Transcript: Adaptive Leadership and Building Trust: Lessons in Leading Off the Map // Tod Bolsinger, AE Sloan Leadership, De Pree Center for Church Leadership Institute

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“Adaptive Leadership and Building Trust: Lessons in Leading Off the Map“

June 10, 2024

Tod Bolsinger

Intro: Leaders, have you ever come to a place where you know things need to change but you don't know what to do? Well, we've all been there. But yes, change is inevitable, and leaders who can shepherd their organizations through current and future challenges need a set of tools for leading change. And today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we'll look at how to invest in transformation. Listen in on my conversation with Tod Bolsinger, and deepen your understanding of leadership essentials for today and tomorrow.

Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al Lopus: I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of the book Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being. And I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.

I’m delighted to welcome Tod Bolsinger to the podcast today. Tod’s the executive director of the De Pree Center for Church Leadership Institute, and the author of a new series of leadership books on practicing change. Today we're focusing on the book Invest in Transformation: Quit Relying on Trust. You'll hear Tod talk about adaptive leadership, or what to do when we don't know what to do; creating a holding environment where you're creating enough change and enough heat to make sure that things are going well without going too far; the answer on how to build trust with your organization; the role of values in the process of organizational change; and spiritual tools to help navigate change.

I know you're going to love this interview with Tod Bolsinger. But before we dive in, I'd like to welcome our new listeners. Thanks for joining us as we honor your investment of time in creating valuable episodes like this.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Tod. Tod's the founder and principal of AE Sloan Leadership, Inc.. He's also the executive director of the De Pree Center Church Leadership Institute and the associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary. He's also author of the book Canoeing the Mountains, which was an outreach magazine resource of the year in pastoral leadership, and Tempered Resilience, which was a Christian Book Award finalist. His latest series is a series of four books focused on practicing change. Tod has a Ph.D. in theology and an M.Div. from Fuller Seminary.

So, here’s my conversation with Tod Bolsinger.

Tod, it’s great to have you on the podcast, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Tod Bolsinger: Thank you, Al. It's nice to be with you. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Al: We've known each other—not personally, but with books coming out about the same time—so I'm really looking forward to digging a little deeper. And I'd like to talk about the expertise you have in adaptive leadership, and I'd like to learn a little bit about what you mean by adaptive leadership. And in your view, why is adaptive leadership and that type of a style the single most critical survival skill for the 21st century for leaders?

Tod: Well, it sounds pretty huge to say the single most important leadership skill, but I kind of believe that, actually. I don't say that out loud that way, but I actually really do believe it. And the reason why, Al, is that adaptive leadership is the leadership skill you need when you don't know what to do, right, when your best practices don't work, when your sermons don't work, when your pep talks don't work. Like, when you find yourself, especially as a good leader and an experienced leader, in a moment where you got to stand before people and they say to you, “Okay. What do we do?” and your only honest answer is, “I don't know,” and yet you're still responsible for leading people forward. That's when adaptive leadership kicks in is at that moment—which they say, you know, psychologists tell us that's the three hardest words for someone to say, “I don't know.” And so it's a really vulnerable moment for leaders, and so getting comfortable with that vulnerability is really critical.

Al: “I don't know.” Yeah, that's a challenge.

So, you've written a whole new series of books about practicing change and adaptive leadership, and that's why I'm so excited about this conversation. So let's focus on trust and transformation. Our listeners know that I oftentimes talk about trust. And in our work, we see trust is essential for one of the eight keys of a flourishing workplace, inspirational leadership. And you say, “There's no transformation without trust. And if leaders aren't trusted, no one will follow them anywhere.” And of course, as leaders, we know we need to be leading, and that means people are following us. So, flesh out for us, in your experience, how does a leader build or even restore their trust account?

Tod: Yeah. So, it's really critical. We often talk about the fact that adaptive leadership is when you're leading off the map, right, when there's no longer a map to follow. But we say, “No one's going to follow you off the map if they didn't trust you on the map.” So when you were doing the things that were expected to be done, right—balance the budget, take care of people, be a person of high integrity, have good ethics, hold the company or organizational values, accomplish the strategic plan—these are all on-the-map skills that you expect of leaders, right? And the work you do—good organizational cultures, good workplaces—those are all on-the-map skills. Those things build trust. And we always say the two ways to build trust is to have technical competence, which means to do the things that you're expected to do well. So, I work a lot with faith leaders, and I'll say, “Look, if you don't handle the Scriptures well, no one's going to ask you to do anything else. They're not going to trust you with anything else. And if you don't handle people's souls well, you don't know them deeply and care about them deeply, they're not going to ask you to do anything else.” Like, you've got to have technical competence, but you also have to have relational congruence, which is a way of talking about integrity, but it's a way of talking about integrity the way people experience it, which is when I look that leader in the eye, I trust their word, and I trust their intention. And if they tell me a hard thing, I trust they still have respect for me, and they want good for me and for the organization. So you build trust, you build the bank account of trust, with technical competence and relational congruence. That's the first part of the equation, right?

