Leading into the Unknown: Tod Bolsinger on Adaptive Leadership

Aaron Santmyire: 00:00:08

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. Today we have the phenomenal opportunity to have with us on the podcast Tod Bolsinger. Tod was a pastor.

Now he's a consultant and he works with churches and missions organizations and NGOs and businesses on facing the realities of the world we live in and leading in this environment. He uses the backdrop in his book Canoeing the Mountains, Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territories.

He uses the backdrop of the explorers Lewis and Clark and how they had to adapt, right? They went out west, they thought they were going to get a waterway to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, what did they end up finding? They found mountains.

Probably not so great way to canoe in mountains.

And just the importance of recognizing that we're living in a changing world and importance of being a leader that has the ability to have adaptive capacity. He'll talk to us and share with us about that.

What really look what we're really looking for is communal transformation and how the things we need to put in to see this transformation that takes place. We'll talk a little bit about transformational leadership and how it begins with competence and the importance of how trust will play in that.

We talk about relational congruence. Just a valuable time, insightful time with Todd.

Just really enjoyed having him on the podcast and this is the first episode we do Canoeing the Mountains and then we're going to do another episode together and once again insightful and you'll really enjoy that that one. Also ask you to do continue to send in your questions for back channel with both.

That's where we get to sit down with Dick Foth and get to learn from him his wisdom and his insight and experience. Just an always a phenomenal time to have Dick with us on the podcast and ask you to continue to subscribe.

I know the podcasts that I subscribe to are the ones I listen to and the podcast is now on over 100,000 downloads, many episodes in and really appreciate you listening in subscribing and continuing to share the podcast with your friends and family.

Also my book A Caring Family launched back in December and that book is just a book that I wish that I would have read 20 years ago on the importance of being a father that was not being unique and special but was loved and known and the lessons I wish I would have known back back then but hopefully will help you today as a parent and a Grandparent as you navigate is as Todd shares in this, the changing landscape of what it means to raise children and the importance of having caring families in our life today. 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 today with.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:02:50

A new friend of the podcast, Tod. Tod, welcome back to.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:02:53

Welcome to the podcast.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:02:55

I'm glad to be with you. Thank you.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:02:56

Aaron said welcome back. And that's going to be the second episode. This is the first episode, so it won't be welcome back just yet.

So, Todd, I've spent a good amount of time in the last few months reading your writings and learning from you.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:03:11

For those who haven't yet, will you.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:03:13

Share a little bit about yourself before I start asking you a bunch of questions?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:03:16

Yeah, you bet. So for 27 years, I was a pastor in California.

I was associate pastor for 10 years in an urban chur in Hollywood, California, and then 17 years at a smaller beach community where I raised my kids and where I was pastor there. For the last 10 years, I've been at Fuller Seminary, first as a vice president and then now I run the Church Leadership Institute.

And, and I have a consulting company, a Sloan Leadership, where we work every single day with faith leaders who are going through change. So we help faith leaders thrive as change leaders.

And so today it's all in the basically being a consult and speaker and executive coach for faith leaders engaging in change.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:04:01

Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:04:02

Was that a process over time that you've ended up in this place? Because that there's a lot of specific experiences in led to this point where you're coaching and you're helping other faith leaders.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:04:13

Oh, yeah, actually, yeah. So when I love being a pastor and I was trained for that, and, and I got a PhD because I want to do some teaching and be a professor.

But there came a time in my own leadership time when I needed an executive coach to help me figure some challenges that I was kind of unprepared to face. And that got me into the place where I started doing that exact same work.

And over time I realized, really, my love is for serving and supporting leaders and in the development and capacity building of leaders, especially leading through change. We are, we say that our, our mission statement is to help faith leaders thrive as change leaders.

And most of us who have been trained as pastors were trained to help individuals, and we were trained to help people engage the challenges of life, but we weren't trained to help communities go through change. When the Context of the culture around them changes.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:05:11

Good word, good word. So, Todd, in the leadership space, how do you define leadership and what are some navigational points that you've used to guide your leadership?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:05:22

Yeah, so my definition of leadership is leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation so they might accomplish a shared mission.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:05:33

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:05:34

So for me, what makes leadership unique is you have to become transformed to be able to fulfill the mission you have. In other words, it's not just organizing or creating the context or the plan. It's actually going through the process of ongoing transformation.

