Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change
By Tod Bolsinger (InterVarsity Press)
Written during a year of considerable social, political and economic strain, Tod Bolsinger’s second book on adaptive leadership, Tempered Resilience, is a gift to those leaders who have faced significant resistance and/or sabotage over the last year, and who are ready and willing to be formed for longer-lasting ministry.
To depict resilience, Bolsinger turns to the metaphor of forging steel. Anyone who has seen the History Channel’s “Forged in Fire”—or who has forged their own metal tools or art—will appreciate how Bolsinger aligns the formation of a leader with the shaping of metal. Comparing leadership formation to the heating, holding, hammering and hewing of the forging process is an evocative picture of the leader’s life. Key to this metaphor is the leader remembering he or she becomes a leader in the midst of leading.
Bolsinger’s second book on leadership follows his well-received debut, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. Rather than technical solutions to technical problems, both books focus on the internal work leaders need to do to overcome the anxiety of uncertainty, leaning heavily on The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow.
Tempered Resilience builds on Edwin Friedman’s Failure of Nerve and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Lessons in Leadership. Friedman’s phrase “failure of nerve” diagnoses a person’s anxious response to others. To that failure, Bolsinger adds “failure of heart,” which is a burned-out leader’s coldness toward others. To avoid these failures when change efforts are met with resistance or sabotage, a leader must become resilient, able to get back up when knocked down.
With all that is good about Tempered Resilience, one section in Chapter Seven needs further development. In light of the intensified racial tension in our country, communities and churches during 2020, the personal example of managing reactivity is too short. It easily could have been a case study for the entire chapter.
Eric Black, executive director, publisher and editor
Baptist Standard
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