Al: Tod, I like the word relational congruence. And when you think about trust, you talk about technical competence. Then I was thinking, “Well, the second thing would be character,” but you're actually describing it even more specifically, right, with the way our followers are experiencing integrity at the core, which is a key part. Yeah. So, well, I love it. Okay.

And Tod, a leader doesn't lead alone, and they need to create a team where they can hold trust and invest that trust in transformation. And you describe this as creating a holding environment. And share with us the function of this holding environment. I love the term; I can't wait to hear about it. How does an adaptive leader get people ready for continuing cycles of change?

Tod: Yeah. So, Al, one of the parts that your organization has done so well is focused on this notion of how important trust is and having a really healthy environment. And I always say the hard news for leaders is when I walk in, I tell them, “There's no transformation without trust,” and they nod. And then I tell them, “But trust is not transformation.” If your goal is to transform for the sake of a mission, if your goal is to bring transformation, having a high trust account is really important. But that's a little bit like having a big bank account before you do a building project. You got to invest that bank account into the building project, which means that when you start making those investments, trust goes down, right? When you have to start making hard decisions, trust goes down. Not because you've squandered it or wasted it, but just because it's now been invested in probably a hard decision you had to make. You had to stop doing some things that people loved. You had to do more of things, other people that are new, that are disruptive. Those are just hard leadership decisions.

So, what you have to do, then, in order to build that trust and make that trust transition and transformation is create what Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky call a holding environment. And what a holding environment really is, is it's like, I say, it's like trying to cook with a Dutch oven, a big cast iron, steel Dutch oven that are amazing for creating, like, big pots of chili or transformational stew or, you know, big meals. What’s powerful about a Dutch oven is that that hard cast iron holds heat really well. Now, you don't grab it with your bare hands. You'll burn yourself. But you know that if you hold the right amount of heat over the right amount of time, it can handle the heat. And so with the right amount of heat over the right amount of time, it'll transform raw vegetables and meat and broth into a stew that everybody can feast on.

You know that if you crank up too much heat, too much conflict, too much urgency, too much anxiety, it's, like, it burns the stew. But most of us are in the temptation of wanting to have too little heat. We hope that transformation will happen with one degree above room temperature, nobody being uncomfortable. And the truth is, what happens is you need the right amount of heat that is a little bit uncomfortable over a long period of time. So people have to be able to hold that heat in their trustworthy relationships. That's where relationships and trust become a tool for transformation.

Al: Yeah. You're talking to us. Any leader knows that creating change, creating transformation does create heat. Well, that's a great analogy. I love that. And creating a holding environment, where you're able to hold heat over time, the heat that comes from change.

Well, you know, in our Best Christian Workplace Employee Engagement Survey our questions around inspirational leadership includes several components, including operational excellence and compassion. And employees give feedback about whether they feel their organization is well managed or whether leaders demonstrate compassion. And this is aligning very much with what you're saying. So, you frame this as the need for a transformational leader to exhibit both technical and competence, as you've mentioned earlier. But describe these factors, if you will, in a little more detail. This is fascinating. So why do they matter so much as we navigate change?

Tod: One of the gurus of change leadership at the turn of the century was a woman named Margaret Wheatley. And Margaret Wheatley was asked the question, you know, remember how anxious everybody was about the 21st century and the Y2K? And she was asked the question, “So, how can you predict the future? Like, how can leaders predict the future?” because what people were thinking about in the 1990s was what Wayne Gretzky called his big skill, which was skating to where the puck is going. It's anticipating the future and getting there before anybody else, which is what a lot of leadership was about about 25 years ago. How do you anticipate changes and get there first? What she said was, “You can't predict the future, but you can prepare for the future with the depth of your relationships and trust.” So when good relationships; good, trustworthy teams; teams that Google described as having psychological safety; teams where people can ask dumb questions; they can demonstrate that they're still learning and that they also can make mistakes because they're trying things; those kinds of teams that have strong psychological safety, good relationships, high trust are the best way to go into the future.