So for me, the Venn diagram is transformation and mission require come around leadership.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:05:59

Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:06:00

Wow. And that's. I could go about 15 different ways, but I won't do that to you today. That's. It is.

I think that's what I loved about your writings, is your focus on transformation. And honestly, it challenges us. It challenges us to. And not just focus on people like you said, community.

So anyway, I won't go in those many different directions. So adaptive capacity. First time I'd ever heard somebody write about adaptive capacity.

What are some reasons that it's so vital today, this concept of adaptive capacity?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:06:34

Well, the kind of leadership that I work with people on that our company does so at a Sloan Leadership, we work with what's called adaptive change. And that comes from two guys out of Harvard named Marty Linsky and Ronald Heifetz. They developed this work called adaptive leadership.

And adaptive leadership is basically this. It's when you have to lead and your old best practices no longer work.

So when the things that got you here won't take you to the next step, you have to learn how to lead at that moment.

And so the capacity, adaptive capacity is your capacity to hold your most important values, the things that make you you, the things that make your organization's unique values that your organizational DNA, and adapt it wisely and well so that it can thrive in a changing environment.

And so that what it really points to is that adaptive leadership starts by paying attention to what's not going to change, what's essential to hold onto. And so it's a discernment question.

And then having to figure out the costliness of the things you're going to have to let go of in order to keep thriving in a changing environment.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:07:44

What are some reasons it's important to start with the things that are not going to change rather than maybe the things that you want to change. Does that, that make sense?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:07:53

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's very tempting when something's not working.

So just, I always say that, you know, you're in an adaptive leadership moment when you're a person who has been, say, a pastor of a church and somebody walks up to you and says, pastor, what are we going to do? Like, the neighborhood has changed? Or are our young people aren't coming back to church the way they used to?

Or we, we always assume that when people had babies, they would show up again to have their babies baptized and then we'd be growing and it's not happening. Actually, the statistics are kind of overwhelming that it's not happening. So what are we going to do?

And if you're a person with any kind of integrity whatsoever and you have any humility whatsoever, you're probably going to stare that person in the eye and say, I don't know. And at that moment, you're in a different frame of leadership because up until then you had a direction, you knew what to do.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:08:39

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:08:40

Like you and.

And a directional leader, a competent person who's got the right best practices and the right thing to do, knows the right thing to do can build a lot of trust. But transformation is what happens when you don't know what to do and you actually have to learn as you go and you're leading the learning.

And that's very hard for most people.

And even, especially ironically, I say this for people of faith, and it's ironic because to be a disciple is literally the Greek word for being a learner. But we don't think our leaders have to keep being learners.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:09:16

Yeah, how do you coach leaders, Pastors to be. To have the courage to say they don't know. You mentioned that there are people of integrity.

But a lot of times, at least in the leadership world that I've lived in in the past, church world, nurse practitioner background, normally you're expected to have the answers, not say, I don't know. So that, that is, that is a shift in mindset. So as you coach leaders to have the courage and the inte to say, I don't know any keys on that?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:09:49

Well, so here's the way to think about it.

So when Heifetz and Linsky put together their work on adaptive leadership, they make this distinction between what they call a technical problem and an adaptive challenge. Okay, a technical problem is not an easy problem. A technical problem is a problem where we just have the expertise to solve it.

So if somebody, I always say, whenever I'm with a group of pastors, I'll say, look, if right now, in this moment, someone ran into this room and tragically told us there was a car accident outside and I think someone's died and there's a family that is grieving. Could anybody help? Almost every group of pastors. I know that the decision wouldn't be can anybody do it? It would be, how many of us would you want?

Like, we all, like, that's a hard thing to do. That's not, I'm not minimizing that at all. But we have been trained on what to do. We know what to do.

If you have to go to a bedside or a hospital room or to be with a family in a crisis, we know what to do. We've been trained for that.

But if somebody was to all of a sudden enter into a room and say, we have 20 years of decline in our church and we're bringing you in, Pastor Aaron, to turn it around, what are you going to do?

