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Baylor University president Robert Sloan has been vilified by some members of his faculty and a few of the university's regents, and he has had to face increasingly fierce organized opposition. But according to two professors at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he shouldn't take it personally.

In their book, Leadership on the Line (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky focus on the dangers leaders face when they guide an organization through "adaptive change." Adaptive change is the kind of change that cannot be met merely by the authorities within an organization or by people simply doing what they already know how to do—only doing it more or better or faster or with greater resources. Many challenges in organizational life require more-better-faster technical adjustments. But adaptive change requires a willingness to experiment and changes in values, attitudes, and behaviors.

Top-tier research universities are unlike small liberal arts colleges in fundamental ways. And intentionally Christian faculty members are different from those who do not try to integrate faith and learning or have no faith at all. Making the transitions to top-tier status and to a Christian approach to learning require fundamental attitudinal and value changes.

Heifetz and Linsky want leaders to understand that it is dangerous to guide an institution through such fundamental and pervasive change. This is so because, at the beginning, people can see far more clearly the losses they are likely to sustain than the gains that the institution will make. People who resist such change are not necessarily bad people. They prize the status quo for good reasons, write Heifetz and Linsky. It is not usually just a matter of personal or communal inertia. Managers and executives who recruited them imparted certain values and understandings, and they feel they are compromising their loyalties if they participate in the change. "People do not resist change, per se," these authors write. "People resist loss."

Heifetz and Linsky warn leaders that those who resent loss will readily confuse message and messenger, and they will transmute their distress over the challenges of change into hostility for the leader who confronts them with the issues of change.

Thus Heifetz and Linsky caution leaders not to let people make the leader the issue. Keep the focus on the adaptive challenges and the need for change. If you don't, you could go down, they say, citing the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as an extreme example.

Israel's right wing, they write, "tried to debate the issue" of exchanging land for peace, "but they were losing the argument. So they began to make Rabin himself the issue, rather than his policies." Thus, they assert, even Rabin's murder was not personal, but an extreme method of silencing the discussion.

Much of Heifetz and Linsky's advice comes back to this point: Don't let the opponents of change make you the issue. Unfortunately, in media reports, the opponents of change at Baylor have managed to make President Sloan the issue. However, experienced observers of organizational dynamics will recognize that—whatever missteps Sloan's opponents may have seized on—the kerfuffle is really about some changes in fundamental values.

This is what Ralph Wood, university professor of theology and literature at Baylor, argued on this website last October. In "Baylor Reaps the Enlightenment Whirlwind," Wood exposed certain commonly cherished pieties at Baylor as being more closely tied to Enlightenment thinking than to authentic Baptist theology. But when baptized Enlightenment individualism has permeated a community, other ways of thinking are threatening, and huge sense of loss looms.

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48