S1:E2 Build Trust and Navigate Change

00;00;00;00 – 00;01;57;17
Audio of children playing.

Marcus Goodyear
When I was a kid. I had the original toy of transformation. I’m not talking about Optimus Prime. I’m talking about Lego. Santa brought me a Lego spaceship, which I built. But then my sister and I could take it apart and build a different spaceship. Our own creation. And then we could take that spaceship apart and build anything. Even spaceships for my Star Wars figures and a little jail cell for my sister’s Princess Leia figure that she’s since told me that most of our Star Wars play involved her waiting for my Luke to rescue her Leia from a Lego box. As a boy in the 1980s, I couldn’t transform those Legos beyond my childish understanding of masculinity. I don’t see my sister that often anymore, but I understand now that we are equals. That is, I try not to put her in a box of my own expectations and make her wait for rescue. I like to think transformation is always possible. Little boys and little girls grow up. Tadpoles transform into bullfrogs. Caterpillars transform into butterflies. People turn into better people. Communities into better communities. But transformation takes work. Those Lego don’t build themselves. Those little kids don’t raise themselves very well. And change can be scary. Sometimes even painful. When we face deep change, it’s easy to pine for the good old days, you know, before everything changed. And we can just go play with our Lego. But change is required. And a good leader helps people navigate that transformation. From the H. E. Butt Foundation, this is The Echoes Podcast. On today’s episode, we welcome Tod Bolsinger. Tod is the founder of AE Sloan Leadership Incorporated with his wife, Beth, and author of Canoeing the Mountains and the Practicing Change series. I’m Marcus Goodyear here with my co-host Camille Hall-Ortega. Today we’re going to talk about transformation and how good leaders help us navigate the pain of change.

00;01;57;20 – 00;02;17;08
Marcus Goodyear
Tod, welcome to the podcast.

Tod Bolsinger
It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Camille Hall-Ortega
We’re glad to have you.

Marcus Goodyear
In your work on leadership, Tod, you say that there is no transformation without trust, but you also say don’t rely on trust. So can you please explain that those two things seem opposed to each other? Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger
So when you talk about leadership, I always say leadership is about transformation.

00;02;17;10 – 00;02;35;21
Tod Bolsinger
That’s why leadership is not about a title. It’s not about having a heavy, heavy furniture in a corner office. It’s about how do you lead a people through a kind of transformation so they can accomplish the mission that’s in front of them. That’s what makes leadership leadership. And it’s also what makes it different than, say, management. Management is a really important skill set.

00;02;35;23 – 00;02;59;07
Tod Bolsinger
I’m not a person who thinks that leadership is more important than management. But management is about taking chaos and bringing order and control and taking care of the things entrusted to your care, as my colleague Scott Kermode says, and handling them as good stewards and handling them over to other people. That’s all really important. But leadership is where it requires transformation.

00;02;59;14 – 00;03;20;19
Tod Bolsinger
So when Moses is, standing on the other side of the Red Sea, the manager would say, “Hey, we checked the map. And it’s going to take us six, six weeks of hard, hard walking to get to the Promised Land.” The leader knows it’s 40 years and not a boat is going to get there. Are those skill sets mutually exclusive?

00;03;20;21 – 00;03;43;28
Marcus Goodyear
They’re not mutually exclusive, but they oftentimes get confused, right?

Tod Bolsinger
So many times people who have been good managers get asked then to become leaders. And this is when the trust and transformation stuff works, right? So I always tell people there’s no transformation without trust. And good managers build trust. Like they’re technically competent. They care for you. They do what they say they’re going to do.

00;03;43;28 – 00;04;08;14
Tod Bolsinger
They hit their deadlines. They, you know, they accomplish the things that are on the to do list, right? But trust is not transformation. Transformation requires people to go through change. So you need there to be high trust. But you can’t rely on trust, if you’re going to lead people through transformation, it actually you have to get comfortable with the fact that when you take people through transformation, people who go through transformation, resist it.

00;04;08;16 – 00;04;25;20
Tod Bolsinger
Right. You said that change is scary.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger
That’s the thing you’re taking people through. You’re taking them through the scary part, through the metamorphosis, through the, you know, the chrysalis stage, or taking through all those things that are scary. That takes a lot of trust. But usually the trust goes down at that moment, which is why you need a big wellspring of trust.

