Invest in Transformation (eBook)

Quit Relying on Trust

Tod Bolsinger (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
128 Seiten
IVP (Verlag)
978-1-5140-0873-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A New Path Forward In a world where skepticism often clouds judgment, communities need leaders who can reignite the spirit of unity and continuity. Trust is a delicate currency-it can be hoarded or squandered, but only when wisely invested can it truly fuel transformation. Bestselling author Tod Bolsinger offers leaders a compelling guide for transformation and trust with Invest in Transformation. Invest in Transformation offers leaders a practical guide that provides: - Wisdom for Growth: Revive trust within your community to enable the kind of transformative growth that turns visions into reality. - Practical Leadership Tools: Learn from Tod Bolsinger's rich experience, gaining insights that are not only theoretical but actionable. - Engaging Content: Enjoy brief, accessible chapters filled with colorful illustrations that bring complex ideas to life. - Real-Life Scenarios: Explore real-life case studies and exercises designed for teams to process and implement change together.There is no transformation without trust, but remember, trust alone isn't transformation. It's time to learn the art of investing in trust for meaningful change.

Tod Bolsinger (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a speaker, executive coach, former pastor, and author who serves as associate professor of leadership formation and senior fellow for the De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Seminary. He is the author of Canoeing the Mountains, which was named Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year in Pastoral Leadership, as well as the Christianity Today Award of Merit recipient It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian. For seventeen years, he was the senior pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church in San Clemente, California. A frequent speaker and consultant, he serves as an executive coach in transformational leadership.

Autor

Tod Bolsinger is the founder and principal at AE Sloan Leadership Inc., the executive director of the DePree Center Church Leadership Institute, and associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary. He is the author of Canoeing the Mountains and Tempered Resilience. Tod and his wife, Beth, split their time between Pasadena, California, and Ketchum, Idaho. Marty Linsky is a professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and a co-founder with Ronald A. Heifetz of Cambridge Leadership Associates. He has published extensively on leadership, management, politics, and education. Mark Demel brings ideas to life through pictures and creative communication. He has spent more than a decade using his artistic skills in the non-profit sector.

Textauszug

There is no transformation without trust. Period. End of sentence.

That axiom is as bedrock and foundational to leading as it can be.

If you are a leader reading this book, I encourage you to pause here and internalize this truth before you read anything else. If nothing else, taking this truth seriously is critical because of the number of scandals of untrustworthy leaders and what it has done in our culture—even in the church.

If you are reading this book because you have been entrusted with the calling to bring about good, healthy, missional change, you should pause even a bit longer and be as honest as possible with yourself about what kind of trust it is going to take to accomplish your leadership vision:

• ➜ The need for you to be diligent about your character

• ➜ The obligation for you to be consistent in your integrity

• ➜ The candor, courage, and empathy to walk with a group through the disruption of change

• ➜ The absolute necessity for you to be honest about your shortcomings (because they will be exposed!)

Leaders don’t have to be perfect, but they do have to be trustworthy. When trust ebbs, leading people to accomplish any mission is almost impossible. If leaders are not trusted, no one will follow them anywhere.

A diagram plots the amount of transformation effectiveness relative to leadership trust. The y-axis says "transformation effectiveness. " The x-axis says “Trust of Leader.” Where the two lines meet there are two negative marks; where the two lines are farthest apart there are two plus marks. A bunch of dots within the diagram shows that transformation effectiveness increases as the trust of a leader increases. Conversely, transformation effectiveness decreases as the trust of a leader decreases.

Even more, if a leadership challenge was thrust on you because of an external disruption—a rapidly changing world, a crisis, or a radical change in the environment or context of your mission—then the anxiety caused by the unknown requires that trust to be even greater, because the unknown and unfamiliar requires deep personal transformation. Transformation is the crux of all leadership challenges.

When trust is gone, the transformational journey is over.

LEADERSHIP AND TRANSFORMATION

Leadership, as I define it, is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation so that they can accomplish a shared mission.1 And that transformation cannot begin until the level of trust is high enough for the group to even consider what it will cost to be transformed.

Adaptive change requires leaders to face the challenges of a changing world or disrupted environment with hard decisions around core values, with hard questions about what we need to learn (and unlearn!), and with hard truths about the necessity of our own transformation. Adaptive change requires leaders to become what they are not yet already.

Transformation is what makes adaptive leadership adaptive.