Aaron Santmyire: 00:10:58

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:10:58

And if your answer is everything people tried 20 years ago, you're probably gonna work. It's probably not going to work.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:11:05

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:11:06

For you to be able to be a person who says, I have a 20 year track record of being faithful to the scriptures of caring for people, of pastoring people, well, I'm going to get to know you and we're going to bring people together. And I don't have a silver bullet. I don't, I don't have a magic potion. I don't have a glib answer.

We're going to actually have to go through a process of transformation so that we can become the community that can reach our neighbors, including all those folks around us who know who we are, but they don't want to come here anyway.

Yeah, that's, that takes a lot of courage and it takes integrity, but it also takes the security of knowing that you have done your best and that you're a person who has integrity and that you're, you're, you're not going to be faking it.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:11:51

Yeah, that's good. That's a good word and a challenging word, I think, to a lot of us. You also mentioned best practice.

Now, I'm, I don't know, 300 some episodes into this podcasting thing. I'm a best practice guy. Like, you know, I'm sitting in my sister's dermatology practice recording this today.

And so a lot of what I do in that world is best practice. But you use the word best practice in ministry, and that's the first time I think I've ever heard somebody mention that when it comes to ministry.

Could you just share a little bit about best practice in ministry and this adaptive capacity to say, hey, this is what was best practice in the past, but now as we look to the forward, maybe that's not going to be the best as we move forward.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:12:35

Yeah.

So best practices is simply a way of saying we have done enough, we have enough experience and we have enough expertise to have told us what really works best and is most faithful. So, for example, I work at a seminary. So everybody who comes to the seminary, somebody, you're the best Christian I know.

You should go pro and you should go off to Christian school. And they show up and we teach them the things they need to get a master of divinity. Like, it sounds like a superhero. Right.

We teach them, here's how you. Here's how you use original language languages, here's how you exegete the scriptures faithfully. Here's how you.

Here's how you preach on the Trinity without committing heresy. Like, you don't have to, like, use eggs and water and shamrocks that are all these heresies. We can actually teach you how to do it.

It's complicated, but we can teach you how to. Best practices are the things we've learned that work and that are the wisdom and of the past apply to today. And I'm.

And anything you can solve with best practices, you should. It's one of the reasons why the medical profession loves best practices because they're scientists. Like, we have test. We have tested these things.

The problem is when your best practices no longer work and now you're in another space where you actually have to lead people into a place where there are no best practices.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:14:00

Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:14:02

And this is what's difficult is because. And what makes it really hard is the people who we are leading want us to have an answer.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:14:10

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:14:12

Matter of fact, their anxiety means they usually would rather us make up a wrong answer than tell them we don't know.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:14:19

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:14:19

So one of the things I've often said when I consult and I work with groups is if anybody stands there today and tells you, oh, I know exactly how we're going to face these problems of a changing world today. Post Covid churches in decline, the church in the west is actually almost in freefall in certain spots.

Oh, I know exactly how we're going to do it, they're probably faking it. And if they look you and shake the finger at you and tell you I alone can solve it, they're lying to you.

And we have a tendency to want leaders to give us glib, easy answers, then take us through the process of transformation that will lead us to be able to be faithful into the future.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:15:02

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:15:03

And I think that's what you're challenging us to do is that the cumulative effect in going this for the long view rather than the short, pithy answers that as you said, a long time in the long run don't hold up this idea of communal transformation for mission and the direct focus of the leader that, you know, you have a leader that maybe has been focusing on connection and caring and now they're moving towards this direct focus on being missional. Can you share some more about that and maybe some of the tension points between the two?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:15:38

Well, so I have this little.

So I have a series of four little books out right now where I took the material from my earlier books and I broke them down into what I call the four big mistakes good leaders make.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:15:49

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:15:50

And one of the big mistakes that good leaders make is the belief that if I'm just trustworthy, you'll want to follow me.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:15:58

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:15:59

And the truth of the matter is we absolutely need trustworthy leaders. But being trustworthy does not necessarily mean I'm going to allow you to transform, be part of transforming me.

So there's no transformation without trust. But trust is not transformation.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:16:18

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:16:19

So one of the ways we put it is we'll. Is this kind of adaptive leadership is like following somebody off the map into. Into uncharted territory where there are no maps.

Yeah, well, I'm not going to follow you off the map if I don't trust you on the map. If you haven't been, I'm not going to trust you.