00;04;25;24 – 00;04;54;19
Marcus Goodyear
So is this why our culture is experiencing a lack of trust overall? Are we just going through a major transformation as a culture?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, I think in some senses, yeah. So one of the things that I often tell people is remember that the root word for family and familiar are the same root word. So when you go through something unfamiliar or you ask someone to step into something unfamiliar, or all of a sudden the world around you changes in such a way that it feels unfamiliar.

00;04;54;21 – 00;05;13;18
Tod Bolsinger
What most people feel is not just disoriented. They feel unfamily-ed and they feel abandoned, right? They get highly anxious. And then what they want is someone to say, Don’t worry, I’ll manage this chaos. I’ll take care of it. I’ll do it perfectly. I know exactly the solution. Right? I want to promise you that I alone.

00;05;13;18 – 00;05;45;06
Tod Bolsinger
I’m the only one who can solve it. Right? And people want that. And unfortunately, that keeps us from transformation. Because real leadership requires us to change. It invites us into it, a collective or a communal experience of transformation.

Camille Hall-Ortega
That just reminds me of something that I thought about when I was reading up on your work, was that I wondered how much expectations come into play that we hear about change being painful and change being difficult.

00;05;45;06 – 00;06;17;05
Camille Hall-Ortega
And I wonder if a lot of that has to do with expectations or I sort of, expectancy violation theory that maybe it’s maybe it’s just that folks need to know that there’s a lot of uncertainty in that change, and that maybe a good leader is one that’s telling people what to expect, even if it’s it’s going to be really hard, or we’re going to have times where it looks like it’s getting worse before it gets better, or what? What does that look like to sort of set expectations in a way that might help with the pain of change?

00;06;17;08 – 00;06;36;19
Tod Bolsinger
Well, you’re exactly right. Good leaders do set expectations and they will tell you the truth. The problem is most of us want, either consciously or unconsciously, a leader who’s going to exceed our expectations and make this change painless for us. They want us to make it easy. And so what we do is we end up in this thing.

00;06;36;19 – 00;07;00;23
Tod Bolsinger
And this is actually one of the things that’s really interesting. A lot of research is that men get asked to take on roles, oftentimes beyond their competency, because they project confidence.

Marcus Goodyear
Do you do you think that our culture has a bias toward male leadership because of that?

Tod Bolsinger
Oh, 100%, that’s not even clear. That’s because we have we have decades, centuries of assuming that leadership is, masculine.

00;07;00;27 – 00;07;17;11
Tod Bolsinger
Almost all the traits. When you ask people, what is the trait of a leader, what is a leader look like? It starts with tall, it’s usually, right? It starts with tall, like King Saul. Right? Exactly, exactly. Right. Right. King Saul is like the quintessential. I mean, for anybody who has ears to hear, has a biblical imagination.

00;07;17;11 – 00;07;47;14
Tod Bolsinger
You get to realize we have these images of David as this great king who brought down the Goliath, but he was the runt of the litter, who was not picked because he didn’t fit the mold of leadership. So yeah, the most biggest bias of all is that. And what’s interesting is Christians fall into it, even though our sacred text literally tells us the opposite, right down to Jesus, who was the Man of Sorrows, who did disappointed because he didn’t look like the leader who came in on a donkey rather than a stallion.

00;07;47;14 – 00;08;07;12
Tod Bolsinger
Right? All those things. So yeah, we have this expectations of leadership. And I think unconsciously our expectation of leadership is they are going to solve our problems so we don’t have to change. And that’s the big disappointment that’s so important.

Camille Hall-Ortega
I’m very curious about what you what you’ve said about men and women because I think it begs the question, what do we do about that?

00;08;07;14 – 00;08;31;00
Camille Hall-Ortega
Is it that we need to adjust our expectations that we don’t need to be looking for a tall male leader? Or do women need to be more confident, even if they’re faking it? Right? How do you weigh in on on the solve for that?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, the first thing for almost every one of these solve solves whenever you get a gap like that.

00;08;31;00 – 00;08;49;28
Tod Bolsinger
So the place where my leadership stuff is built is on adaptive leadership, which is always in the gap between spouse-d values and actual values, or the gap between what we say we want to be about and what we actually do. The first thing we got to do is we got a name that gap — we just got to name up front.

