Tempered Resilience: How leaders are formed in the crucible of change
“Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their transformation to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world”
In a post-2020 world, leaders are forced to lead through change. Often, they are met with significant resistance, if not outright mutiny!
While there are significant resources on leading through or toward change for business contexts, the tension elevates slightly when we consider the Christian context. How do Christian leaders think about, prepare themselves for, and finally lead through change? This is the essential question that Tod Bolsinger asks in Tempered Resilience.
Tod Bolsinger is a Professor in the School of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He received his Physical Doctorate from Fuller Theological Seminary, and his specific area of expertise is congregational strategy and leadership formation. He is the Vice President and Chief of leadership formation. Bolsinger has written three other books, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian, Show Time, and Canoeing the Mountains, in addition to Tempered Resilience. In this book, Bolsinger seeks to help leaders gain resilience to turn resistance and despair into hope (10). Let’s jump in!
overall an excellent book!
Bolsinger's purpose in writing is to assist Christian leaders in navigating organizational change. His primary audience is Christian ministry leaders, with some reference and application for general Christian principled leaders. Tempered Resilience is in many ways Bolsinger’s vocational Christian leadership sequel to Canoeing the Mountains.
In this previous work, Bolsinger defines leadership as “energizing a community of people toward their transformation to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world” (16).
In his perspective, leadership is about navigating change regardless of the specific role a given leader occupies (22). Tempered Resilience is then a guide on how to lead through the potential negative resistance to change (22). Bolsinger suggests four critical characteristics and four specific practices to produce grounded resilience that is necessary for transformational leadership through change.
The four characteristics are teachable, attuned, adaptable, and tenacious. Bolsinger walks the reader through each one of these characteristics and ties them together through a consistent illustration of tempering steel. His argument is supported by personal experience, academic research, and biblical concepts. Each one of these characteristics is developed and grounded by four correlating practices.
The four practices are learning, listening, looking, and lamenting. Bolsinger states that by intentionally practicing these four actions, leaders prepare themselves and their people to best lead through resistance to transformation. The common analogy of forming steel is used to give an illustration of how these leadership practices can be used as tools for personal leadership formation.
Bolsinger concludes by summarizing life's purpose as defined in Matthew 22:39-40. He states, "the end or goal of life for Jesus—whether for an individual or a community—is to love God and love others” (213). This interpretation is used as a catalyst to encourage leaders to pursue tempered resilience in their formation as a tool to best love God and love others.
Three unfortunate assumptions
Tempered Resilience is an engaging and thought-provoking book on leading through change. Bolsinger succeeds in providing his readers a succinct paradigm for forming themselves into individuals who can lead through change. His writing is engaging, clear, and exceptionally practical. While the book is excellent for stimulating discussion, Bolsinger makes several significant unqualified and undefended assumptions about leadership.
The first assumption is leadership is only transformational. This has been a common assumption since Ford’s revolutionary book and the past 50 years of exponential global change driven by technological advances. However, significant research has been conducted on transactional leadership and its viable positive effect in certain contexts within organizations.
The second assumption is resistance to change is negative. Bolsinger doesn’t acknowledge the potential positive outcome of resistance to change. Since change is critical to Bolsinger’s definition of leadership, all change is propagated as either neutral or good.
The third assumption is the definition of loving God and loving people. Bolsinger identifies loving God and loving people as Jesus' purpose for life. However, without a specific context or definition of what "loving God and loving people" means, a reader can insert their traditions. The lack of definition or qualification could easily be misconstrued to justify and advance a leader’s organizational change agenda.
Add it to your library
Bolsinger’s Tempered Resilience is engaging and thought-provoking on how to lead through change. However, several leadership assumptions leave significant room for misunderstanding, or at minimum, overgeneralizations. The most prominent potential misguidance is that all change is good. Having a chapter, section, or appendix on surrounding oneself with critical evaluators to determine if the change direction is wise and suitable for the specific situation would have been substantially impactful.
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