A Different Take on Leadership

Some time ago I attended a meeting relating to the roll out of a strategic plan. The agenda was  to review the requirements for leadership and leadership training.  The context was for a mainline church denomination but some of the discussion could apply more broadly.

Several participants had been asked to research and bring  leadership concepts and common key words emerged for leadership roles.  Words like “mediating”, “perfecting”,  offering” and “blessing” appeared in one report.  In another the author had been fond of the letter “C” – and used nouns like “character”, “calling”, “competence” and “community”.  “Servant” leadership was also on the table.

My own contribution came from a longer paper I wrote some years earlier and I focused first on changes in  world view, vision and mission, structural change, personal characteristics and personal development.  My key words echoed some of the others – “discipline”, “humility” and  “learner”.  I was also strong on “collaboration” rather than “hierarchy” even though we are still working within a hierarchical structure. But leader still assumes followers and someone has to take the first step.

The most interesting submission was a summary of a work by Ed Friedman entitled A Failure of Nerve. The writer of the summary had limited himself to 500 words and boiled down the role of the leader to a non-anxious presence.  We spent little time on Friedman’s idea in the meeting, but I had read his book some years before and its mention whetted my appetite to return to it.

A Failure of Nerve  was compiled after Friedman’s death in 1996 by his daughter and students and has been recently reissued.  It is timely. Friedman was a rabbi and psychotherapist by training and as well as founding a successful congregation he served as adviser to six US presidents as well as to many senior church leaders and individual clients. Even before his death he saw that America in the nineties had become a frightened society, fearing change and seeking safety as opposed to the spirit of adventure of its early explorers and founders.  He’s strongly critical of this stance and challenges us to change our mental models.

Friedman is often caustic and witty – and several readers have collected maxims that represent the substance of his thinking.  Here are some that apply to leadership:

• Leadership can be thought of as a capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.

• ‘no good deed goes unpunished; chronic criticism is, if anything, often a sign that the leader is functioning better! Vision is not enough.

•  Leaders need “… to focus first on their own integrity and on the nature of their own presence rather than through techniques for manipulating or motivating others.”

• Leadership through self-differentiation is not easy; learning techniques and imbibing data are far easier. Nor is striving or achieving success as a leader without pain: there is the pain of isolation, the pain of loneliness, the pain of personal attacks, the pain of losing friends. That’s what leadership is all about.here

Much of where Friedman is coming from is defining church congregations and enterprise units as  family systems, a concept developed fully by therapist Murray Bowen. It posits that we call rational  in congregations and enterprises is always framed by the emotional responses learned in our personal birth and extended families.  Those families and tribes, like all systems, seek equilibrium.  When things get tense, it’s likely that learned behavior in earlier systems are in play.  When things are going well, Friedman says, expect sabotage.

The remedy is for the leader to develop self-differentiation rather than to try to persuade or motivate others to change.If a non-anxious presence is required it assumes there is already anxiety and conflict in the room.  But it is working on one’s own development that allows others to learn by example – and take responsibility for their own development.

There is much more to  learn in Friedman’s approach – and that will be a feature of future posts.

First published on anther site in June 2017

It is Like That . . .

“Be careful how you interpret the world.  It is like that.”

— Erich Heller

My laptop is back.  I had noticed it was behaving strangely and taking forever to boot up in the morning, but last week it failed.  I headed off for GeekSquad which had sold me the unit two years ago.    Because I maintain a couple of websites, I stressed the urgency of a repair and went home to wait. I had saved all my documents on USB sticks and the updates were recent.

If you have any doubts about your addictions, take away your devices for a few days. “Left to my own devices” had a whole new meaning and made me ponder my interpretation of the world and what was currently in it.  Here was some of it – readings for a couple of discussion groups, daily piano practice (I’m back doing this after resuming lessons), exercises to remedy a problem with the sciatic nerve, finishing reading a novel, cleaning the apartment, needing to do the laundry, grocery shopping.  These might be seen as a reasonable workload for an 82 year old.

But they weren’t.  I was obsessed with the absence of the laptop.  Where was the more sombre view of what was happening in the US as documented in the New York Times online?  What did I owe the accountant for my taxes – since the invoice now came electronically?  What were they saying on Washington Week?  This might seem obsessively American.  I live in Canada.  I had access to mail on a tablet and a phone.  But I felt as though someone had removed part of my brain and it was in the shop. Where were the 20 or 30 newsletters that came through Unroll,me?

