Leadership principles are all the rage. In fact, if one were to search for a leadership book on Amazon, the authoritative leadership gurus seemingly number in the infinite. Even Amazon’s list of “best leadership books” has over 10,000 to read—and that’s the curated list! Whether it’s leadership “principles,” “laws,” “wisdom,” or “advice,” they all claim to “create results” that will take a business, organization, or team to the “next level.” Fascinatingly enough, the vast majority of these books attempt to give the leader tools to improve their organizations: make sure the right people are in the right roles, increase communication and clarity with certain processes, vision statements and strategies are crucial, etc. This is where Edwin H. Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix is different. Blending his background as a business consultant, family therapist, and ordained rabbi, Friedman fuses insights from marriage and family therapy, medicine, scientific advances, organizational management, religious leadership, and broad cultural trends during his own career to give his basic leadership principle: that no organizational principle found in any of those 10,000 Amazon leadership books will make any difference if the leader lacks growth in his/her understanding of self. Leaders fail not because they lack information, skill, or technique, but because they lack the nerve, presence, and self-awareness to stand firm amid other people’s emotional anxiety and reactivity. Ultimately, this leads to a long-term and lasting change for organizations, instead of the short-lived change that too often happens with principles used as “quick fixes.”
Because A Failure of Nerve was compiled and published as an unfinished work after Friedman’s death, the chapters and concepts presented throughout are not necessarily balanced or complete. Regardless, there is still an enormous wealth of helpful insights offered, and at times, one wonders if Friedman has a prophetic awareness of modern American society, capturing it as being rampant with sabotaging leaders, highly reactive environments, toxic climates, raging storms of anxiety, and systems and institutions that threaten the survival of families, churches, groups, institutions, and possibly even American civilization as a whole. Relying heavily on systems theory, Friedman observes several shared elements pervasive in American society: (1) systems that allow the weakest, most dependent members of any organization, group, or family to set the agenda, (2) the depreciation of individuation among leaders, discouraging them from relying on their decision-making ability but rather on “expertise,” (3) an obsession with techniques and data, and (4) a widespread misunderstanding in relational processes in families and systems that persuade leaders to solve problems through consensus or peace-making.[1] Because of this, Friedman’s approach to leadership is not to encourage techniques or offer step-by-step programs. Instead, he emphasizes simply—and yet, challengingly—the presence and integrity of the leader in their context.
This begins with health. A leader must be healthy, and this is defined by his/her ability to “self-differentiate,” or know when one ends and one begins. Simply stated, a leader needs to know themselves well as individuals and have clarity about their personal life goals. This allows them to separate themselves from anxious emotional processes while still remaining connected in a way that can bring lasting culture change. Friedman describes it this way: “In other words, leaders can stay involved in a non-anxious, influential way. Personal and internal management of their own reactions to what is going on in others is crucial. They are able to take stands at the risk of displeasing others, without being controlled by them.”[2] This is not about skills or characteristics, but an emphasis on relating well through the emotional processes occurring in a leader’s context. In our contemporary society, leaders are entangled in keeping institutions happy and feeling good, but this is often the very reason they are gridlocked and unable to move forward. Leaders are caught in a cycle of finding themselves trying to lead within their context’s angst and anxiety, going with the flow instead of leading people out of the chaos. The lack of desire to take risks means that leaders are losing their bold sense of nerve to break the cycle. Friedman calls this cycle “emotional regression,” and believes our society and institutions to be “chronically anxious,” creating a toxic atmosphere for differentiated leadership.[3]
