Wow.

Todd: 00:29:47

Leadership is always faces sabotage. And sabotage is not the bad things that evil people do do.

Aaron: 00:29:55

Okay.

Todd: 00:29:56

Sabotage is the human things that anxious people do. When people are anxious, they're afraid of losing something. They want the familiar, they want to go back. It's Moses.

Six weeks, six weeks after the Red Sea, six weeks after the greatest miracle that anybody would see until Jesus's resurrection, 650,000 of them, six weeks they saw later. Six weeks later, they're saying, you know, slavery, Hear me out here, they killed our children. Yes, but we did have leeks and onions.

It's hard out here. Maybe we should go back and that the most soul sucking thing for leaders is sabotage.

So after riding canoeing the mountains, I wrote Tempered Resilience, which is about the way in which we learn to survive sabotage. In the little books, the third book, Leading Through Resistance is about how do you deal with sabotage.

You know, what do you do when people get sabotaged when sabotage you and they come up against you, they're mad at you, they're angry and disappointed. You get closer to them, you accompany them. You realize they're not people who are trying to thwart you.

There are people who are anxious and they need you and so you actually get closer to them. It's so hard. But it's really the key to the kingdom. Ed Friedman said it's the most important aspect of leadership. Most important, important.

And most of us have never been taught it.

Aaron: 00:31:27

Wow. And it's for sure. And I think that it's the drift, right? The drift is to push away, defend. It's not to draw in.

And I think what you're sharing really helps us recognize that it's not personal. Right. It's what's going on in them. It's this anxiety in them.

And we might be part of making decisions that maybe have, have created some of that, but it's not, you know, hey, I hate Aaron San and I'm just going to make his life miserable, you know, But I think that's, that can be common. Is that, is that a fair assumption?

Todd: 00:32:02

Oh, 100%. Yeah. It's. I always say to people, just if you ever get stuck, you're sitting there in the moment, you're thinking, what the heck's going on?

Just remember this. The root word for family and familiar are the same root word. So I'm asking people to do something unfamiliar to them. Them.

Yeah, I'm asking them that instead of making the church about us, we're going to make it about our neighbors.

Or instead of just being about, about discipleship, we're going to actually, we're going to actually serve a cup of cold water or do a medical missionary mission work or, or instead of solving a problem like putting in a well, we're actually going to gather people together and listen to them. Like. This feels unfamiliar when you do something that is unfamiliar. People feel unfamilied.

Aaron: 00:32:44

Wow. Wow.

Todd: 00:32:46

So that means they don't just feel disoriented, they feel abandoned, they feel alone, they want to run home to mama, they want to go back to do anything familiar. So think about how often when you feel anxious, you go back and do something you're good at.

Aaron: 00:33:03

That's true.

Todd: 00:33:04

Right. Because you feel, it feels familiar. It's really hard to stay in there and go through the transformation needed. That feels unfamiliar.

Aaron: 00:33:16

Might be a reason I have, I spent a lot of time in school. That was what, you know, that was always familiar to me. And so I just kept going back to get more degrees and more degrees.

But you're right, it was something that was familiar. I like to learn. And you could see some, some, some, sometimes some of the gains in the middle of some losses.

So one of the other things we've hit on a little bit, the idea that losses inevitable in change. And you list a few that could go straight to the personal and organizational identity.

Reevaluating legacy commitments, reconsidering unspoken loyalties, shifting unquestioned behaviors and attitudes and naming and navigating competing values. Do all of these necessarily or inevitably need to happen and, or does some happen in certain organizations as they go through change?

Could you just maybe share a little bit about that? Can we expect all the to happen or maybe some of them to happen or maybe it just depends.

Todd: 00:34:20

Yeah, it shows up. They show up in different ways in different settings. Right. So yeah, so in different ways.