So now that I trust you, if you keep telling me, oh, there's a map up here, don't worry, we'll find it. Oh, I've got it. I got a map in my head. I'm not going to trust you. Trust is really important.

So transformation is when you take that trust and you invest it in the process of learning, discovering, clarifying who we are, getting clear on the missions in front of us, the transformation that's needed.

And so when our neighborhoods change, for example, and we say our deepest value is to be missional, we want the mission of, of God to be start at the sidewalk, not at seawater. Want the mission of God to go forward from our lives, not just from our checkbooks and what we give.

Like, we're like, we are all sent into our neighbors neighborhoods.

So that means I have to now be transformed from a person who thinks my job is to come to church into a person who now understands that My calling is to be sent from my congregation into my neighborhood. That radical reshifting is going to require me to rethink who I am and take on the responsibility for being continually being transformed by God.

And that's a big load.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:17:55

It is a big load.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:17:56

And do you find as you coach.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:17:57

People through that, is it a process to get through that? Because it doesn't sound like we make a decision, we go for it, but it sounds like, to me, a series of events to make that transition.

Is that a fair question?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:18:10

Well, it's a long process. So I would say that if you think about this, if Moses gets on the other side of the Red Sea. Right. So takes the Israelites out of slavery.

They're on the other side of the Red Sea. The manager walks up to him and says, hey, so that was a big deal, that miracle.

We should make sure that we celebrate that Red Sea thing, like, every week at dinnertime. Let's put aside a day to celebrate that. And we'll do that. That'll be important. That'll help us remember who we are.

Second, I've checked the maps, and I talked to locals. It'll take us about six weeks of hard marching to get to that place you call the promised Land. But we. I think we got the provisions. We could do it.

The leader knows it's going to take 40 years, and not everybody's going to make it.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:19:01

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:19:02

Because to go into that promised land, you got to now be a different people.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:19:06

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:19:07

It's no longer being slaves. It's now being a people who are going to be able to set up a culture that is going to reflect the very presence of God in the world.

And what they didn't even know until they got way down the road about 39 and a half years, is that none of the people who came out of Egypt would go into the promised land.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:19:31

Yeah. Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:19:32

Israel did, but the individuals didn't. So when I work with churches all the time, people ask me, like, you know, can your company help save our church? Can your. Can your consulting work?

Can you. Can you keep us from dying? And I'll say two things you got to know is, one is we can help you. We can help you thrive. We.

We can teach you if you want to. But our goal isn't to help keep your church from dying. Paul's churches all died.

Our work is to help you understand that Paul's church has died and we're still here.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:20:07

Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:20:09

So what matters isn't whether or not your church survives or not.

What matters Is the faith that has been passed down to us going to become effective at bringing the presence of God to our neighbors and our friends in the next generation? And how do you lead that process?

Aaron Santmyire: 00:20:27

Yeah, man.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:20:28

Challenging. Challenging words. You mentioned that there's three characteristics when it comes to adaptive leadership.

Would you be able to share those three and maybe unpack them a little bit for us?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:20:40

Well, when I talk about transformational leadership, the leadership, though, brings transformation. The three characteristics are you need technical competence.

In other words, you need to be good at the thing, things that people expect you to be good at.

So I always say, if you can't preach well, if you can't, if you're not faithful to the scriptures, you're not faithful to listen to people deeply and care for their souls. If you can't run meetings well, you waste their time.

If you can't handle money well, so that they all suddenly don't trust that your money goes to the mission it's getting. If you can't handle those things well, no one's going to follow. No one's going to trust you. So technical competence is really important.

The second part is what we call relational congruence.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:21:22

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:21:22

And this is a little bit like talking about character, but it's more than that. It's the way character shows up in relationship to people.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:21:29

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:21:30

So what people need to have deep trust is to know that you are going to be the same person. No matter where you are or who's in the room or who you're talking to or what your agenda is, you're going to be a congruent person.

So technical competence and relational congruence build trust, adaptive capacity, which is the capacity to discern your core values and adapt them to thrive in a changing world. That's. Those three things are what are needed for transformational leadership. Technical competence, relational congruence, and adaptive capacity.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:22:07

And can each of those three be grown, developed, formulated? Are there or coached as you help people? Or is that something that's innate, that people are able to. Maybe they're born with relational congruence.