This vicious cycle has four characteristics, each one regressive in its own way and inhibiting an institution’s basic ability to progress forward. First, the cycle is characterized by intense reactivity. Leaders often lead in reaction or response to something happening in their context; focusing on decision-making in reaction to what is happening to them. This forces a leader or institution to always be against something. Unhealthy followers in a toxic environment will always look for a leader to be responding to situations and conflicts (largely because they are prone to continually react as well), and they will place their confidence in the leader by his/her ability to do so. The second characteristic of the cycle is the herding instinct, or as Friedman calls it later, the “mob mentality.” This form of regression happens because our society and institutions look for their approval through democratic consensus; we know we are going down the right path when everyone agrees with it. Unfortunately, this tends to create an “all or nothing” approach. If a leader does not have consensus with his/her followers, then the followers will perpetuate a myth that the leader is not for them but rather against them. The third characteristic is blame displacement, which is a leader’s underlying need to look at external factors in order to place blame, rather than looking into oneself. While there are some cases where there truly are victims to systems, Friedman speaks of the inability to take blame as regression; followers are likely to displace blame, as well. Finally, the last characteristic is the quick-fix mentality. This is where leaders and institutions are looking for the simplest solution to a problem, one that solves it quickly. Our society is averse to pain, and instead of looking for long-term, holistic, altruistic solutions, we often desire instant gratification to remove immediate pain. These are all characteristics of chronic anxiety and can be found in most institutions in the United States, in both its leaders and followers.[4]
And so, following this, Friedman gives us a bit of a way forward. Challenging contemporary western civilization, Friedman defines attributes that can form “well-differentiated leaders,” those that do not lead in an echo chamber of the urgent, but rather the long, steady leadership of presence. Friedman says some difficult words here, emphasizing that this kind of leadership is more concerned with responsibility rather than empathy:
Societal regression has perverted the use of empathy into a disguise for anxiety…The great myth here is that feeling deeply for others increases their ability to mature and survive; its corollary is that the effort to understand another should take precedence over the endeavor to make one’s own self clear…But it has rarely been my experience that being sensitive to others will enable those “others” to be more self-aware, that being more “under-standing” of others causes them to mature, or that appreciating the plight of others will make them more responsible for their being, their condition, or their destiny.[5]
Friedman then gives five aspects that modern leaders need to embody in order to bring a form of presence that will bring about changes in culture (or what he calls a “renaissance”), whether it be in the family, group, institution, or society as a whole: (1) a capacity to get outside the emotional climate of the day, (2) a willingness to be exposed and vulnerable, (3) persistence in the fact of resistance and downright rejection, (4) stamina in the face of sabotage along the way, and (5) being “headstrong and “ruthless”—at least in the eyes of others.[6] This kind of leadership removes itself from the cycle of chronic anxiety and emotional regression, instead leading above it. This kind of leadership transcends the challenges of our day, allows us to be a non-anxious presence, and bring calm. These are attributes that have nothing to do with personality traits, social-cultural factors, or gender, but instead have everything to do with a leader’s ability to function when everything around him/her is stuck, circling, and disoriented. Why does this work? The bottom line for Friedman is that it is because leaders like this are not controlled by the world, the systems, and people around us, but instead are their own person—self-differentiated, emotionally healthy, and with the nerve to make a difference.
There are incredible strengths to Friedman’s work, one of them being a rallying cry to innovative (and challenging) leadership that calls for boldness, clarity, and yet a calm presence. In my own experience in church ministry, Friedman’s emphasis on the long-term solution and a leader’s presence have proven true. While pastors that have served in a congregation for decades can sometimes be frustrating for young, energized leaders who dream of “better,” it is their slow and steady clarity and presence that has brought the congregation to the health it currently experiences. One particular strength I would like to mention is Friedman’s far-reaching impact on later writers. For instance, Friedman’s work was highly influential for his student, Peter L. Steinke, whose book Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times: Being Calm and Courageous No Matter What has many similar themes. While Friedman was not speaking directly to ministry, Steinke’s work clearly builds on Friedman (and family systems theory) to speak exclusively to pastors in congregational leadership. According to Steinke, churches today are “far too fearful of conflict,” and require a paradigm shift to understanding conflict as part of life.[7] And so, Steinke builds on the concept of a “non-anxious presence,” especially in the midst of our modern society’s natural inclination towards anxiety and its detrimental effects on religious communities, describing in detail the consequences of pervasive anxiety: contagiousness, reactivity, and black-and-white thinking. Steinke also discusses reasons why clergy often leave the ministry, which is far more often due to conflict in the congregation rather than pastoral style, finances, worship style, staff issues, or building construction/renovation.