So like, for example, one of the ways, like, so, for example, I've worked with mission agencies where as long as we trust that the president, the boss, whoever's in charge is hearing from God, we're fine. We'll do. We're humble, we're God, we believe you're God's person. God speaks to you, you're fine. So we all trust you. We can sleep at night.

God speaks to them, not us. It's, you know, mo. Moses is up on the mountain. Long as Moses is talking to God, we're fine.

When Moses doesn't come down for a while, we start freaking out. We got going after golden calves, or if Moses comes down with his face all radiant and we go, my gosh, he's just seen the presence of God.

And then Paul tells us later that Moses kept that veil on even after the faith so that people thought he was still radiant with God's glory. He's fake, right? Part of what we're learning is different groups respond to different challenges differently.

Aaron: 00:35:27

Okay.

Todd: 00:35:29

So the key thing is, if you're a leader, is to recognize once we're clear on what will never change, we must be prepared to change everything else. So once we say, okay, what matters is that we're going to go to this promised land, and we may not be able to take everything with us.

And we're gonna have to learn how to depend on God and on each other. Okay. This is hard. Sabotage will show up in lots of different ways.

Once you realize that, however it shows up, it's people being anxious, then you learn that what you can do is you can be calm, not take it personally, stay connected, accompany them with them. They need to be accompanied through it and stay the course, be really committed to. Unless there's. This is our conviction.

We decided God's taking us to the promised land, we're not going back. So come along.

Aaron: 00:36:31

Yeah. Do you think this is. This is me going on a little squirrel track. But in. In organizations, like business organizations, do they have.

They have a challenge stopping things. As much as I think sometimes in the church, I think in the church. I grew up in the church. I love the church. 48 years old, it's been a great thing.

But I've seen that we start. We can start things pretty quickly, but bringing to a point to say, you know what? This is.

This has served its purpose and its reason, and we're gonna. We're gonna stop it. We have a. We seem to have a challenge with it. So is that. Is that common across all organizations. Do we see it more in the church?

The businesses have the same challenge. Is that a fair question? I know you don't necessarily work with businesses, but at the same time, is it just specific with churches?

Todd: 00:37:20

No, it's actually. It's humans. We hold on to things that we're comfortable. We are like.

So I mean, I mean literally, like think about the number of businesses that discovered during COVID that you could actually have remote working.

Aaron: 00:37:32

Yeah.

Todd: 00:37:33

And the number of companies that ordered people back to the office even.

Although a whole generation of people and a whole bunch of studies proved that there are certain things that are good to be in an office and certain things that are not good to be in an office. And that your best way forward now is to take this learning and figure out the best way to office and the best way to be a team. Right.

I mean mission agencies have been doing this forever. Like they're way ahead of that on that.

But I just this last week I spent time in a New York City high rise office building that people pay a lot of money for because it's really prestigious and no one was there.

Aaron: 00:38:09

Wow.

Todd: 00:38:11

Not one employee was there. And I literally asked the person who was giving me the tour. I said, why do they have it? They said because it's a prestigious address.

Aaron: 00:38:21

Interesting.

Todd: 00:38:22

Like to give it up means to say, okay, we're communicating something. We don't want to communicate the loss.

Aaron: 00:38:29

Wow. Wow. I want to spend some time asking. I get about two more questions for you. This one really hit home.

It's one that I've thought a lot about since reading through the resources about learning to recognize and invest in the mature and the motivation does it that it really stuck out to me because sometimes I think some we. We drag maybe some people that don't really want to come along and we end up dragging them and we're tired and word out. But that hits on it.

The mature and motivated in investing there versus maybe people that are not really wanting to come on in the change journey. They're really not looking to change. But we spend a lot of time trying to pull them a long.

Could you just share a little bit more about investing in the mature and motivated?

Todd: 00:39:20

Yeah. So very, very often when my. My company are we a consulting company. We get hired to lead organizations and churches through change.

And one of these we talk about is we cannot change for them. It's their work. Yeah. Help them with their work. We cannot be more motivated in their change than they are. We can.