Thus, I was ready for of all things – theology.  A book, Life Abundant, was buried on a shelf but I hadn’t looked at it for years.  I met the author at a west coast retreat centre some years ago and told her I had just bought her book. “Which one?” she asked, and on hearing the title, she responded, “I’m so glad.  I’ve been writing the same book 14 times so far and this is the best version yet”.  Amazon tells me that there are later ones, but this one is more than sufficient.

The book’s subtitle is Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril. Sallie McFague taught at Vanderbilt Theology School for more than 30 years and is now based at Vancouver School of Theology where she is still teaching and conducting research.  She starts this book by explaining that she has spent many years teaching religious autobiography, but when challenged, realized that she had never written her own.  It’s a reminder that we all have one – whether we are part of a denomination, or agnostic or atheist. The last thing we generally have time for thought as to what it is.

During re-reading, I was giving myself brownie points that reflection was the most frequent tag on my blog posts, but theology is more than that.  I’m generally optimistic and see life more as a comedy than a tragedy.  These days it’s more like a farce with a reality show leader keeping us all glued for the latest episode where we couldn’t make this stuff up.  We are amused and appalled.  But what does it say about us?  I’m so busy being a spectator of this soap opera that I don’t need to reflect on my own life – and the fact that I’ve got to be further along on the downward slope than I want to be.

The laptop is back.  The hard drive has been replaced and so has a new version of MS Office with an amazing number of new distractions.  I have been surprised at how quickly I am up and running.  Press a button on the modem – and we’re back on line. Bring back the mail services. Check. Bookmark all the frequently visited sites. Check.  Bring back all the saved files. Check. Anything missing?  Personal photos weren’t among the saved files.  I’ve just obliterated a major part of two decades.  Still I later found many of them on a stick.  But the lack of care about what really matters has hit home.

So what is this theology stuff?  McFague says it is “words about God” but refreshingly she reminds us that it is about an interpretation of the world as we see it.  Any theology is going to involve three C’s – context, content and criteria.  That’s going to keep us busy for a bit.

Context reminds us that the documents of any faith are written in a particular time in history. These reflect the interpretation of the writers based on their own understanding of the universe in which they dwell.  The reflections will be of necessity partial and relative to the context. For this reason. McFague says that any theology needs an adjective in front of it to clarify the group espousing it.  The adjective in front of “Christian” for example, might be “liberation, feminist, fundamentalist, progressive – or a name of hundreds of denominations with different emphases and views.  The speaker matters.

Content depends on experience – but again McFague notes that experience is the channel and the means that it comes through – not the content itself.  Something comes into our life as a revelation or an insight that concerns the relationship of a god or creator that is of such importance that it affects our orientation to the world and our behavior.  It’s not religious experience so much as ordinary experience.

The big question then becomes - who is our neighbour.  I asked this question in a discussion group in my parish church last week.  The answers were what I expected – the person who lived down the block or in the apartment next door – whose name we might not know.  But as I look out my window from a high floor, I can observe a barrier around a tree that is going to be removed to accommodate reconstruction of a water reservoir.  I live in a large metropolitan North American city.  Are my neighbours people of colour? People who live in the third world? People of other faiths? Other creatures? Oceans? A tree?

Our world contains questions that are more than we can ask or imagine.  We have to explore further.   The criteria will have to wait for a later post.

More on Possibility

When I started this blog – which followed one created many years earlier – the tagline was suggested by a book by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander – entitled The Art of Possibility.  I first met Ben Zander on a TedTalk, where he introduced a bunch of techies to classical music.  The Talk has still maintained one of the highest ratings ever – over two million views. Their earlier book showed how both he and his wife have inspired many to bring out the best possibilities latent within themselves.

The new book, Pathways to Possibility, is even more explicit. Written by Rosamund Stone Zander, a family systems therapist, it resonates with another of my favorites in the field – Ed Friedman.  She unpacks the reality that most of our negative aspects arises from our own experiences as children, and unless we recognize and re-frame such experiences, they play into everything that we do as adults.  We can either recast them as memories – things in our past that no longer have control over us – or see them as part of our continuing story and growing maturity.  Her message is simple but profound.  I have seen this in action when another practitioner in the field helped a woman re-write a negative story and it changed her whole attitude in an instant.

Reading this book – and watching Ben Zander coach his music students on YouTube are excellent lessons for anyone who wants to initiate change – as another wise colleague has said – we have to be the change that we want to see happen.  Try these!