Week Two Leadership: System Traps and Well-Differentiated Leaders

"It's about leadership in the land of the quick fix, 

about leadership in a society so reactive 

that it cannot choose leaders who might calm it's anxiety. 

It's about the need for clarity and decisiveness in a civilization 

that inhibits the development of leaders with clarity and decisiveness.

-Edwin Friedman

       Much of what we are going to talk about in this next year comes from a favorite book of mine. "A Failure of Nerve" by Edwin H Friedman. Feel free to get a copy and read ahead.

       As I mentioned last week so many books about leadership give us some idea about how to motivate others. One of the premises of this book is that the leader's presence and being has more to do with the health of the system than anything else. How many times have you watched an episode of Dog Whisperer or Super Nanny?

       The dog owner/parent thinks they have invited an expert to fix their dog or their child. But in every episode the real issues lie with the leaders. The nanny or dog expert can step in and take control of the situation in almost an instant. What makes the presence of those people different than the current leaders of the system? How important is just the presence of a person leading?

       Just like the nanny or dog expert steps into identify what's going wrong in these relationships...Friedman has identified four major problems that should be addressed...

• Regression: systems become oriented to the weakest members, aka..."the Squeaky Wheel gets the grease." "Instead of focusing on strong, power is leveraged to the recalcitrant, passive-aggressive, anxious members of the system." The Bill Belichick interview this last weekend spoke about how things go best when the best players are the best leaders. I'm guessing he keeps it that way. Energy should be directed to the "visionary, imaginative, and the motivated."
• Devaluing decisiveness: We wrongfully hire experts without considering decisiveness. Things happen in a moment at work, home, church...The kind of person you are, will affect the knee-jerk reaction you and I give in these leadership moments. Judgements that come when you don't have time to weigh through all the facts are not valued enough.
• Data Junkies: There is an obsession of gathering info to make decisions. How often have you seen people live in a paralysis of analysis. So much information gathered that a delayed decision or inability to make a decision IS a decision. Know who you are, make decisions according.
•  Unreasonable belief in reasonableness: This is one of my favorites. When we were first parents we were told we had to explain everything to our kids. If we explained our expectations there would be no issues. Our children would understand and always yield to the way we were leading them. Being reasonable doesn't always work with people who are being unreasonable. Sometimes we had to step in and force our children to obey for the greater good for them and us. What happens when an invasive organism that lacks self-regulation needs to do something different? This is a pervasive problem in leadership.

       So the antidote to the above is the well-differentiated leader. Here's the definition, we'll talk about it more next week...

       Well-differentiated Leader:  Someone who has clarity about their own life and direction. Someone who does not get lost in all of the anxiety around them. Someone who can separate themselves and yet remain connected with people. "I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others and therefore be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing."