Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast
“How Leaders Can Thrive in the Unknown“
May 5, 2025
Dr. Tod Bolsinger
Intro: As Christian leaders, what do we do when the path forward disappears and our best practices no longer work? Well, in this episode of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, Dr. Tod Bolsinger challenges us to rethink how we lead through rapid change, especially when the map we've relied on no longer applies. And whether we're leading a ministry, a school, a mission-driven business, you'll discover how to lead with humility, clarify your organization's unique calling, and build resilient teams equipped for the future. Don't miss this deeply insightful conversation that will both encourage and equip you to thrive, even in uncharted territory.
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: Hi, I’m Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of Road to Flourishing, the go-to research-based, Christ-centered guide to building a flourishing workplace culture. My passion is to equip Christian leaders like you to create engaged, flourishing workplaces, where people thrive and organizations make a significant Kingdom impact. And if you'd like to learn more about my book or opportunities for me to speak, this podcast, or recent articles I've written, I invite you to visit allopus.org. That’s A-L-L-O-P-U-S—dot org. Let’s journey together toward building workplaces where your faith, leadership, and organization flourish.
I’m delighted to welcome Dr. Tod Bolsinger to the podcast today. Todd's the founder and principal of AE Sloan Leadership and author of numerous leadership books.
Throughout our conversation, you'll hear Tod share about how to lead with adaptive resilience when the challenges you face no longer have clear solutions; and why clarifying your organization's core mission is essential for navigating change and staying grounded in purpose; and how to build a leadership culture rooted in trust, vulnerability, and spiritual formation to sustain long-term impact.
I think you're going to love this interview with Tod Bolsinger. But before we dive in, this podcast is proudly sponsored by the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey, the most-trusted employee-engagement tool for faith-based organizations. With thousands of leaders already using our platform, each new participant strengthens the growing network committed to flourishing workplace cultures.
What makes us unique? Well, we're the only research-based, biblically grounded employee-engagement survey designed specifically for Christian-led organizations, providing insight and transformation through a Kingdom lens. As today's guest, Dr. Tod Bolsinger, reminds us, leaders need to be humble enough to listen and curious enough to keep learning, especially from the people they serve. That's exactly what our Survey helps you do. So don't wait. Now is the ideal time to gather actionable feedback from your team and begin building a healthier Christ-centered workplace. So visit workplaces.org to learn more and to start your journey today.
I’d also like to say hello to our new listeners. Thanks for joining us as we honor your investment of time by creating valuable episodes like this.
And now let me just tell you a little bit more about Dr. Tod Bolsinger. Tod's the founder and principal of AE Sloan Leadership, Inc.; the executive director of the De Pree Center Church Leadership Institute; and the associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary. He's also the author of the Outreach Resource of the Year in Pastoral Leadership, Canoeing the Mountains, published by InterVarsity Press; and the Christian Book Award finalist, Tempered Resilience. His latest series of four leadership books focusing on practicing change are also available. Tod has a PhD in theology and an MDiv from Fuller Seminary.
So, here’s my conversation with Tod Bolsinger.
Tod, it’s great to have you back on the podcast, and I’m looking forward to following up on our conversation from last year.
Dr. Tod Bolsinger: I'm glad to be back on too, Al. Thank you very much for having me.
Al: So, Tod, we talked about some of the themes of leading through change in our podcast conversation last year, and then I heard you speak recently at the Murdock Trust Leadership Now conference. And I wanted to come back and talk with you on this podcast because you had such important insight for faith-based leaders. In your work, you help faith leaders thrive as change leaders, and many of our organizations, we need to continue to change to stay up with what God wants us to be. So, let's start with considering models for change. You know, is there a distinctly Christian approach to change leadership? And what's different from how secular leaders might consider change leadership from a faith-based perspective?
Tod: Yeah. I appreciate that question, Al, because I think sometimes people think that having the gift of the Holy Spirit within us saves us from having to go through the pain of change. Like, we'll just magically be transformed, right? They forget that, you know, for the people of God to go from being a group of Hebrew slaves to a people who would go into a promised land to reveal the righteousness of God to all the nations, took 40 years of wandering through a wilderness with the presence of God in front of them.
So I think there's two parts, to me, that make Christian leadership really unique. One is every single thing we do, we believe we do before the face of God, and we do it responding to the call of God. So it's really first and foremost about God. It's not about whether we're successful as leaders or whether we please anybody else. It's really about God being first and foremost. And the second part is that because of that, there are some certain things about our values—you know, the family DNA, the kind of thing that makes us look like children of our Father—that are really important to hold on to. There should be a family resemblance even though we go through transformation and change. And so, for me, the most important thing is about our identity as Christian people. Many people think leadership is about casting a vision. And I think when you look around in the Scriptures, there’s about one or two verses about vision, and there's a lot about our values. And I think our values are really the important part.
Al: Yeah. And our values are our identity or should be a key part of that. Yeah.
Well, in our work at the Best Christian Workplaces, we help leaders listen and get input through appreciative inquiry. That's an approach that we've used. I've enjoyed David Cooper’s writing and been to his workshops. And so when you write about the importance of formulating questions for learning—and I love this at the Murdock Conference. I resonated with that approach so very much—how can leaders grow in their skill of asking questions, especially in areas where they don't seem to have clear answers?
Tod: So, this is the weird thing, right? To get better at asking questions, you have to acknowledge you don't have the answers. Like, for most of us as leaders, we think we're supposed to have the answer, so we show up and we fake it. We're good at talking about the small amount of insight God may have given us. Instead, to become a good question asker starts with being curious and humble, acknowledging what you don't know and being willing to show up as a beginner, who needs to genuinely ask for help. I think when you get curious and humble—that's why humility is the critical skill set for a leader going through change. Humility is teachability. And so humility and teachability often show up in asking really honest questions. And sometimes they feel like dumb questions, but they're honest questions, and that changes the entire trajectory of a leader's life and calling.
Al: With humility, saying, “I don't know. Tell me more,” you know, is a great way to get started. And I love the appreciative-inquiry approach. I've heard you describe it, too, of asking positive forward-thinking questions of, how can we move in this direction? Yeah.
So, while we can’t predict the future, Tod, we know that leaders over the long haul have to help their people and organizations adapt to change. I mean, one thing we know is change is happening faster than ever before. So you have a thought process through the adaptive-change process, you call it. So give us an overview of this process, and what are some of the steps in moving an organization through an adaptive-change process that you've written about?
Tod: Yeah. So, one of the ways to think about adaptive change is adaptive leadership is the leadership that's needed when you get into an environment where you no longer have best practices, when you're not an expert anymore. And that's important to recognize. There are places in our lives where we are experts. I said I work at a seminary. Everybody comes to seminary. Somebody said to them, “You're the best Christian I know. You should go pro. You should go off to professional Christian school.”
Al: Is that what they do?
Tod: Right?
Al: Okay.
Tod: And what we do is we give them a bunch of skill sets to be really good at stuff like interpreting the Scriptures and listening to the heart cries of people, teaching people how to pray. We teach people how to preach sermons on the Trinity without committing heresy. Like, there's some skill sets you learn along the way. But if all of a sudden you find yourself in a context where your best practices no longer work so easily, now you have to use a different kind of leadership that starts with learning. That's why the whole notion of humility is so important. When you don't know what to do—like, there's a powerful passage in Second Chronicles that I come back to a lot. Jehoshaphat, who is the king, for the first time is facing not one, not two, but three armies—a good military king, but he doesn't know what to do with three armies—and so he literally gathers the people together and he prays, “Lord, we do not know what do, but our eyes are on You.” And that changes everything. And so adaptive leadership is really about the leadership you need when you're not an expert, when you actually have to learn as you go, and where you're going to have to let go of the things that brought you this far, where some of the things that are most dear to you are going to have be left behind. And so it's always about navigating learning and loss. And if you're taking people through learning and loss, you're taking them through adaptive leadership. And that's what we work every single day with, with people.
Al: So, what got us here won't get us there, is that the…that's, well…
You wrote a book, Tod. You're kind of getting right at the theme, Canoeing the Mountains. And that's really what that book was about. How do you say it, when you don't know what the best practice is, you know, it's kind of like Lewis and Clark is the example where, well, they got to the mountains, and their canoes weren't working anymore. So they had to think about a different approach, yeah.
Tod: It's this great example out of U.S. history because almost everybody who took high school U.S. history can remember Lewis and Clark somewhere back in there. And what they were remarkable is they were really, really gifted. I mean, they were considered one of the most successful military ventures in the history of the United States, but they were charged to find a water route that would connect the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. And when they got to the Rocky Mountains, they finally discovered there was no water route. And the one thing you can't do if you're a bunch of water guys is keep paddling. And they realized that they had to actually explore a whole new terrain that nobody of European descent had ever been there. They had no maps. They were going to have to actually learn as they go, and they were going to leave their canoes that they built with their bare hands behind. And that's the model we often use when we're teaching people, how do you lead when the world in front of you is totally different than the world behind you? And that's the concept people find themselves in today.
Al: Yeah. That's a great analogy.
Well, change is uncomfortable for people, isn't it, Tod? And you talk about building a leadership team that can handle the heat. So, every leader and leadership team has handled some heat along the way. Share some practical steps so we can do this better going forward, especially as leaders. How can we build a strong, resilient team that can lead through change, that can handle the heat that is coming before us, whether we know it or not?
Tod: Well, one of the first things they can do is contact you guys, your organization, because that's what you guys are really good at is assessing, can our team flourish with the mission that we have in front of us, and what do we have to work on? And in one sense, I'm really serious about that, that what happens to teams when you all of a sudden find yourselves in a—when you're off the map, and there's no best practices, and you can't just do what you've always done, is you actually have to have a high degree of trust so that you can take on the hard decisions you're going to have to make together that are going to inevitably be resisted by people. I mean, nobody wants to hear, “Hey, we're going to have to leave behind something that we really care about.” If you came on this trip thinking it was a canoe trip and all of a sudden we tell you that there's no water, you're going to be disappointed in us, even though that's the geography, right? But what you did just talk about is you have to pull a team together. We use the phrase that Patrick Lencioni made famous. We said, you know, your executive team has to be your first team. You've got to trust each other really well so you can have candid conversations and begin to make hard decisions about what's going to make the mission flourish. How are we going to accomplish the mission that we've been given? And that takes a high degree of trust and health. And we work with organizations on how to develop it, and then when they have a high degree of the trust and health, we help them figure out how to make those real-time, hard, adaptive decisions and lead forward in an adaptive way.
Al: Yeah. To go back to the Lewis and Clark analogy, you just caused me to think, okay, so here we are at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and Lewis and Clarke have pulled their team together, and they said, “Okay, guys. Well, we said this was a canoe trip.”
Tod: Exactly.
Al: “But that's not working for us. So let's come up with a plan. And oh, by the way, we need somebody that can help us work with these Native American groups that we're running into so we don't get killed along the way.” Right?
Tod: That’s right. Right. Yeah. You start realizing that when you get into, we call it uncharted territory, right? When you get off the map, when you get beyond your best practices. So we have, like, a lot of schools, you know, for example, you and I were talking about universities and Christian schools. Well, up until this year, you could look at the demographic trends and know that every year the cohort of kids every year was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Well, in 2025 we're now facing a demographic cliff. The birth rates are declining. We're going to get smaller and smaller and smaller. So if all of your strategies were about how to use marketing to capture a growing number of kids, and you start realizing that now you're facing, as a university or a school, a completely different environment that we haven't had in 40 years, declining population, well, now we're going to have to learn to think all differently about stuff like, it's basic things like, how do we fill the seats in our classes? How do we make sure we have the enrollment numbers we need and the tuition we need? I mean, it causes us to really have to take on some profoundly deep questions. And for Christian institutions, it's even deeper because we live in a world that's profoundly different than it was 40 years ago.
Al: Well, that's a perfect lead-in to, okay, so let's go a little deeper. And when you're in this environment, you're off the map. You talk about a topic of identity or the unique values of an organization. So you're suggesting that we go back to what our unique values are. And clearly, this goes beyond a list of aspirations. We're not talking about aspirations. I know you really differentiate that. It's not what's on our website or on a wall plaque, but you've termed this organizational DNA, or charism is a word that you use, a unique word. I didn't really ever hear of that until you spoke of it. So why is the clarity on charism or value so important for leaders and organizations, especially in this changing world, when we find ourselves off the map, as you say?
Tod: Yeah, yeah. So charism is a great word because it actually comes out of the Catholic tradition. So Catholic brothers and sisters would be lightened up right now. They would hear that. That's the word that was used to describe the differences between different Catholic orders. So if you talked about Benedictines or Franciscans or Jesuits, you wouldn't say, “Hey, they have different theology.” They're all Catholics. Or “They have different commitment.” They’re all committed to the Church and to the work of Jesus Christ in the world. But they have a different gift that they bring to the world.