Or is that something that we grow and walk in?

I'm just thinking for those who are listening in, maybe they're older leaders, maybe they're younger leaders, maybe they're in the middle of the road like me at 48. Are these areas that we can grow in?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:22:36

Yeah, I think leadership's a skill. I mean, to me, leadership isn't. It's not about having a title or heavy furniture or being glib or being creative.

It is about do you have the capacity to bring people together so that we can mutually be transformed, to be able to accomplish the mission that God has given us to do?

Aaron Santmyire: 00:23:01

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:23:01

And we believe that can be taught, it can be formed. It's, it's like any other skill. There are certain innate characteristics. Right. So think about this. I live in a seminary. I work in a seminary.

We teach everybody to preach. Right. Everybody needs to be able to open up the scripture and preach a sermon. Some people are funny.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:23:18

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:23:19

Like when I started preaching, I was not funny. I'm not very funny. I'm not funny. I, I mean, other people who were funny were more naturally gifted than me.

I came from a, I came from a family where my dad could tell a good story. So I was, My early preaching was mostly storytelling. Right. Which wasn't bad, but so they could build on.

Okay, you're not funny, but you're a good storyteller. But we're going to teach you how to be faithful with the scriptures. Right.

So there are certain skill sets that you can build on, but everybody can learn. And that's really important. Leadership really is a skill set that can be taught.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:23:56

Yeah, that's good. That's good. And I think encouragement for the rest of us. Relational congruence. Sorry, I keep walking back towards that one.

In the world we live in today, is relational congruence, is that becoming harder or is that just something that we're going to need to be growing more in? And you've mentioned several times that the world is changing. It's changing rapidly.

Is relational congruence something that you think that we, that we're going to need to focus on more in the days ahead or is that something that is a non negotiable? Does that make sense?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:24:37

Well, it's both. It's a non negotiable and we have to, we have to focus on the. Yeah. Focus.

And the reason why is because relational congruence at its core is when I, when you're asking me to do a hard thing.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:24:50

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:24:51

Do I trust that you care about me? Like, do I trust that you'll be the same person? Like, right.

So, so very often when, when we're working with, we're working with all kinds of organizations and churches and stuff, and they're all going through change and stuff.

Universities, when I come to you and say, hey, we've done a big assessment, we've, we basically said, here are the challenges you're facing, here's the issues that you want, here's what you say you'd like to be about. Here are the trend, here's the changes that are going to be required.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:25:22

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:25:24

Change is experienced as loss. People don't resist change, they resist loss hyphens. And Linsky said, yeah.

So if you don't trust me to care about you, then you're not going to trust me with your losses. So if I say to you, look, the church you love is going to die unless you are willing to change. Here's the weird part.

You might be able to keep it alive as long as you're alive.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:25:53

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:25:55

But it won't be there for your kids or your grandkids. If you want there to be a church for your kids or your grandkids, you're probably gonna have to let some things go.

You're gonna have to discern what you don't dare let go. Because if you let it go, you lose the faith, you lose what's important.

But you're gonna have to decide, is this about you or is this about the future? If it's about the people you love and you're willing to let some stuff go, you better trust that not only am I competent, that I've read that. Right.

But that I so care about you that I'm looking you in the eye and telling you this, because I really do trust your heart is something you want, something better than yourself. Because it'll be way easier for me to give you a false solution and false security and have you pay me a big fee and leave town and never come back.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:26:38

Yeah. Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:26:40

And that changes. Loss is a leader. As they begin to look towards the future, how do they navigate those losses without everyone fleeing? Right.

Because in general, people don't like. They don't like losses. They're looking for wins. And sometimes, as you said, we don't just want short term wins.

And maybe we can ride it out and it'll live as long as we're alive. But once again, it comes back to that courage to say, hey, I'm not just going to think about what's best for me.

We're going to look to the future and helping people with those losses. Have you found some ways to help people navigate those losses so they don't become destructive and blow the whole thing up?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:27:22

Yeah. So in the little books that I have, the four little books, I've got a little blue one called Leading Through Resistance.