[8] Steinke then continues with illustrations that serve as a set of case studies related to family systems theory, encouraging leaders to develop a type of presence that can survive (and even thrive) through conflict, and presents a path for leaders to walk on their journey to non-anxiety. In the second part of the book, entitled, “The Leader’s Functioning,” Steinke describes leaders’ behavior in the context of larger societal demands: how leaders can “influence the emotional field” by staying calm and level-heading in the midst of crisis, staying focused during unexpected surprises, and continuing to courageously challenge during times of stagnancy. Steinke offers a perspective that counters society’s need for a “quick fixes,” and instead emphasizes patient, deep, fundamental changes that keep leaders holding onto a sharp sense of vision, effective responses, the ability to withstand caving to criticism, and potential for further growth. It is easy to see Friedman’s thesis shine through Steinke’s work. In our current course, however, it was also easy to see Friedman’s work form a foundation of many of the concepts of Tod Bolsinger’s Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. Bolsinger’s main story of the Lewis and Clark expedition has many ties to Friedman’s use of New World explorers during the renaissance.[9]
There are also weaknesses and deficiencies to Friedman’s book. Some of these may be related to Friedman’s premature death. Would he have expounded on some of his sections with increasing clarity if he had finished them? However, perhaps some of my concerns are related to Freidman’s core arguments. For instance, Friedman spends a great deal of time criticizing the role of data in decision-making and leadership. This is understandable, of course, when data is used in a way to stall a leader from making an important decision. However, in the congregational settings in which I have served, leaders have often needed more data, not less. The average church pastor seems to rarely make decisions based on demographic information in their congregation—or better yet, the community around them—nor do they use research methods to learn where their congregation sits in respect to catechesis, spiritual growth, or mission. I would argue that church leaders need to make continual data a more steady factor in their decisions, especially as it gives real information on the needs they can meet in their sliver of the world.
Perhaps the most important weakness, however, is that Friedman simply is not coming from a Christian perspective. While Friedman is a Jewish rabbi and certainly writes to include religious congregations, there are specific parallels to the Christian experience and to Jesus Christ’s own leadership methods that are simply lacking in this book. At times, I feel that Friedman might actually be contradicting other observers and teachers of Christian leadership, especially during his tirades against empathy towards other people, or his emphasis on individual differentiation as opposed to communal identity. I find Friedman’s lack of sacrificial or neighborly leadership to be a sharp contrast from writers like Henri Nouwen, and seemingly disparate from Jesus himself. On the other hand, Friedman’s main emphasis for leaders to lead above the cycle of chronic anxiety and emotional regression do seem Christlike, and this analogy drives the message home for us as leaders in the church—and makes Friedman’s book incredibly helpful.
In a non-anxious way, Jesus leads his disciples above the societal cycle they were used to. He is connected to his followers, and yet well-differentiated. He is calm and yet bold, clear, and driven. His followers reward and expect him to lead within the cycle—to lead the way in reactivity, herd instinct, placing blame, and finding a quick-fix to problems. Instead, if the overarching problem in our world is sin, Christ’s leadership and ministry is proactive in every way, calling and guiding his people through the world, coming as God incarnate, and leading us to salvation. While the herd instinct and mob mentality plays a crucial role in Christ’s ministry, ultimately calling for his death, Christ is the ultimate non-anxious presence, remaining calm in the midst of insults, not even responding to false accusations. While Christ is the only person to walk the earth who is truly deserving to place blame on others, he still chooses not to, taking the underserved blame upon himself. And, while many are looking for a short-term fix (perhaps the restoration of the kingdom of Israel and removal of Rome), Christ’s ministry is focused on the long-term, total, and complete restoration of his eternal kingdom. Christ’s presence was and is everything for culture change, and even when he leaves us, he promises us, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”[10]
[1] Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (New York: Church Publishing, 2017), 12–13.
[2] Ibid., 14.
[3] Ibid., 53.
[4] Ibid., 62–88.
[5] Ibid., 133, 137.
[6] Ibid., 188–189.
[7] Peter L. Steinke, Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times: Being Calm and Courageous No Matter What (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2006), 99.
[8] Ibid., 76–79.
[9] See Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (Westmont, IL: IVP Books, 2018).
[10] Matthew 28:20.
Ex Vitæ Verborum 