I mean so I often talk to My, my, my consultants about are they a good client or should we fire them as a client? As it. Because the two things mature and motivated means this mature means I'm an adult. I take responsibility for myself.

Aaron: 00:39:59

Yeah.

Todd: 00:40:00

And motivated means this is mine to do, so I am motivated to do. If you're not mature and you're not motivated, then there's nothing we can do.

And a lot of times as weird is those of us who are in leadership, we think it's our job to grow people up and inspire them. And I think my job is to actually help leaders continue to grow in their own journey. I often say our job is to think.

How can we help you with your problem? How can we help you mature into the person that you want to become? We can't. We can't do it for you.

One of my colleagues likes to say, you can't stop smoking for somebody else. Right. They gotta want. Right? Yeah. So the mature and the motivated are really the way I think about the kind of the table stakes.

How do you begin this get been this whole game? How do you get into the game?

Aaron: 00:40:54

It's that, that's good, good stuff. Last question I have for you. You talk about a transformation team experimenting their way forward. What does this practically look like?

And how does experimenting our way forward, how does that impact others? And how can maybe we navigate how it impacts others?

Todd: 00:41:18

So in adaptive leadership and technical, technical problems are solved by experts with best practices. Adaptive leadership is solved by experimenters who are learning way forward.

So what we say is when you're in an adaptive situation, which means you don't have a best practice, there's no, we don't have a solution. We're gonna have to learn our way forward.

The most thing is that you take on experiments and the, what we do to people is we say don't ask the question, did it work? Ask the question, so what did we learn?

Aaron: 00:41:53

Wow.

Todd: 00:41:53

And. And then do another experiment and ask what did we learn? And I do another one and ask what do we learn? And do what do we learn? What do we learn?

And spin that flywheel faster. And that's how you move forward. We move forward one learning at a time.

And if I think if we could find a way to focus on what we learn, learning is really motiv and learning will keep us going and learning keeps us engaged and inspired.

When you're learning, you're not failing and, but trying to convince people to do that is really hard because it means you have to start with, I don't know, I'm going to have to learn. So what's the next thing I'm going to learn? And the next thing, and the next thing and the next thing, and pretty soon you can bring change.

Aaron: 00:42:34

Yeah. Well, I won't ask you another question, but I have one more. But where can people find. Where can people find your resources?

How can they connect with you? I'll put links in the show, notes for the books, but just some information on how they can connect with you. And then I'm going to ask you.

Todd: 00:42:49

To pray for us. Yeah. Our consulting group is called AE Sloan Leadership. It's named after Alan Enid Sloan.

They were two older people in the life of my church when I was a young pastor who invested in my wife and me.

Aaron: 00:43:00

Wow.

Todd: 00:43:01

And when they passed away and they were 85, and I asked their kids if we could know if I could name my company after them because they were people who were deeply invested in us. A.E. sloan leadership. So if you look up A.E.

sloan leadership, s L O A N A E Sloan Leaders Leadership, or you just find my name and it'll take you to our consulting company, and there you'll find all the stuff. It's where we have our resources and our connections with the materials, books, and all that kind of stuff.

Aaron: 00:43:26

Awesome. Todd, I really appreciate you spending some time investing into the missional leaders around the world that listen into this podcast.

And will you pray for us?

Todd: 00:43:36

Indeed. Indeed. Oh, God.

Wherever this podcast goes, wherever somebody's listening in and they hear something that speaks to their situation, I just want to give you thanks for the privilege of being able to walk even audibly, even for a moment, alongside a leader who wants to bring change.

And I pray that you would multiply our conversation and these words and the learnings that we have had along the way into these very different contexts to these different people and help them to continue to experience your presence. Pray that you will show up in ways that they would wouldn't even expect.

And it would be a source of great encouragement because they will experience your presence coming to them and speaking to them to the end, that your kingdom would come and your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Aaron: 00:44:40

Amen. Amen.