00;08;49;28 – 00;09;07;01
Tod Bolsinger
We have this bias one, and if you can’t name it, you can’t navigate it. And then what we got to do is ask ourselves, so what do we get out of keeping that bias? And mostly what we get is to live with the illusion that our leaders are going to make our lie, are going to fix our problems.

00;09;07;01 – 00;09;37;05
Tod Bolsinger
They’re going to be our quick fixes instead of our leaders are the people who are going to empower us to collaboratively fix them together so that we can be transformed.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Really good, really good.

Marcus Goodyear
So leaders, you have said leaders need a willingness to walk people through the disruption of change. This transformation process you’re talking about and that they have to be willing to disappoint people at a rate that people can absorb.

00;09;37;07 – 00;09;56;25
Marcus Goodyear
And then just a moment ago, you were talking about Jesus. Would you say that Jesus is a leader who disappointed people at a rate they could absorb?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, it’s so interesting because that, quote, disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. It comes from Marty Lynskey, who is a person who I’ve gotten to know. He wrote the foreword for my little Practicing Change books, and he’s a really remarkable leader and scholar and consultant.

00;09;56;27 – 00;10;36;15
Tod Bolsinger
And what’s interesting is I know Marty personally, and he wouldn’t have been thinking about Jesus because he’s actually Jewish by background and he would tell me that he’s unreligious. But he asked me, why do Christians like adaptive leadership? Like, that’s the stuff that I do. I work with faith leaders. And I told him it’s because what you’re describing is what we really believe we found in saw in Jesus, a person who’s willing to take people through the disappointment and at times they could absorb it. At times it took them. It took them while. Yeah, at times, at times they couldn’t. They did crucify him.

Marcus Goodyear
I feel like it’s taking us 2000 years to absorb it, right?

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, exactly.

Marcus Goodyear
We’re still not there, right?

00;10;36;15 – 00;10;57;20
Tod Bolsinger
Right. And even the even the power of the Holy Spirit in Pentecost is really about convincing a group of people to have an experience that says that thing you thought was the kingdom of God, which you thought was a military overthrow of Rome, is actually a radical transformation of all the earth, starting with you. It’s not about nothing.

00;10;57;20 – 00;11;25;25
Tod Bolsinger
Then it’s the starting with me first. That’s the that’s the whole Christian understanding. Then it starts with my own confession of my own faith, my own sin, my own need to be forgiven of my sins.

Marcus Goodyear
So you’ve made it very personal, right? And yet leadership is about transforming communities. And I have heard a lot of people, commenting on how personal Christian faith has become, in recent decades, maybe the last 100, 200 years.

00;11;25;27 – 00;11;52;18
Marcus Goodyear
How do you think about transforming an entire community, rather than just the individuals within that community?

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, I often say that if we had taught all of our children from the minute they ever went to Sunday school, that the most important verse was your kingdom come, your will be done on earth before you taught them. John 316 For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

00;11;52;20 – 00;12;14;10
Tod Bolsinger
It’s really important the world. But we take that as me. So I say Christianity is personal, but it’s not private. It is personal. So that I take personal responsibility to say yes to something that is going to transform my me in, in a community. That’s why I believe we are baptized into a people of God for the sake of the world.

00;12;14;12 – 00;12;41;26
Tod Bolsinger
It’s for the sake of the transformation of the whole world. What happens very often, and I think this happens a lot of our singing and a lot of our prayers and our programs is it becomes not just personal, Marcus. It becomes private, becomes just disconnected from the communal. And I’ll tell you one place, I’m a pastor by training, I was taught how to work with individuals to go through loss and grief and transformation.

00;12;41;29 – 00;13;09;15
Tod Bolsinger
But most of us were never taught how to take a community through loss and grief and transformation, let alone an organization through loss and grief and transformation that we would choose so that we might be able to participate in God’s transformation of the world.

Camille Hall-Ortega
While you’re talking about change and you’re saying change is painful, is it always painful?

00;13;09;15 – 00;13;29;14
Camille Hall-Ortega
Is that true, too? Is that fair to say that change or transformation is always painful?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, sometimes it’s chosen, but I think that. So I do really believe that change is experiences loss. And I guess maybe it’s because, you know, I’m 60 and I know what it’s like to have children who are adults who no longer play Legos with me.