But here's the interesting part, Al, and this is where it interacts with your work. When most leaders hear trust and relationship, what they think is personal. They think it's about, “Oh, we should celebrate each other's birthdays, and we should know each other's backgrounds, and we should have genuine love for each other as friends,” and those things are really important. But what Margaret Wheatley pointed out is the only way to build the kind of deep trust she's talking about is through meaningful work together, that our workplaces and the work we do, the projects we take on, the way we work, is actually what builds trust.

And this circles back to Google's idea of psychological safety. Google asked the question, How do you make the most-high-productive teams? And they did it in a very Googley way: they did a bunch of data. And what came out with is the team has psychological safety, the team in their work. These people didn't have to be best friends outside of work, but they needed to create an environment where people could ask dumb questions, they could feel vulnerable while they're learning, and where they could also make mistakes while they're learning. And they could be a good team together.

And so for me, technical competence and relational congruence that builds trust doesn't just mean we love each other outside of here; it means that we work together in a very honoring, respectful, caring way inside of our work.

Al: Yeah. So, much like as a college student, I was involved in Young Life ministry, working with teenagers, and the whole developing trust. You have to “earn the right to be heard” is the Young Life phrase, and then they teach you, well, how do you do that? And as a young man, we’d often would do sports together or create events together. And I remember taking one campaign or group of guys spelunking one time. Just, that's not meaningful work necessarily, but it's meaningful activity, where we do things together. But yeah, in the workplace, yeah, the depth of relationships and trust. I love that. And yeah, the psychological safety, being able to make mistakes and not feeling vulnerable, I think is a good word to describe it. And the way you do that is you accomplish things working together, doing meaningful work.

And, you know, just transforming to our leaders, we're often asked the question, you know, how do we build trust? And moving forward, doing meaningful work together is the best way. Understanding kind of where you've been.

Well, talking about organizations and transformational leadership, let's talk about being clear about values and organizational DNA. So we hear a lot of organizations talking about DNA. Why is that so important in the change process? To be clear on what should never change. And can you share some examples of how leaders get this mixed up? You know, sometimes we’re all about, “We've got to change everything. It's so broken, we got to change everything.” But maybe there's too many things that never change with other leaders. Like, you know, we don't want to rock the boat, kind of what you were describing a little earlier; not having enough warmth in that holding environment. So, talk a little bit about the values and organizational DNA.

Tod: So, Al, as you know more than most, the values of a company is what makes its identity, its values or its identity. I've worked with organizations who have had major crises. Some of them have ended up on 60 Minutes. And what they lose is they've lost their values. That's why they end up in the news. Or they've had a scandal. And sometimes it's a personal scandal from somebody at the top, the organizational leader. But a lot of times when they look deeper, they realize, oh, the whole organizational culture not only was shaped by these leaders who had moral and questionable behaviors, but it also affirmed it in others where it’s become rampant.

And so you realize your values are your DNA. Your values are your culture. And what you have to do as a new leader when you walk in, especially if you need to bring change, is you've got to be able to say for change to last, it has to be a healthy adaptation of our core DNA. In other words, you can't become what you're not. And what happens with a lot of leaders who come in from the outside is they believe their job is to bring new DNA, or it's to bring just change, or it's just to wipe out the old as a way of trying to move into the future. And that almost never sustains. It's just never sustainable. It's one leader at a time. And that's what Jim Collins talked about, organizations that lurch from one idea to another until they fall over. So it starts with getting really clear on what should never change, because it's really our core identity, and then figuring out what a healthy adaptation of that looks like.

Al: Your comment struck me, “For change to last, it has to be a healthy adaptation.” And I believe that there needs to be respect for the past, not to come in and just pull the rug out quickly. And I've seen this especially in corporate environments. New leaders come in. It's been broken. You know, they pull the rug out. Whatever has been there in the past is bad. We're going to create something new. But it has to be a healthy adaptation over time, doesn't it?

Tod: Yeah. Oh, exactly. You mentioned Young Life. Young Life is actually one of our clients. And one of the things I appreciate about it is whenever we're talking to Young Life people, they are very clear on what they're about: We reach unchurched kids, and we do so by building relationships, and we do so by respecting where the kid is and going to the kid’s world. Now, after that, they can ask a lot of new questions. That looks pretty different today than the Young Life probably when you and I were young, right? But at the exact same time, those values are right there, those values of respect, reaching unreached kids, and earning the right to be heard, and being relational.

I just did an entire consultation with a whole group of the camping ministry. You know, Young Life is famous for its beautiful camping facilities, and the camping-ministry people said, “Our facilities are just tools for relational ministry.” That's the value, right?

So, whenever you work with an organization, if you can get really clear on—I always say that when you talk to leaders about their values, they pat their chest, and they get choked up talking about them, and they talk about them the way a family talks about a beloved grandfather that passed down, like, the values of hard work or faith or respect, those values are what we have to recover.

I worked with another organization where literally they said to us, they said to me after I did an exercise with them, “Our biggest problem is we lost all of our values. We lost our way because we grew so big. Everything was growing so much and going so well. But we lost the core DNA of who we are, and now we have to recover it again.” And we said, “Yeah, that's where you start.”

Al: Yeah. And so for our listeners, leaders, if you're not clear, if your values aren't clear and articulated and something you talk about on a regular basis, that's an opportunity for implementation and change, right there.

I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

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Al: Welcome back to my conversation with Tod Bolsinger.

Let's talk about change and transformation and how it can be painful. It's tempting for a leader to minimize the pain that's coming. So how does minimizing the reality of pain erode trust and set up the change process? I’ll have to say, I think about a turnaround situation in my previous role. I was kind of the turnaround guy. And, you know, I didn't want to create pain, but, boy, it was painful. And so how does minimizing that reality of pain erode trust?

Tod: Al, thank you for focusing on this, because most people think you minimize pain to increase trust, right? Like, people will trust you if you'll tell them, “Hey, don't worry. I'm going to make sure that we get through this with as least pain as possible, because I love you and I care about you.” But almost all of us know that change is experienced as loss. It just is, every time, right? If any of us who've ever walked a daughter down the aisle in a wedding knows that it's the most beautiful day. It was the best day of my life. My daughter's wedding was a better day in my life than my own wedding. But my daughter and my relationship changed. And I was weeping, and she was weeping, and it was beautiful and I had sad all the same time. And if we'd said to each other, “Oh, don't worry. Nothing will change,” well, we wouldn't trust each other very much.

So, part of what we have to do is own that adaptive leadership starts with saying, “I don't know. Like, we're going to have to learn our way forward.” But adaptive leadership also requires us to acknowledge that change always requires loss. And so we're navigating with people through the losses, not trying to shelter them from the losses. And when we wisely walk with people through the losses, then they trust us to take the next step with us. And that's where transformation really begins to happen.

And, you know, circling back to our DNA question. If I can say to you, the most-important things we're going to hold on to, or what's actually true about us, our actual values, not our aspirational values—it's not what we should be; it's who we actually are—those things we're going to hold on to. And because we're clear on that, we're going to get clear that we might have to lose almost everything else or change everything else. But that's how we're going to move into the future. We're going to hold on.

If I say to my daughter, “You have a new family now. You have a new life. And that's going to be your first and most important family. But you will never lose our love, and we will support you as your parents,” then, that's the way that she can move forward and we can move forward. And there's multiple illustrations of things like that we can all talk about.

Al: Yeah. So, yeah. “I don't know,” recognizing that change requires loss. And yeah, it does. It's going to be different. And so we're going to lose something along the way. And then as leaders we just navigate together through the loss. And you help take people through the next steps to see transformation. That's a great process. Yeah.

So, Tod, you've got significant experience in working with leaders to help them be more effective in their work in ministry. And I appreciate that. And there's much practical leadership wisdom in your books. You also are a theologian, and our listeners are leaders in Christian ministries, churches, schools, and businesses, so let's talk about the spiritual side of leadership. That's something that at Best Christian Workplaces we recognize is a huge part of the workplace. And I know that you don't separate discipleship from practical leadership skills. And I think as we focus in the church more and more about true discipleship, we're seeing that it's very much like leadership. And we also know that effective leaders bring their whole selves to work. So what are some of the character qualities or even spiritual practices that you see as an essential for Christian leaders to focus on so that they're able to lead in a changing world?