So one of my clients happened to be a group of church-planting missionaries, Catholics who were church-planting missionaries, a monastic group who were planting churches in Appalachia. And they would say, “Our charism is that. What we are really good at is planting churches with folks who are in the immigrant community and in the indigenous community, who are rural workers in Appalachia. That's what we do. We don't work in cities. We don't put out pamphlets. We plant churches. That's our gift.” Well, what we've often said is, “I believe that every church, every community, every organization has a gift that they can bring to the world, and that there might be similar to other ones, but there's a unique gift. And that gift comes out of your identity, just like a person's calling comes out of who they are and their own sets of their own personal identity.” And so, what we do is we start with churches and organizations and universities, and we say to them, “Before you think about change, let's get clear on what will never change. Let's get clear on our identity and our gift, the thing we bring to the world that makes us unique. And then, we can start asking about how that needs to apply to the pain of a changing world in a unique way.” And so charism speaks to the pinpoint of the world, and then it causes us from there to get really clear on where we need to be transformed and grow and adapt.
Al: So, every community has a gift. And each of us listening, you know, think about, well, what is the gift that God has given our community and how that comes out of our identity? It causes me to think about LeTourneau University, Steve Mason—they’re ministry partners of ours—and they've gone through that, and they’ve kind of identified themselves as the “Polytechnic Christian University,” because of their background, their unique founding, you know, with R.G. LeTourneau and his whole focus on engineering and equipment and, yeah.
Tod: Yeah. I'll give you another example from a school we worked with. We worked with a school that's a Christian high school in a pretty affluent area in California, and it's surrounded by other prep schools, schools that are really good at sending kids to the Ivy League. And they decided that what they really wanted to do is get a faculty who would help them be kind of a Christian prep school. And they were actually struggling with that. They were actually—their enrollment wasn't as strong as they thought, and people were getting disgruntled, and they called us in to do what we do.
And so we did an assessment, we did a bunch of listening, and we came back to them and said, “Okay. When we ask your faculty, they came here because they would like to be a Christian prep school. But when we asked your parents, when we asked your students why they're here, they said, ‘We want to be here because we want to part of a school where we are known personally. We're not interested in a prep school. We could go to a prep, and we go to a church. We’re interested in the school that allows us to be mentored personally.’”
So, we went to their leadership, their board, and said, “You have to stop trying to be a prep school. That's not your gift. What you are is you offer to the world a place where in a world where young people feel as if they are just a number and nobody knows them, they will be mentored through their adolescent years into whatever God has called them to be.” Mentoring, not prepping, became their role. And they switched their school. They reorganized around that. They started talking about that. They lost a few faculty. They brought in…and now they're thriving. And it's not because it was magic; it's because it back to their identity, and that there was a need in that community. So there wasn't a need for a third prep school in that community. There was need for a school that said, “Because we're Christians, we're going to make sure that every single student here is known personally by an adult who's going to mentor them.”
Al: Fascinating. Well, this gets to, you know, even in our Christian world, something that's even a little deeper, and you talk a lot about calling. And so, encourage leaders to consider the pain points of the world as something that you do, and also to help them discern what specifically God has called their organizations to address, as you've just kind of outlined. So take us a little deeper on this aspect of leading through change, and how does an organization discern their unique calling and stay focused on adapting in this changing world?
Tod: So, for so many of us who think that what a Christian leader does is a leader goes off into the wilderness by themselves and comes back with a big vision from God and then proclaims that vision and everybody kind of, you know, like, is drawn toward it. So leaders are visionaries. I think there's something very beautiful about painting a picture of what God can do, but it actually doesn't start in vision. I actually think this is a mistake that many leaders fall into and that many of us were taught that what leaders do, they inspire people to vision.
Actually, what really good leaders do is they do what God does in the Old Testament, which is hears the pain of the people and responds to it in love and faithfulness. So what we tell organizations all the time is once you get really clear on your values, on your charism, on the unique gift you bring, pray about asking where in the world is the pain of the world require us and need our gifts and need what we bring.
One of our clients is Baylor University, and we helped them do their strategic plan, which is a huge honor. It's a school that went through its own trials, and their president, Linda Livingstone, who's just one of the best leaders I've ever seen, said the world needs a Baylor. The world needs to be a place where Christian higher education and the highest form of research—they achieved R1 status, which is the highest level—come together. Well, we came in to work with them after they had accomplished that. And then the question we helped them discern going forward was, the world needs a Baylor for what? For what? And what they basically said is the world needs a place where Christian values and the highest level of scholarship and teaching come together to help create leaders and servants for a global context. The world needs a Baylor to be for the world. And so it's a unique university where other really good Christian colleges I work with talk about being world changers, but they don't have the reach of a place like a Baylor. Baylor does. And I just keep saying to folks that the more you get clear on your charism, which is hard to do—people have a lot of aspirations instead of our actual values—and get really clear on where the world is in pain calling for our gift, the more you'll be able to face the transformational hard choices you need to face because you'll thrive into the future.