00;13;29;15 – 00;13;50;07
Tod Bolsinger
Right? Exactly. Like right.

Marcus Goodyear
That’s what my grandchildren are for.

Tod Bolsinger
Who are taking their own time to give me grandchildren.

Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. Oh, no.

Tod Bolsinger
But I like, I like, I love my kids, but I and I miss the heck out of them. And so like part of it is, wanting them to flourish as adults means I don’t get to have them under my own roof.

00;13;50;07 – 00;14;10;23
Tod Bolsinger
Like there’s always loss. There’s always. But that loss is good loss. It’s good grief, you were letting go of the things so that we can step into the new, into the new. But it is a it is a kind of loss. Yeah.

Camille Hall-Ortega
And so what are what would you say are some top ways that or maybe you wouldn’t say that maybe maybe not accept this premise.

00;14;10;23 – 00;14;42;08
Camille Hall-Ortega
But some ways to kind of deal with the pain of that, of those feeling of loss.

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. Well, well, one of them is just to acknowledge the need for it. So like, so like, like the book that I’m probably most well known for, Canoeing the Mountains, is really a book that says, it’s uses the story of Lewis and Clark to say that there was this European mental model of the world that became the European mental model of the continent, that assumed everything was just a continuation of the past 18 months of traveling in canoes upstream.

00;14;42;08 – 00;15;05;09
Tod Bolsinger
And they got to the Rocky Mountains. They realized the world in front of them was nothing like the world behind them. That the geography of the West was like, unlike anything people of European descent had ever seen before, and that they couldn’t just keep canoeing their way forward, which means that they had to actually, at that moment, drop the canoes and become hikers.

00;15;05;09 – 00;15;29;21
Tod Bolsinger
They had to become mountain climbers instead of canoers. It required a transformation.

Marcus Goodyear
Yeah, in order. And they had to look to a different leader too. Right?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, well, the probably the biggest transformation of all was that they began to listen to Sacagawea. Yeah. So they never paid attention to a teenage Native American nursing mother. They couldn’t write it down a single word she said, until they needed her to be the person who was the relational bridge with the Shoshone that actually helped them get to the mountains.

00;15;29;21 – 00;15;47;15
Tod Bolsinger
And so so it required even to think. But think about this, Lewis was tutored by Thomas Jefferson in the White House. But when he got so far off the map, he needed to listen to someone who probably up until that moment, he barely acknowledged her humanity. Well, now he had to be willing to. And not only did he willing to, he did.

00;15;47;15 – 00;16;11;01
Tod Bolsinger
And they were remarkable. And when they were off the map, they were this remarkable community of people. And the sad part of the story is when they finally, when they went back home, they basically reverted back to their old ways.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Okay. So I would, I would imagine then that and I’ve always pronounced it Sacagawea. But you’re pronouncing it correctly I’m sure.

00;16;11;03 – 00;16;31;04
Camille Hall-Ortega
So help me with the name here. Sacagawea.

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. Is that right. Yeah. So this is interesting. We all learned her name is Sacajawea. Yeah. But they actually wrote her name down in the journals with KS Sakakawea or Sacagawea. Yeah. And so, I think it’s good to give her back her name personally.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Yes. I think that’s great.

00;16;31;10 – 00;17;02;11
Camille Hall-Ortega
I’m imagining that she perhaps had some moments where she was leading some reluctant folks. Right. That maybe they didn’t see her as competent until they really needed her. How do you lead people who are reluctant, you know? Well, one of the ways.

Tod Bolsinger
Okay, so let’s circle back to where we started now. She was incredibly trustworthy. Like she was competent I mean like actually they have in their journal stuff like Charbonneau who’s who is or her husband.

00;17;02;17 – 00;17;23;04
Tod Bolsinger
Was it completely incompetent. Like they tolerated that guy because they needed her. Right. She was the competent one. But because of the way that that was the way the 18th century, you know, European men thought about Native American people. You know, they needed that. They needed to bring the husband and the husband literally brought his wife, and they only brought one of his wives.

00;17;23;04 – 00;17;48;17
Tod Bolsinger
We don’t know what he did to other wives yet. So what realizes we actually live in this place where what she did is demonstrated her competence over and over again. So they trusted her and that led to their transformation.

