The Leader's Real Problem
Many leaders are searching for the right data, software, method, or system to fix the problems facing their enterprise and team. They fight battles internally and externally — navigating differences of opinion within their own teams while simultaneously managing the volatility of a market that is constantly reshaping their product or service. The leader looks far and wide for the solution that will resolve the dilemma, while anxiety builds and compounds over time. We live in a world where data and information are limitless, and we have wrongly come to believe that with the right technique or method, our challenges will slowly fade.
Edwin Friedman, in his masterpiece A Failure of Nerve, posits that this "problem" is actually emotional in nature. The leader's problem isn't external — it's internal. Friedman writes, "Those who fail to see how in any family or institution a perpetual concern for consensus leverages power to the extremists." In other words, when well-intentioned leaders succumb to the anxiety of leadership in a way that aims for consensus, good feelings, and universal harmony, it actually kills the system — and often the highest performers are the ones who feel the most negative impact. This is the result not of poor strategy, but of a leader's own personal fear.
Friedman goes further: "In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being constantly frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true 100 percent of the time, regardless of whether the disruptors are supervisors, subordinates, or peers, is that the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger. By that, I mean a highly anxious risk-avoider, someone who is more concerned with good feelings than with progress, someone whose life revolves around the axis of consensus, a 'middler,' someone who is so incapable of taking well-defined stands that his 'disability' seems to be genetic, someone who functions as if she had been filleted of her backbone, someone who treats conflict or anxiety like mustard gas — one whiff, on goes the emotional gas mask, and he flits. Such leaders are often 'nice,' if not charming."
This reality takes shape in the home, the church, the business, the nonprofit, and the political sphere. It is universal in its scope. As humans, we tend to swing from one extreme to the other with each passing generation. One generation experienced oppressive and dictatorial leadership, and so the next becomes spineless and overly accommodating. The image that comes to mind is a road with a ditch on either side — it is far too easy to escape one ditch only to crash headlong into the one on the opposite side.
Leadership is lonely, and that is simply the cost of the role. There is no way around it. Leaders must know themselves — and honestly reckon with how their own story has shaped the level of reactivity and anxiety present in the systems they lead. This is why the growth and health of leaders matters so deeply. How the leader goes is almost always a predictor of how the enterprise goes.
This is precisely why coaching, counseling, and intentional development are not luxuries — they are necessities for every leader who wants what they steward to thrive.
A few questions worth sitting with:
What were the emotional conditions of your family of origin?
How are those same emotional patterns showing up in you now?
Do you see how those patterns might be shaping the context in which you currently lead — at home, at work, at church?
If this strikes a chord, I'd be glad to have a conversation. Reach out here.
