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?

Health and Safety: Strain at a Gnat...

One day in December 2005, Lucy and I were almost thrown out of bed by a major blast, followed by a rumbling roar. “Sonic boom? RAF playing silly B’s?” I thought. 14 miles away, Buncefield fuel storage depot was going up in smoke. At 2·4 on the Richter scale, this was a biggie, followed by the largest fire since World War II. A switch had failed allowing a tank of unleaded to overflow. The oil company accepted no liability and shot the sergeant. Apparently component failure in a complex fuel handling system with inadequate error traps, is all the fault of the little guy drinking tea in the shed at the gate. Interesting theory. But where, I wondered, was health and safety in all of this? Checking the paperwork? Counting the wheelnuts on the tankers?

Apologies to our glorious Health and Safety industry, but after a day’s chuckling over it, I can’t resist. Here, courtesy of the Wardman Wire, is the ultimate health and safety advice, on crossing your drive without risking life and limb. The delight is in the detail.