Marcus Goodyear
Okay. And what the transformation came when they were able to set aside their old world assumptions about what they expected to find and what, what had been built up in their mind.

00;17;48;19 – 00;18;08;07
Marcus Goodyear
And, you know, they dropped the canoes like you said, so, but that I always want to come back to the present. What old world assumptions are we carrying around with us that people, you know, 100, 200 years from now are going to just shake their head? What do we as individuals or Christians or Americans need to let go of, in your opinion?

00;18;08;09 – 00;18;48;24
Tod Bolsinger
So one of the things that I work with leaders almost every single day is I, as my, my, my new little books, the Practicing Change series are what I call the Four Big Mistakes Good Leaders make. And one of the mistakes that almost every good leader makes is believing that at the moment of crisis, they will and need to rise to the occasion, and what they actually do is default to their training. And if we were trained well, great will respond well. But if we were trained for canoeing and you’re facing mountains, you’ll tend to double down on paddling harder. And then next thing you know, you’ve just burned out your rotator cuff, you’ve exhausted yourself and you haven’t gone anywhere.

00;18;49;00 – 00;19;18;17
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. So one of the things we have to give up is, I would say, is the expert expectation. I think the single biggest thing to give up in a changing world is that you, the expert, will take you forward. It’s not the expert, it’s the learner.

Marcus Goodyear
And that requires trust. That requires trust and humility.

Tod Bolsinger
Like, I mean, Eric Hoffer said, you know, in a changing world, learners inherit the earth and they’ll learn and find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.

00;19;18;20 – 00;19;34;24
Camille Hall-Ortega
Wow.

Tod Bolsinger
And what we have is a lot of leaders who want people to trust you, because I was an expert, and what they need to learn is to trust you, because I will lead us through the learning. I’m humble enough to say, I need help. We’re going to do this together. We’re going to collaborate. We’re not going to leave out voices.

00;19;35;00 – 00;19;58;24
Tod Bolsinger
We’re going to bring in voices. We haven’t listened to before. How about diverse voices like Sacagawea? Yeah. Who is on home territory. And we’re and we’re just not listening to her. Right. That that’s what good leadership looks like today.

Marcus Goodyear
So good. The idea of trust is one that I get a little stuck on. I mentioned earlier that we don’t have a lot of trust in our society, or maybe it feels like we don’t have a lot of trust in our society.

00;19;58;24 – 00;20;30;07
Marcus Goodyear
I don’t know, there’s two little studies I read recently. One of them said only 22% of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. Yeah. Period. And I read another study that said only 32% of Americans said they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in organized religion and churches. And I was, reading The Righteous Mind over the weekend where he talks about just the, the, the failure of people’s ability to trust institutions and how our institutions are losing our trust.

00;20;30;09 – 00;20;55;20
Marcus Goodyear
How do we rebuild trust. And I know for leaders, you’ve said we a leader rebuilds trust through skills, through earning that trust. How does an institution earn trust? And how do we as a culture earn trust with each other? Again?

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, it’s so we talk about trust being built through technical competence. That’s the credibility of doing the things that are the most important, that it’s doing what you said you’re going to do.

00;20;55;20 – 00;22;14;06
Tod Bolsinger
It’s doing what you’re entrusted with. Right. So I always say to to pastors and religious leaders, if people can’t trust you with the texts, the sacred texts, and they can’t trust you with the traditions, they can’t trust you with souls, they can’t trust you with meetings and money. They can’t trust you with all those things. They’re not going they can’t trust you on the map. They’re not going to follow you off the map. So it starts with competence, but it also requires relational congruence. And I think right now what we have is a giant trust in a in credibility and authority. We have so much cynicism. It’s so high that people actually don’t trust news reports. They don’t trust any of the markers in our culture that we used to look to for to be, wise brokers. Now everybody’s on a team. And, you know, Jonathan Smith work on this has been so powerful for me. Even data, you know, Jonathan Hite and Adam Grant and others have said people don’t use facts anymore, like scientists that use facts like lawyers to argue their case. So until we name that we are actually trying hard to win and hold on to power rather than actually make things for the common good, we’re going to we’re going to have just a deficit of trust.

00;22;14;09 – 00;22;35;02
Camille Hall-Ortega
Yeah, I’m hearing a lot. I think of probably some misconceptions that our society has adopted about leadership. And you’re kind of turning some of those things on their head. What do you think are some top misconceptions about leaders and leadership? Well, one of them is that I so I have two a couple a couple things we work on a lot.