And one of the parts that we learned, a book I wrote called Tempered Resilience was all about, what do you do when people fear the loss that they resist you One of the things you learn is you actually have to get closer to people. And that's hard. Right. When most of us are in conflict, we pull away.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:27:49

True.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:27:49

When you ask people to do something that is bringing change, they get mad and they get mad at you.

And so one of the things we teach people is that when you're facing the resistance and people are facing loss and they get angry and scared and resistant, you actually have to stay calm. You have to stay connected, and you have to stay the course.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:28:14

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:28:14

And give in.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:28:16

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:28:17

So it's not being stubborn, but it's having. If we have a deep sense of conviction, this is what we're supposed to be about.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:28:23

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:28:24

So I'll give you example. One of the churches I work, I work with a church in Texas. It's a wonderful church. I love the pastor. It's a great place. They live in a community.

It's an urban community in Texas, so it's more city than it is rural. And the community is changing. That's changing dramatically.

And they said, we have always been a church where our deepest value is we're going to love our neighbors and love our community. They would say, for us, this is a missional value. We're going to be a missional church that cares about our neighbors.

Well, their community has changed. It's become much more multiethnic. And it's become. And there's actually an influx of Muslim people who've come into the neighborhood.

And they believe what we want to introduce our Muslim neighbors to Christ. We want to love the people in our neighborhood. So they have become a multiethnic church.

They've been worked really hard to say people in leadership are going to. We're going to. They want people to. We want anybody who come here to see people who look like them and sound like them. We use different languages.

worked really hard. They're a: 2000

The problem is every week he preaches to 500 empty seats because they used to be 5,000 members.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:29:37

Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:29:39

And people come up to him and say stuff like, you know, we used to be really big, and if you'd stop all that woke stuff. He says, woke stuff. This isn't about being woke. This isn't about being DEI. This is me reading Revelation, Chapter 9, Revelation, Chapter 7.

Me reading Revelation and saying, there's a day is going to come when every tribe and tongue and nation are going to come before the throne. Yeah, it's me reading the scriptures and saying there's neither male nor female, true nor Greek, slave nor free.

It's when I read the scriptures and I say, this is what the gospel is. Good news to my neighbors. We're supposed to love our neighbors. So this is all we're doing.

And people say, yeah, but I don't want to be in a church with that much diversity. I said, what do you do? He goes, you go close to them, you care for them, you hope they'll go with you on the journey.

But if they want, if it's a conviction that God wants us to reach our neighbors, Jesus said, loving your neighbors as part of loving God. Yeah, we're gonna have to do that.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:30:41

Yeah. Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:30:43

It takes once. As you begin the conversation, it takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of courage.

When you walk into, say we won't focus on that church, but if an organization, a church, a mission, how are you able to assess or discern what the organizational culture is or is not?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:31:02

Yeah, so we have a whole process that we do when we start where we do a lot of, we do a lot of deep listening and it's not very complicated, but it's really intentional. And so one of the things we do is we do an open ended survey. Anybody in the Congress.

So if you just say a church, for example, it doesn't matter if it's. We had churches that are 50 and we've had a one, we've had one global megachurch is 100,000. Right. So it doesn't matter which size.

We do the same thing. We start by offering a survey. We let people tell us anything they want.

We live in a day where we have lots of tools and lots of technology that helps us be able to get really quickly to the meat of those issues. We do focus groups.

Focus groups let us take one of the things we learned and take it deeper with a group of people like, okay, hey, we had a group of parents tell us that their kids, that they're really anxious about their kids not wanting to come to church. Let's get those parents together and ask them some questions. Let's get those kids together and ask them some questions.

Yeah, we often do a focus group.

Say, can you give us eight to 10 people who've left the church, but who you trust and you love and you think they would tell us the honest truth about why they left the church?

It's, it's painful for the pastoral staff, but it is incredibly helpful where they'll, they'll tell you flat out, this is why we left and why we're heartbroken or why we left Anita to leave. We get. We do deep listening. When we do the deep listening, we begin to look for the underlying issues. We ask the question, what's been revealed?

What's the presenting problem? People talk about, but what's the underlying, deeper issue that we can hear for?

And once we've identified those, then we can start the process of transformation.

