Don't pick the Fastest Lemming

A central part of my job is helping discern people's callings to particular jobs, with search groups. Very often “leadership” is high on the list of essentials. I uderstand why. Everyone is more or less disorientated in a fast-changing world. People look to clergy to help them through the shifting sands, fog, smoke and mirrors. What many busy people want much of the time is a messianic figure who will turn out and fix things for them. This is the age of the quick fix. Sadly some of the most intractable problems communities face didn’t arise like this and won’t go away without costly and potentially time-consuming social and personal transformation.

The temptation is to pick what seems the most obvious candidate — the competent performer to get things done. But what if the problems are not technical problems? One of the limitations of the Anglican Covenant, peace be upon it, is that it is basically a lawyer’s solution to a broader problem — an attempt to solve mutual incomprehension with aspirin — a quick fix to a chronic cultural issue. People would grow more if they engaged with it humanly and spiritually as well as trying to fix it legally; but maybe all we can manage for now is a bit of paper.

The best leader is the slowest, not the fastest lemming, the oddball who slows down, stands aside, and wonders why. She can be of far more value than the sleekest, zippiest rodent. Appointing to technical criteria is a good discipline for preliminary screening and showing up the issues to discuss at interview. Once that stage is reached, however, you need to look for the person's inner security, personally and spiritually, how well they know where they stop and others start, their sense of perspective, their eccentricities, and the factors that make them the slowest, not the fastest Lemming. Otherwise all you get is the greyest, sleekest überLemming who seems to lead the pack, and we all end up in the drink.

The race goes not to the fastest Lemming, but the one who comes back up the cliff. Discuss?

Anxiety, leadership & Rabbi Friedman

I’ve just lent out my copy of the most teasingly brilliant leadership book I know — Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s Failure of Nerve — Leadership in the age of the quick fix. The rabbi, who died over ten years ago now, was a family and congregational systems therapist. His book isn’t, like many other studies, a how-to book or analysis of “successful” leaders. Leadership isn’t really about what you do, as much as why you do it, what it does to you, and how is is grounded in the person you are. Sounds heavy, but it’s common sense, actually. As a skilled systems therapist, Friedman diagnosed six phases in the process of leadership:

1. Differentiating the self: If you don’t know who the hell you are, why would anybody else? This means defining yourself as more than just a pale reflection of what everybody wants from you. If you start to disappear into the context, your boat has sunk and it won't be going anywhere. This is the key to the whole deal: “Leadership [is] the capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.”
   
2. Staying connected: Sticking with reality, including your own pragmatic reality, not merging yourself into the demands and anxieties of the most angry and conficted focus groups you serve.
   
3. Maintainng a non-anxious presence: “Keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you” as the man said. Colluding with hysteria increases the amount of idiocy in the system.
   
4. Keeping open space to be proactive: Not becoming entirely imprisoned by the latest crisis; making phonecalls as well as answering them. Entiely reactive turns you into a football for others. Being that compromises (1) above.
   
5. Managing triangles: This is where three people run scripts between them where any two gang up on any one serially. There re also fix-it games which are actually hellish triangles of blame — hot potato circles in which nobody accepts true responsibility. Ther’s an old game of Victim—Rescuer—Persecutor. Three chairs, two people, keep moving. Just Don’t do it!
   
6. Persisting in the face of sabotage: ‘No good deed goes unpunished!’ That’s a reason to do it, not to fail to do it...
   

Rabbi Friedman observes that in every area of life these days (10 years ago), especially perhaps the Church, many (most?) people are chronically anxious and desperate for quick fixes. Leaders who get sucked into that stuff and start playing to it lose their souls and burn out. The institutional frameworks that once held leaders in a zone from which they could lead have been compromised and busted all over the place as society has de-institionalised. Therefore the only people left do the job are the leaders themselves, and, er, God!
The only tragedy of Friedman’s book is that he died before it was finished, so half of it is barely reconstructed from notes. Does it ring bells for anyone else?