00;22;35;02 – 00;22;59;29
Tod Bolsinger
One thing we talk about in one of our little books is a book called The Mission Always wins. The mission always wins. So until we’re all agreed on, what is the mission? What’s the purpose? What’s the highest value? So even the Lewis and Clark story is interesting. They were sent to find a water route that would a navigable water route that would be part of the economic plan of this new country, the United States of America, a water route that people have been looking for for 300 years.

00;23;00;04 – 00;23;21;20
Tod Bolsinger
What they got to is the reality of the mountains, that there was no water route, but they didn’t go back because they had a deeper value. It was an enlightenment value. And I could sit here and argue with you whether it’s at the right value or not. But they had a deeper value, and the enlightenment value was the growth of human knowledge will lead to the growth of human happiness.

00;23;21;23 – 00;23;38;18
Tod Bolsinger
So we’re going to keep exploring even though it’s not going to be good economically for us. We’re going to keep exploring because there’s a deeper value until we get clear on the deeper values that we all agree on. And until we get clear on the mission that we’re all put in front of us, we’re going to be very hard.

00;23;38;25 – 00;23;56;16
Tod Bolsinger
So the values, I would say values are more important than vision right now. And mission is more important than any person, any leader. The what is the mission? The mission wins. Not the leader, not the stakeholders, not the donors, not the people with the money, not the people who are the loudest. The mission and the two were clear on those things.

00;23;56;16 – 00;24;17;28
Tod Bolsinger
It’s going to be hard to move forward.

Marcus Goodyear
Well, one of the reasons that we invited you here is because our mission is to cultivate wholeness and people and institutions for the transformation of communities. And we kind of latched on to that idea of transformation. Begin looking who can help us think about this? Do you think of wholeness as part of leadership?

00;24;18;01 – 00;24;37;04
Tod Bolsinger
So I always say under the precursor to transformation is health, right? So organizational health is mostly clarity. I mean, the simplest way to think about organizational health is clarity. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect. But we’re really clear. So when we when we get asked to work with organization we always start with, okay. So health is clarity.

00;24;37;04 – 00;24;58;20
Tod Bolsinger
What’s the most important things. What is the things that are not going to change. What are the values that have been that have been, that have anchored us and the actual values, not our aspirational values? Let’s get clear on those things. And then once we’re were aligned and we’re living out our values and our behavior, now we can start to talk about how we move forward together.

00;24;58;23 – 00;25;48;28
Camille Hall-Ortega
I’m wondering about, I think our tendency and maybe this is about us not wanting to feel pain or feel loss, but I think for a lot of folks, when we’re going through change, we want our uncertainty to be reduced. But it sounds like maybe you’re saying there might meet maybe there’s a need to lean into that uncertainty because it sounds like you’re you would challenge a good leader to own uncertainty.
Can you talk more about that?

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. So adaptive leadership, which is the leadership at work I do starts when there are no best practices. No, there’s no best practices. We don’t know what to do. It literally for me, the biblical text in Second Chronicles, Lord, we don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you, right?

00;25;48;28 – 00;26;05;20
Camille Hall-Ortega
Oh, wow.

Tod Bolsinger
Like, so the hardest part about that is it starts. Then when somebody looks at the leader and says, Camille, you’re our leader, I trust you, I’m following you. I’m here on your team. What are we going to do? And because you’re a good leader, you got to look them in the eye and say the three hardest words for any human to say.

00;26;05;20 – 00;26;22;16
Tod Bolsinger
Like, harder than I love you, right? Right, right. People think I love you, I forgive you. I’m sorry. Those are not even nearly as hard as standing before someone who trusts you and is looking for you for leadership. And you’ve got to say, I don’t know.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Wow.

Tod Bolsinger
And it is still ours to do. So we’re going to figure it out together.

00;26;22;19 – 00;26;49;25
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. So it’s looking beyond yourself and that’s, that’s a good word.

Tod Bolsinger
And we and we work we do this with churches and organizations. We say to them and we, we ask this question, how might your charism as a kind of a Catholic word, your gifts, your values, the uniqueness that is you? How might your terrorism address the pain point of the world as an expression of what God wants to do in the world, what my ear cares, and the pain point of the world?