So it starts with a deep listening of identifying the challenges within the life of the congregation and the places where there needs to be transformation. And then we work through a process of how to do. How do you.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:32:53

How have you learned to deeply listen and have people in ministry deeply listen without becoming defensive? Does that. Does that make sense? Because you said you're here.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:33:06

Yeah, yeah. Well, it starts with. I mean, I love the fact that you mentioned defensive, because that's why people don't listen. They get defensive.

We often talk about, can you be curious? Can you be curious? Can you just say, instead of defending that people might have.

Like somebody recently said to me, I think we're in a world today where a lot of people have the wrong answer to the right question.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:33:31

Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:33:32

And we're so busy arguing with them about how bad their answer is that we're not hearing that they have a genuinely deep, good question that they're asking. So if I can. One of my. One of the guys that trained me that I really learned a lot from, he was a mentor. He was an unofficial mentor.

He was a leader in my church, and he was the Fortune 100 consultant for a big company. And I would ask him questions all the time as a young pastor, and I would say, can I get your advice on this?

And he would often stop and say, I know there's a good question in here. I just don't know what it is. And I think sometimes getting at the right question is more important than finding the right answer.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:34:15

Wow. Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:34:17

And is that just something we learn over time and getting the right question, or did he give you any wisdom on how to distill and find that right question?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:34:25

Well, what we've learned is very often the right question is the one we're afraid to ask, the one that feels dumb to ask, the one that is difficult, the one that actually challenges what you think. Think of how often you're listening to someone and you're posing the next question in your head instead of listening all the way through to.

That's what that is. So I've often to tell myself, I've Said that, you know, I started leading at a young age, and I've always been a good talker.

So I've been better at talking than listening most of my life.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:34:57

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:34:58

So now most of my life and most of my work is. Actually starts with having to do pretty deep listening. And I have to tell myself, just be curious. Be curious and be humble. Can I.

Understanding doesn't mean agreeing. Can I just understand where it came from? There's a little trick I teach my consultants who work with me.

I teach them if you can say back to someone what they said with the same emotional connection that they feel, your goal is to get them to go, that's right. That's right. That's exactly right. But most of us, our goal is to get someone to say, you know, you're right, you're right. I didn't see that.

You're right, you're right, I'm wrong. Your goal is not to be right. It's to say back to them in something that they experience you. So they say, yes, that's right. That is what I experience.

It's very hard to do, but you can practice it.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:36:00

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:36:00

And as you share, you know, I think the thing is, as pastors and people in the ministry, we're normally used to communicating to people. And it is a shift. Right. We stand up on Sundays. We stand up at times.

Normally you stand up, you speak, and you're speaking to with however you would like to say it. But this is. This. This is a major change in the listening that takes place and being willing. Because normally we're used to people listening to us.

Would you agree with that or not?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:36:28

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the little books I have, there's four of them. There's four books, Red, Yellow, Blue and Green. You can find them.

They're called the Practicing Change series. And the red book, which many people think of as the first book in the series, is called how not to Waste a Crisis.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:36:43

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:36:44

And the subtitle is Quit Trying Harder.

Because what most people do when they're in a crisis, when they're in an emergency, when there's something going on where I'm the leader, you're in charge, gotta take care of this, do this, get us through this, get us through Covid, get us through a pandemic, give us. What do you do? Is we work really, really, really hard doing the thing we've always done that is no longer working.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:37:09

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:37:11

And so learning to stop trying harder that we teach people, you have to see the shift before you solve the problem, See the shift of values, attitudes, or behaviors. In other words, it's a technical. It's not a technical problem. It's an adaptive challenge.

It's going to require you to discern what values, what attitudes, what behaviors are going to have to shift. Like my, my friend preaching to 500 empty seats. He's got to help his congregation shift.

That their neighbor means the people who are right around them, not just everybody who looks like them.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:37:46

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:37:47

You have to shift that value, shift that attitude, shift the behavior. What does it mean to really welcome our neighbors?

Aaron Santmyire: 00:37:54

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:37:55

And you mentioned on that line assumptions, Right. You write about assumptions and the importance of being able to maybe identify them. A lot of times they're comforting. Right.

But at the same time, they. You mentioned that they can be. You're right that they can be dangerous. How do we navigate as leaders? How do we navigate helping the people we serve?