Tod: Yeah. So, if you just think of it this way, Al, we just talked about adaptive leadership. We talked about two of what I call the three big traits of adaptive leadership. One requires learning, right? It's I saying, “I don't know.” Well, the cultivation for becoming a person who can actually lead the learning is humility. And humility is the quintessential spiritual characteristic of the Scriptures, right? Moses was the most humble man on earth. Jesus literally is the one who, in Philippians 2, sets aside all of His prerogative as God to become a human being. So cultivating humility.

Loss. What does loss require? It requires both empathy and courage. I have to have the courage to be able to lay down my life. That's what loss is. Lay down what I have. And I have the empathy to walk with people through their laying down of what they need to.

And then, the third characteristic of adaptive leadership is we talk of it as navigating competing values. Competing values are when you have core values, and you'd also end up with competing values. Like, say, in a church where you ask the question, Is the church primarily about honoring and taking care of our members who have been here forever? Or is the church also about reaching out to people who've never had a church? Well, now you're in competing values. And the key to adaptive leadership is knowing that competing values cannot be solved with a win-win. In technical moments, in moments of expertise, you can organize through a win-win. But in adaptive leadership, when you're moving off the map and loss, it's always competing values where something, one has a priority over the other, and people experience that as loss.

So, you need humility for learning, you need courage and empathy for loss, and you need discernment. And I tell people, the single biggest spiritual practice and trait of Christian leaders is the practice and trait of discernment. How do we discern, what does the Lord want us to do, especially when we have to make a decision between is it this or that? Or maybe it's not A or B, maybe it's 1, 1A. Or this will be our first priority, and that'll be our second priority. But we're going to have to name that so we can navigate it.

Al: Yeah. Wow. This is deep. Again, humility. That just brings us back, and again, for many leaders this isn't perhaps our natural go-to place, right? But yet it is. When it comes to learning, we have to be humble, to be willing to even ask or admit, “Well, I don't know,” so that really facilitates that learning. But then, empathy and courage, and then discernment is a key. And discerning means that you're also because of empathy and courage, you’re understanding what the key issues are, so you're able to, then, discern, “Okay. So where do we go forward kind of discerning the will of God in that case as well?” isn’t it? Yeah.

Tod: Exactly. Yeah. So the hard part about discernment is asking the question, What then shall we do? Lord, what then shall we do? We have all these different things in front of us. And we work with organizations all the time, and we tell them the biggest problem for most who are struggling is they're trying to do too much, instead of understanding, what is your gift you bring to the Kingdom of God? What is your capacity? What is the uniqueness of your perspective?

I imagine in your own work with the Best Christian Workplaces, you get asked to do lots of things that would be scope creep, right? And one of the hardest things is saying, “No. We're not going to take that on. We might, but we’re not. This is the work we do.” Well, that takes discernment. And the hardest discernment isn't good versus evil; it's discerning between two good things, and saying no to something that is otherwise a good thing.

Al: Yeah. So listening, having empathy and courage. And I also believe in Christian workplaces that our employees, by listening to them, you're not only respecting them, but you're hearing perhaps the will of God spoken through members in the workplace. So again, discerning, what shall we then do as a result of conversations with people that you're working with?

Well, Tod, in your consulting and teaching, you're interacting with several generations of Christian leaders. And as you think about young leaders who are moving into positions of more and more responsibility, what are some of the qualities that give you hope about the next generation of Christian leaders? Are there some cautions you might have for those listening in this leadership season?

Tod: Yeah. Let me give you one caution and then one hope. The caution I have for most leaders is what most leaders, good leaders, do is most good leaders keep thinking they can outwork a problem. We'll just keep trying harder. We'll just… One of the little books in the series we refer to is called How Not to Waste a Crisis. And the problem of most leaders in crisis, and we saw this during COVID, is they just thought if they worked hard enough, they could solve the problem. And that led to burnout. Because what we do when we work hard is we tend to go back and work. Do the thing we've always done, just do it harder, which means we're going back to old best practices, and we're trying to outwork the problem. And the truth is, we need to outlearn the problem. We need to learn a new way of leading.

So, my caution to good leaders is you will tend to default to your training, you will tend to keep doing what you've always done, but do it until you exhaust yourself. That's like paddling hard in a river, in a canoe, where there's no water. If there's no water in the river, don't paddle harder; get out of the canoe, right?

Al: Yeah.