00;26;49;28 – 00;27;05;08
Tod Bolsinger
It’s not just how might you get to be the organization or church you want to be and ask people to support it. And it’s not just no matter what we got to do, we got to take on the things of this world that are painful. Like, I think Jesus didn’t take everything on. There was people. He didn’t.

Marcus Goodyear
It’s true.

00;27;05;15 – 00;27;21;24
Tod Bolsinger
Right? There were people he walked by, right? He healed one person at the pool of Bethsaida. Thank God he did. We had a great story, but a lot of other people who pass by. So what is it for us? And that’s the discernment work. That’s why I say the spiritual gift that every leader has to cultivate.

00;27;21;24 – 00;27;45;00
Tod Bolsinger
And every community has to cultivate this discernment, because discernment helps us to say, what is ours to do? What is the transformation we need to take on? What is the thing we need to be willing to lay down?

Camille Hall-Ortega
I’m wondering, we’re talking a lot about kind of what a leader brings to the table and how that affects the folks that they’re leading.

00;27;45;02 – 00;28;07;02
Camille Hall-Ortega
But what about the leader themselves? What if they have been hurt or betrayed in some way? How do they trust and how do they how do they have to adjust from those past hurts for themselves?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, my first answer is every leader has been betrayed or hurt in some way because we are humans, right?

00;28;07;02 – 00;29;14;27
Tod Bolsinger
So the most important thing for me then is don’t fake that like I don’t believe, “Fake it till you make it,” I really don’t I, I understand the, the mindset of that, but I really think that what you’re actually doing is telling the truth. Like, so when I walk into a room I like, I’m aware of this. I rarely struggle with whether or not people are going to like me. If I’m working with them. I for some reason I’m pretty freed from that. But when I’m not freed from is, I actually wonder whether or not they’re going to respect my work. Like I will be aware of everybody when I’m speaking. Anybody who closes their eyes for a second because it’s the late afternoon and they’ve had a like a, a sugar low, like I will think in my head, I will have that person’s face and I’ll think later. They’re thinking, well, there’s two hours I’m never getting back, right. Like, like, like I struggle with people doubting my competence or whether or not I get at that value. Now, once I say that out loud, I realize, okay, that’s usually me. I mean, sometimes I got to do a better job, but that’s usually me being overly insecure. I just have to let go of and ask and look for healing and recognize that leaders are formed in the leading.

00;29;14;27 – 00;29;33;29
Tod Bolsinger
You’re actually formed in the process. It’s not like you get it all worked out, and then you get asked to lead.

Camille Hall-Ortega
That’s really good.

Marcus Goodyear
All this talk about kind of the pitfalls of leadership and the trust and the mistrust, it makes me think of something I read or something I heard. Sorry, at Lady Lodge many, many years ago, 2011.

00;29;33;29 – 00;29;59;16
Marcus Goodyear
So several years ago now from Linda Roberts. She was speaking there. Laity Lodge is our adult retreat center operated by the H. E. Butt Foundation here in the Texas Hill Country. And she was talking about trust and mistrust and how it feels like everything’s at stake. But God can use it all for good. So I’d like to play this clip. It’s a little bit old and scratchy, but I think you’ll be able to hear it.

00;29;59;19 – 00;30;26;07
Linda Roberts audio clip
So much of what happens to us being growing up is about trust and mistrust, and one of the things that we know is that when we’re raising children, we do the best job we can, but we blow it, right. What we have to trust is that the mistrust they get from what we do wrong because we’re not perfect, that that mistrust God will use.

00;30;26;10 – 00;30;51;14
Marcus Goodyear
So, Todd, when you hear that, does that set you free as a leader? Is that hard to accept?

Tod Bolsinger
What Linda is really saying here is as a leader, just like as a parent, you have to trust that you’re going to be imperfect.

Marcus Goodyear
Yeah.

Tod Bolsinger
And that literally are act of the I always think my act of leadership or our act of being a person who steps in and lead into a leadership position is an act of service.