Transformation is the crux of all leadership challenges.

Adaptive leadership inspires and equips people to see beyond their own personal goals, security, and visions of success to collaborate to bring about the change necessary for the organization to thrive in a different (and often disruptive) environment.

Since this is not at all natural, the transformation process requires leaders to “keep the work at the center of people’s attention,” and to pace and structure the change process so there is time for the members of the organization to absorb the changes, the losses they must face, and the transformation needed.2

Like a chef trying to slowly sauté onions so that they will become softened, browned, and flavorful without sticking or burning, the leader must continually pay attention, adjust the heat, and every now and then stir the pot to keep the process going.

A group facing challenges requires deep transformation into the very best version of who they can possibly be.

“Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb,” Marty Linsky told an interviewer when describing the challenges of adaptive leadership.3 And whenever I quote the line in a seminar or speaking engagement, it always gets a laugh and a lot of nodding heads.

Leaders recognize themselves—and the challenges confronting them—in this statement. They understand now, if they didn’t when they took the job, that unlike being a manager who fixes problems, sorts out solutions, makes plans that align, and allocates resources (and thus make people happy!), leaders often are faced with taking people through a process of personal and organizational transformation in order to face these disruptive challenges in front of them.

A diagram shows that adaptive challenges (1) require learning; (2) result in facing loss; (3) reveal competing values that must be named and navigated; (4) require experimentation and failure; and (5) result in resistance that must be faced with resilience.

It is a process that they often resist and a reality that makes leading any group of people really hard. To be sure, when we took on a leadership challenge, we naturally assumed that there would be challenges and that some days would be hard. (“It’s the hard that makes it great!” as Tom Hanks’s gruff baseball manager character in A League of Their Own said.) But what most of us didn’t expect is how hard it would become to lead the very people who asked you to step into the leadership role. We didn’t really expect to have to face resistance and even opposition from the staff, partners, and board members who asked us to take on the challenge. We figured they would have our backs and that they were ready for the rough road ahead.

Until we realized that they weren’t.

The often subconscious expectation of our people was that we would make things better for them. We would “right the ship” or “trim the sails” or get us going “full steam ahead.” They may have expected that there would be some rough seas, but mostly they assumed that our leadership would make an organization (one they belong to and have invested in) a more efficient and effective version of what it already is. The hard news to deliver is that a group facing challenges requires deep transformation into the very best version of who they can possibly be—transformation that requires people to endure loss.

Those losses are not just cosmetic but go to the level of personal and organizational identity:

• ➜ Reevaluating legacy commitments

• ➜ Reconsidering unspoken loyalties

• ➜ Shifting unquestioned behaviors and attitudes

• ➜ Especially: naming and navigating competing values

Adaptive leadership confronts the gaps in what we say we believe and what we actually do each day. It queries people on where they need to grow and what they need to learn.

And most painfully, adaptive leadership asks people to face what they must leave behind in order to move the organization forward into uncharted territory.

An ink sketch shows a stack of letters that says “What we do” and another stack of letters that says “What we say.” There is a big gap between them, and a man is standing on top of the “What we do” stack and pointing emphatically at the gap between the two stacks. Two people are standing on the ground contemplating the big gap.

CHANGE AND LOSS

“People don’t resist change, they resist loss,” Heifetz and Linsky have taught us.4

And this reality helps us better understand the most delicate skill required of change leaders: to utilize both empathy and courage to shape the “disappointment” of your own people . . . at a rate they can absorb, as Linsky so memorably put it. To bring about transformation without losing all trust from your people, to pace the transformation in a way that will enable you to invest the trust you have in the process, ultimately leads to your organization becoming people who can face the necessary losses and take on the challenges in front of them.

Adaptive leadership asks people to face what they must leave behind in order to move the organization forward into uncharted territory.

That’s what this book is about. It is about learning the skill set and developing the adaptive mindset that moves from trust to transformation. Together we will...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.8.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Practicing Change Series
• Illustrationen: Mark Demel
• Vorwort: Marty Linsky
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Planung / Organisation
• Schlagworte: Accountability • Adaptive • biblical principles • business • change-adept organization • Change Management • christian leadership essentials • Church • Communication • developing strong leaders • faith-based • ministry • non-profit • Pastor • Short • Strategy • team building resources
• ISBN-10: 1-5140-0873-4 / 1514008734
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5140-0873-7 / 9781514008737