Tod: So, that's my caution is most good leaders think they can outwork a problem. They really can't. They have to outlearn. They got to learn a new way of leading. My hope is this, which is I work with people across the church, as broad as possible, I mean, the broadest spectrum possible, and then, the broadest global perspective possible. And the most hopeful thing I have is good leaders all looking at a changing world and beginning to ask some of these questions. These are people who, I say I talk to people who don't talk to each other because they're not quite sure they trust each other. But what they all have in common is we know the world is changing and we need to learn to lead differently. And that actually gives me great hope because that spans a lot of our old divides within the church.

Al: You mentioned—I love the title of your book, Canoeing the Mountains, and you've talked a lot about leading when you're off the map. So connect those thoughts for us.

Tod: So Canoeing the Mountains, which is about 10 years old now, was a book that used the metaphor of Lewis and Clark, where they were trying to find a water route that would connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. And they were exploring the United States’ geography. And they were assuming what everybody assumed for 300 years is there had to be a water route that would go through this big landmass that is North America. And, you know, they went 18 months up the Missouri River only to find the Rocky Mountains in their way. And what they didn't realize is no European people had ever seen the Rocky Mountains. Their idea of a mountain was like a mountain in Virginia, like the Shenandoah Mountains, which are much smaller. So they had no idea that the world in front of them was totally different than the world behind them, and that they had to actually learn to lead differently. They had to learn to drop their canoes—that’s loss—and move into a new world, listening to people they hadn’t listened to before, like a teenaged Native American nursing mother named Sacagawea.

Well, all of a sudden, you started realizing, that leadership in a changing world applies really very much to what's happening all over our world today. And that's what adaptive leadership is all about. It's about learning, loss, navigating competing values, and not relying on your old best practices. And so Canoeing the Mountains started the trajectory of this conversation that I'm having with faith-based leaders over the last decade and led to our founding of our company, AE Sloan Leadership, and it’s the work we just do.

Al: Fantastic. Well, thanks, Tod. We've learned so much today. And going back to trust, and that's kind of how we kicked off the conversation, and adaptive leadership and how we've got to trust when we're off the map, when there's, as you've just described, we need to be doing things in a new way. And in the whole conversation around a holding environment, at creating holding environments where it holds the heat, where there's not too much heat, but there's enough heat to actually create change. And I think for our listeners, that was really helpful. And the importance of the depth of relationships and trust in our workplaces, and the way of moving forward with that is to do meaningful work together. That builds trust. That earns for leaders the right to be heard, as we smiled and talked about our mutual backgrounds. And how, yeah, it can be painful. It's painful for us to say, “Well, I don't know,” especially some of us in leadership roles. That's not the easy thing to say. And how we can navigate through these losses and take steps together as we work through navigation and navigating the future. And then, yeah, the hope we have that, yes, the world is changing, but there are ways to lead through that. So this has just been a great conversation.

Is there anything that you'd like to leave with our leaders that we've talked about that's on the top of your mind?

Tod: Thank you for asking. This has been a fun conversation, Al. I appreciate it.

You know, the little book series is called the Practicing Change series. And what I like to tell leaders is change is a practice, and leadership is a practice. It's not about being an expert; it's about being a learner, and it's about getting better every single day at leading people that you care deeply about because you have a cause that matters to you. And so when we talk about practicing change, and even the four big mistakes leaders make, that we talk about in these books, we're talking about people who want to keep practicing to get better, because leading change is one of the hardest things. It's the thing that almost nobody taught us how to do in the faith-based world. And so anything you can do to keep practicing, keep learning, keep going forward, you're actually leading well and serving your people well.

Al: Well, Tod, thanks so much for your contributions today. And most of all, I appreciate your commitment to equipping leaders to be effective in an environment of transformation, an environment that we all live in. So thanks for taking your time out today and speaking in the lives of so many listeners.

Tod: It’s really my pleasure. Thank you, Al.

Al: Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Tod Bolsinger. And I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You can find ways to connect with him and links to everything we discussed in the show notes and transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.

And if you have any suggestions for me about our podcast and have any questions on a flourishing-culture workplace, please email me, al@workplaces.org.

And leaders, if you want to improve your leadership, expand your organization's impact for good, and see greater faithfulness in our broader culture, help us to achieve our goal to see more flourishing Christian-led workplaces. To help, please share this podcast with another leader, or for yourself, launch a project in your own organization to discover and improve the health of your workplace culture. If you're interested in learning more, go to workplaces.org and request a sample report.

Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.

We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al: And join us as we talk with Matt Wimmer next week. Matt’s the executive director of SAMBICA camps, and we're going to talk about how he created a flourishing workplace in a short couple of years.