00;30;51;14 – 00;32;20;19
Tod Bolsinger
I put it on the altar. God is going to use it. I want God to multiply it. And I had somebody say to me, God works through us and in spite of us. That’s an important thing to remember. It keeps me humble and it keeps me from thinking that I’m the person with the solution. But it’s also when in times when I have been the person with a leader who has hurt me or who is not, who has failed me, it’s helped me to realize, I can do what I often can learn at this moment is to look beyond that leader to what I want from God. And I think it’s really important. You know, people say you learn the best from really gifted leaders with obvious flaws. And when you start thinking about that, it gives you the opportunity to then take responsibility for yourself, right? So, I mean, I come from a family of really, really great people, but to be honest, we were not good listeners. I did not learn how to listen, in my family, we learned how to talk over each other. I need a lot of people in my life who said, Todd, you’re a good talker, but you know, brother, what you need. And I needed to hear that a lot. And I didn’t learn that from the leaders who are my models. I had to learn that from people who confronted my leadership problems. And I’m better. I’m a much better listener today than I used to be.

Marcus Goodyear
I just feel like that is a common problem in our culture, that we are all good at talking, we’re good at posting, we’re good at commenting, we’re good at thinking somebody wants to hear our take instead of listening.

00;32;20;19 – 00;32;54;09
Marcus Goodyear
It’s this just the world needs more listeners.

Tod Bolsinger
One of the ways I found myself getting into that was by saying, I’m going to learn to listen as deeply as I need to until I completely understand what the other person’s saying.

Camille Hall-Ortega
That’s so good. I love that we heard from another guest that we spoke with, that you want to be able to share someone’s story in the way that they would share it, that you want to be able to listen to them so well that you could share their story in the way that they would, they would share it themselves.

00;32;54;13 – 00;33;15;02
Tod Bolsinger
Oh that’s beautiful. I think I’ll take that. That’s good. I’ll practice that. That’s for you. That’s awesome.

Marcus Goodyear
Which is a lot of what we try to do in Echoes. We’re trying to share other people’s stories in partnership with them in Echoes magazine and often that means we do the journalism. No, no, of the subject gets to review the story. We try to we’re not looking for puff pieces, so we’re not going to, you know, we’re not going to bring in somebody who’s just going to spread their agenda. But at the same time, we want to make sure that they feel honored and that they feel that the story is representing them well. Yeah. Todd, any last thoughts or last words for us?
Anything we didn’t think to ask you?

Tod Bolsinger
Well, you this is a great conversation because it was so far ranging. I would say that maybe to circle back to the whole part about trust. Whenever I say to people, there’s no transformation without trust, I always say, if you need to stop right here, like, if you doubt that, stop right here.

00;33;54;17 – 00;34;54;25
Tod Bolsinger
Because trust is a sine qua non like like you’re right. The fact that our country doesn’t trust each other, it’s going to be very hard for us to be transformed into the nation we want to be or the culture we want to be. So you’re right, it starts with that. What I just want people to get, though, is stockpiling trust, especially if you’re a leader that everybody trusts me and I don’t want to lose anybody’s trust. I won’t do anything to make anybody mad at me. So it’s like building a big barn filled with seed and everybody’s starving because there’s no fruit. You’re gonna have to figure out how to build that seed and plant that seed in such a way, in a healthy soil that will bear fruit. And that’s the work. That’s the work that has to be done.

Marcus Goodyear
So a leader uses the trust that they’ve built up in order to address the pain people are going to feel as they’re transformed.

Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, I yeah. And one of the my little books is called Invest in Transformation. And it’s invest trust in transformation. That’s what it’s about.

Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. In fact that book is one of the ones that guided this conversation.

00;34;54;28 – 00;35;35;02
Marcus Goodyear
And it’s part of a four part series that you can get right now by Tod Bolsinger. And there’s an illustrator as well, whose name is, I think, listed as an author. It’s very good. And of course, canoeing the mountains as well. Thank you. Todd, thank you so much for your time. It’s been great to talk to you again. It’s been too long. And, I’m grateful for all that you’re doing out there. For leaders, for Christians, all that you’ve done for Laity Lodge and the H. E. Butt Foundation in the past. It’s been great to talk with you.

Tod Bolsinger
Thank you.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Thanks!

Marcus Goodyear
The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stennett and me, Marcus Goodyear.
It’s edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, Todd Bolsinger. The Echoes Podcast, the production brought to you by the H. E. Butt Foundation. You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.

Season 1: Episode 2

Build Trust and Navigate Change

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