Al: So, there's a question for each of our listeners. Why does the world need what you do? And for what? Okay, listeners. We'll just put this podcast on pause, and when you've answered that question, come on back.
Tod: There you go. That's it. And that's really important. Those conversations to have with your team and to have your donors and to have with the folks who are significant, like—so what is the problem in the world that God wants to point us at? What's the pain in the world that God want us to engage?
There's this great old rabbinic tale that says that when you get to heaven and God judges you, He won't ask you why you weren't Moses. He already had a Moses. He'll ask you, “Why weren't you? I needed you.”
Al: And we all have that Moses thought of well, leadership is going to the mountaintop, getting a vision from God, and bringing it to the people. But you're saying, no, it starts with pain points. It starts with our values, our charism.
Tod: Yeah. When Moses went to the mountaintop, that was way down the line. If it started with God coming to Moses and saying to him in the wilderness, “I have heard the cry of my people, and I am sending you to Pharaoh,” like, it wasn't Moses' idea.
Al: Yeah. And then Moses did everything to really kind of say, “No, You've got the wrong guy.”
Tod: Yeah, exactly.
Al: And when God asks us to do some things, we often might say the same response, “Well, really?” But yeah, then we know the rest of the story. So yeah, it doesn't start with the mountaintop, Tod. Yeah. That's really a great point. Yeah.
So, Tod, these principles of building a team, clarifying values, identifying pain points, really important for adaptive change. There’s no question. But many of our listeners might be feeling a little overwhelmed. “Gosh, these are questions, they seem just a little oblique.” What encouragement can you give to a leader who's feeling maybe even exhausted by this amount of change that we're all experiencing so quickly and especially as we look and see what's in front of us? So how can leaders find the energy to keep engaged in this process for the long haul?
Tod: Yeah. Thank you. It's the right question to be asking, Al. I think the first thing I do with leaders is I ask them this question, which is, what is the problem in the world that you believe your organization is called to work on? Like, in other words, if God answers all your prayers, what's going to be different? Like, just start with that. Because for a lot of leaders, if they're honest, what they'll say is, “Well, the problem that I was brought here to work on is to make sure this organization didn't die,” right? Like, “I want to make sure the school doesn't die. I got to get the enrollment up,” or “I want to make the nonprofit keeps the donors going,” or “The church stays alive. We've got churches dying. So the problem I want to work is the church, the organization not dying.” And I had someone really profoundly say to me, “Tod, nobody cares if your institution survives. They only care if your institution cares about them. So get out there and figure out what they care about and help them with that. Show them that God cares about them.” And that switch, for most leaders I know, if they can get really clear on that switch, then they begin to have energy because now they can begin to ask a lot of things they can let go of or begin to, at least, talk about letting go of. So, a lot what we do is just for institutional survival. And that gets daunting after a while, and it's like carrying that canoe over the mountains.
Al: Yeah. So leaders, yeah. We’re not about trying to keep our organizations alive, but organizations, people want to know that we're caring about them in the process. Wow.
Well, Tod, we've learned so much. So I'm going to ask you one more example, like the Baylor example.
Tod: I have two thoughts off the top of my head. One is going back to this idea about people surviving. I say this to church leaders all the time. I said, you know what? I'm not here. Our company works with helping faith leaders thrive as change leaders. We do speaking and consulting and coaching. We work with lots of organizations, but the one thing we'll never tell you is that we can promise you that your organization will survive. Paul's churches didn't survive. They all died, but we're here. So we work on your mission. We work on helping you fulfill your mission, and if that means that you don't have a mission, we'll help you figure that out that you don't, and maybe your season's over.
I worked with one of the churches, the second illustration is that one of the churches I worked was it had been a growing mega church—5,000 members moving to 10,000 members. Like, it was on its way. And it was completely convinced that it was supposed to be this big mega church. And the conviction of the church leaders came back and said, “What our deepest value is that we would be missional. We need to care about our neighbors more than we need to care about growing the numbers of our church. Our neighbors are more important than our numbers,” they said.
