Invest in Transformation

Writing in the wake of the 9/11 bombings, leadership expert and author Margaret Wheatley responded to the question of how leaders and teams could learn to plan ahead when the world was so volatile. How might leaders get better at predicting what the future will bring?

She waved the question aside.

You can’t predict the future, Wheatley wrote, but “it is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another.”[1]

If that answer leaves you with a heaviness in your heart, you are not alone. Trust in organizations, institutions—even trust in neighbors—has been declining at a rate that many previously thought unthinkable.[2] Even more, the lack of trust in leaders, either political, institutional, corporate, even religious—led one author to write about “the scandal of leadership.”[3]

When the books don’t balance, the public and private messages don’t align, the decisions made seem more for personal gain than for the organizational good, trust evaporates quickly. Psychologist and executive coach Jim Osterhaus explains that while trust increases from the congruence of leaders repeatedly doing what they say, the trust level goes down when the words and actions don’t match. According to Osterhaus, “Trust is gained like a thermostat and lost like a light switch.” A leader builds trust slowly over time by constantly monitoring the conditions and actions that create the “climate” of trust in the room. But even one action, if perceived as incongruent, can make the levels of trust plummet into darkness.[4]

When trust has fallen to the place where leading anywhere is impossible, there is nothing else to do except restore it. For example, when an institution wants to embark on a building renovation project, if there is no money in the bank, then the renovation work must stop. The bank account of trust needs to be replenished.

To restore the trust account, a leader needs both technical competence and relational congruence.[5] Technical competence is the sense that leaders are doing everything within their power and their job description to be as effective as possible. Before they can call a group to change and grow, leaders must demonstrate that they have the ability to serve the needs of their charges right where they are. Before they call people to take on the challenges of the uncharted territory in front of them, they must demonstrate that they can ably navigate the most basic expectations they have been authorized to accomplish. Before an organization will even consider undergoing costly change, there must be a sense that the leadership is doing its job. Because change is so potentially painful, therefore, transformational leadership then does not begin with transformation.

It begins in competence.

Now, certainly, if technical competence is the only criteria for leadership, it can lead to significant problems (numerous scandals led by “the smartest people in the room” immediately come to mind), so genuine trust in leadership is more than just credibility that comes from technical competence; it also requires relational congruence.

Relational congruence is the way that leaders show up for the people “entrusted to their care.”[6] Relational congruence is the personal capacity—the emotional intelligence, the moral character, the ability to listen and communicate—to uphold values and protect the relationships, the integrity, and the culture of the organization. When leaders function with relational congruence, they strengthen the bonds, deepen the affection, and create the wellspring of trust needed to face the unknown challenges of a changing and disrupted world.[7]

When leaders have high credibility and high trust, they themselves tend to feel secure, are able to give direction easily, and find less friction inhibiting them from accomplishing their goals. In the words of Stephen M. R. Covey, “Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust,” and “once you create trust—genuine character-based and competence-based trust—almost everything else falls into place.”[8]

[1] Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Our Control,” published in Human Resources in the 21st Century (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003), accessed July 31, 2023, www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/whenchangeisout ofcontrol.html.

[2] See David Brooks, “America is Having a Moral Convulsion,” Atlantic, October 5, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing -levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/. Compare to Lee Rainie, Scott Keeter, and Andrew Perrin, “Trust and Distrust in America,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22 /trust-and-distrust-in-america/.

[3] J. R. Woodward, The Scandal of Leadership: Unmasking the Powers of Domination in the Church (Cody, WY: 100 Movements Publishing, 2023).

[4] From a phone interview conducted by the author with Jim Osterhaus in June 2011. Originally printed in Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Leading in Uncharted Territory (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 69.

[5] Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, 42-44.

[6] With thanks to my colleague Scott Cormode for this memorable and inspiring reframe of the people who have often just been called “followers.” Scott Cormode, “A People Entrusted to Your Care,” Fuller Magazine 10, n.d., accessed September 1, 2023, https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu /a-people-entrusted-to-your-care/.

[7] I first wrote about this in some depth in Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, chapters 3–5.

[8] Stephen M. R. Covey with Rebecca Merrill, The Speed of Trust (New York: Free Press, 2006), loc. 527-28, Kindle.