When trust is gone, the transformational journey is over.
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.
Understanding Transformational Leadership
Transformation is what makes adaptive leadership adaptive.
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.
The Challenges of Transformational Leadership
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. 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, and makes plans that align and allocate 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.
How to Lead Transformational Change Effectively
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. 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.
Adapting to Disruptive Environments Through Transformational Leadership
The 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.
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.
Adapted from Invest in Transformation by Tod Bolsinger. ©2024 by Tod E. Bolsinger. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
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 the Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year in pastoral leadership, Canoeing the Mountains, and the Christian Book Award Finalist, Tempered Resilience. His latest series release includes four books across The Practicing Change Series: How Not to Waste a Crisis, Leading Through Resistance, Investing in Transformation, and The Mission Always Wins.
