As faith leaders, most of us became leaders because there is a God that we love, and there are people that we love, and we want to introduce the people we love to the God we love by building a church, a ministry, a school, or an organization that they would love.
Understanding the Challenge of Adaptive Change
What we soon found out was that to bring the changes necessary for any organization to accomplish the goals put before us (including helping people we love experience the love of God in a tangible way) requires renovating an organization that previous generations have already loved—and continue to love just as it is!
Unconsciously, we who are stakeholders have expectations for the leader to make our lives better, easier, more productive, and more successful. Stakeholders expect leaders to solve all of the problems, to balance the budgets, to raise money, to bring a compelling vision, and to energize the team for good, hard work. We stakeholders expect the leader to “turn the ship around,” without causing any seasickness—with the least amount of pain possible.
In other words, we stakeholders generally expect that a good leader will make things better for, well, . . . us.
Why Stakeholders Resist Adaptive Change
There are always stakeholders who are deeply committed to keeping things the way they have always been.
But when changes are needed to help our beloved organization thrive or even survive in a changing world, leaders are required to make hard decisions and tough choices that often cause pain and howls of protest. Oh, we know we need things to change; we just don’t want to have to change.
But why? Why is change so hard?
Certainly, some of it can be associated with needing to learn better change processes, but the biggest enduring challenge is our personal resistance to it. Heifetz and Linsky explain it in terms that all of us can understand, “It’s not that people resist change, per se. People resist loss.”
Strategies for Implementing Adaptive Change
Loss.
That is what is at stake for the stakeholders. Because in a changing world where “what got you here won’t take you there,” leaders often have to help their people let go of the very program, tradition, strategy, or resource that made the biggest difference in their lives. The people who have the most personal resonance with and commitment to an organization experience the loss of having to let go of what has made the organization so meaningful to them. Facing losses and taking stakeholders through those losses to a new, fruitful expression of the organizational mission is at the top of the leadership job description.
Keeping the Mission at the Center of Adaptive Change
This is especially true in what is called “adaptive change.” Adaptive change is, by definition, organizational change that requires the organization itself and the people who are part of it to adapt or change themselves.
“Changing hearts and behaviors” captures perfectly the crux of adaptive leadership. Adaptive challenges require us to bring change at the intersection of personal and organizational life—at the overlap of personal transformation and shared mission. Like a Venn diagram that captures with utter clarity the necessity of change and the urgency of mission, adaptive change requires a laser focus on the challenges facing an organization and how the necessary shifts of behaviors, attitudes, and values enable the group to face their biggest challenges and thrive.
For the adaptive change leader, the goal can never be pleasing stakeholders by solving their problems but leading the organization through personal and shared transformation in order to accomplish its mission in a changing and often disruptive world. What an adaptive change leader must do without fail, then, is to help the organization make necessary adaptations that bring transformation for the sake of the mission. The mission is the ultimate “trump card” that always wins the hand.
Adapted from The Mission Always Wins 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.