So they started looking at their neighbors and recognized that their neighborhood was changing, and their neighborhood was becoming really multi-ethnic. And they said, “You know, we could say a homogeneous church, and we could keep getting people driving in here, and our numbers will go up. But our mission is to our neighbors, and our neighbors need us to look different.” And so they became a multi-ethnic community. And they are thriving. They're the most amazing church. I just worshiped with them about a month ago, and I was, like, in tears because they looked like the Kingdom of God. They looked like every tribe and tongue and nation. And they are this beautiful example of having made a shift so that people in their own neighborhoods feel welcome.
They only have one problem, Al, which is that pastor, who is one of the best leaders I know, preaches every single week to 500 empty seats because there were a whole lot of folks that cared more about numbers than they cared about neighbors. And when they said, “We're going to be multi-ethnic,” they said, “Yeah. I don't want to be a part of a church that's like my neighborhood. I want to be part of church that looks like me.” And so they left.
So the pain of having to actually pay attention to your deepest values and stay committed to that, especially when the people who started with you get grumbling and want to go back to Egypt and care more about flesh pots than they care about the faithfulness and following God, is really hard. And that's exactly what this church is doing. And we work with them. I've worked with them now for four years, and it's one of the churches I'm the most proud of because I've watched them making hard decisions to embody more and more of the Gospel. I mean, this is a Bible church. They literally go, “We have this vision because it comes right out of Revelation. Every tribe and tongue and nation, that’s what we are going to be,” and that's what they did.
Al: Yeah. Wow. Great story.
Well, Tod, this has just been a great conversation, talking about change, talking about asking good questions, starting with, “Well, I don't know. Help me.” You know, being curious, being humble. As leaders, those that we're leading, do they, will they say about us that we’re curious, that we’re humble, that we kind of show up as a beginner asking about pain points? And then, the way you talk about adaptive change was really helpful. Knowing that—I think you've said, God's eyes are on us and, you know, how do we handle the heat that we face? And that's building trust, having a team that's together and being the first team to use Lencioni’s approach. And we clearly are on the same page with that. And when we're in a place where now we're off the map, I love that analogy, we get off the map and, okay, so what is it that we really are going to focus on and be successful at? And that is understanding our own charism, as you describe it. And that's just very helpful, about knowing who we are and starting with our own identity. And, yeah, let's get off of vision. Vision's important, as you’re saying, but let's respond to, what is the unique gift that God has given us as we serve the body? And yeah, a couple of great examples. Thanks so for those. And leaders, let's stay engaged. Let's really help others and show that we're caring about others as we do the work we do. So, yeah, this has just been a great conversation.
Tod, how about a bottom line, something that you'd like to leave us with?
Tod: So, Al, I've got this little book series that just came out, four books, each of them less than 100 pages. They’re all on one of the big mistakes that really good leaders make. This comes out of 10 years of coaching people on these big mistakes. And one of them is, people think they can outwork the problems. They can just try harder. And there's a little book called How Not to Waste a Crisis: Quit Trying Harder in that series of four books. And I would say the first thing that you need to do as a leader is stop paddling harder if you know there's no water in the river. Instead, start learning differently. And if you can be a learner as a leader, then you can keep moving forward. So you're going to have to actually quit trying harder and actually start leading the learning.
Al: I like that analogy so much more than beating a dead horse. So, let’s—
Tod: Yeah, yeah, no need! No need.
Al: —let's go with that. Yeah. Really thoughtful.
Thank you, Tod, so much. Thanks for your contributions today. Thanks for your commitment to developing thriving leaders who can adapt to the future, to the future of the world that we're in. And thanks so much for spending your time with us and speaking in the lives of so many of our listeners.
Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Tod. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
You can always 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 or have any questions on flourishing workplace cultures, please email me, al@workplaces.org.
And as you reflect on today's conversation with Tod Bolsinger, ask yourself, where is God inviting you to lead with greater humility, deeper courage, and renewed clarity of vision? Adaptive leadership isn't all about having all the answers. It's about cultivating trust, learning together, and staying rooted in the calling God has placed on your organization. So if you're ready to take the next step toward building a flourishing Christ-centered workplace culture, start by listening well to your team. Visit workplaces.org to learn how the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey can help you lead with insight, curiosity, and purpose.
And keep listening to our weekly podcast as we continue to learn from leaders who are proven inspirational leaders. And next week, I'll be talking with Bishop Geoffrey Dudley Sr., the author of Leading Through Storms.
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.