Maybe look at some of the assumptions that are maybe spoken or unspoken and so that we're not falling into the dangerous side of assumptions. Is that a fair question?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:38:29

Well, yeah, sure. It's a one is to acknowledge that you have assumptions.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:38:35

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:38:36

Like one of the first things. So here's one. Whenever we get a bunch of data like, like when we.

We do a lot of surveys and we did a lot of listening and so we get all these reports, I'll. There's be a small group of team. They'll be working with us. The first question I ask them is, what would not surprise you to hear that we heard this?

Like, like when we roll this out, what would not be a surprise? Someone would go, oh, it wouldn't surprise me if, if, if everybody told you how much they loved our pastors preaching.

Because people love our pastors preaching. Great, Great. What else? It wouldn't surprise me if we had another argument over the bell choir. People have been arguing over the bell choir forever.

Great. What else? And I just ask them to tell me what's not going to surprise you. And you know what? Most the time they're really right.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:39:17

Okay.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:39:18

And what they're 100% right on is their assumptions. I assume these things true. So when I say them, stuff like, hey, here's an interesting thing. Nobody brought up the bell choir.

So what do you think about that?

Aaron Santmyire: 00:39:34

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:39:35

All of a sudden you're like, my gosh, I just thought there was a bunch of cranky people who really liked the bell choir. They didn't bring it up. Why didn't they bring it up?

Aaron Santmyire: 00:39:45

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:39:46

Okay. I have this assumption in my head about A whole group of people who love the bell choir, who are traditional, who are probably angry about here.

It's an assumption.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:39:55

Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:39:57

Those assumptions, man, they can get us for sure. And I think as we move into this, I think that's what's helped me thinking about being an adaptive leader.

And what it takes is to be able to put those on the table and to walk in them. Last question I have for you, and then I'm going to ask you to pray for us.

What are one or two questions that every leader should be asking themselves as they. They're growing?

And if they want to desire to become a transformational leader with adaptive capacity, what are one or two questions they should be asking themselves?

Tod Bolsinger: 00:40:32

I think you often ask yourself a lot, how is the world around me really changing? Okay, like, what's really changing? Not what I wish it was or what I. But how's it really changing? Then you can ask once I. Once I can name it.

I always say, if you can't name it, you can't navigate.

So if you say, look, you know, hey, this used to be a community that was pretty homogeneous, or this used to be a community where everybody knew their neighbor.

Or, hey, this used to be a community where all the kids played outside in the front yard, and now it seems like they're just so busy doing homework, nobody knows each other. Like, just observe it. Yeah, Learn to make observations. Just notice things around you. That's the first thing. What do you see?

And the second thing is then to say, what do I need to learn to care for these people? Like, first, what do I observe? And second, what do I need to learn? Like, what is it? What's. Like.

So that's a little thing, but we moved to the Upper west side of New York, of Manhattan in New York City for just a year at. My wife's an artist and she's going to art school here. And I literally thought to myself, I've never lived in an apartment in my life. Like, it's.

Well, I mean, I had. I mean, not in 40 years. Not since I was. It's been a long time since I was. It's been a long time since I live in an apartment.

What's it going to be like to have neighbors who I meet up and down the elevator? And I just thought, huh, what do I not know about them? What would it be like for me to learn about them? What do I assume about them?

Them that I don't know about them? Like, I just start realizing the more curious I get, I find the more curiosity I get, the more humility I have.

And if I can just keep you to keep teaching leaders, be more curious and be more humble and be open to what transformation might be needed to you, then the rest of it will follow.

Aaron Santmyire: 00:42:33

Wow.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:42:33

Good word. Todd, I appreciate you spending some time with us today.

We're gonna we're gonna have a follow up best episode on this investing in but will you pray for us today and yeah. That God will use what you shared to help us grow in these areas.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:42:51

Well, God, you know the people who are hearing this probably people that we didn't even intend. You know that there are things that places where this conversation went that I trust your spirit led it.

So I pray that your word would not return void.

And not just my words or Aaron's words, but the word that your spirit will speak into the heart of people about what you want to do in and through them.

And I pray that you would allow them to hear those instructions or those help or those suggestions, those perspectives, openness, so that they might be able to participate a bit more in the work of your spirit. So that your kingdom would come and your will would be done on earth even as it is already in heaven. Amen.

Tod Bolsinger: 00:43:42

Amen.