On the first page of “A Failure of Nerve,” Edwin H. Friedman launches his troubling thesis with this unforgettable statement:
“…when anxiety reaches certain thresholds, 'reasonableness and honesty’ no longer defend against illusion, and then even the most learned ideas can begin to function as superstition.”
He continues, with words that could have been penned yesterday:
"I believe there exists throughout America today a rampant sabotaging of leaders who try to stand tall amid the raging anxiety-storms of our time. It is a highly reactive atmosphere pervading all the institutions of our society--a regressive mood that contaminates the decision-making processes of government and corporations at the highest level, and, on the local level, seeps down into the deliberations of neighborhood church, synagogue, hospital, library and school boards. It is "something in the air" that affects the most ordinary family no matter what its ethnic background. And its frustrating effect on leaders is the same not matter what their gender, race, or age."
The book was first published in 1999, but Ed Friedman was conveying timeless truths.
If you’ve led an institution for any length of time, you’ve probably had moments when you’ve wondered, “Who the hell would want this job?” (at least if they only understood what that leadership entailed!) Whether it’s a tech startup or a family, university or book club, a hospital or the board of elders–same discouragement, same weariness, same taste of burnout threatening to claim you.
Maybe you can remember how your role held such promise at first, but now the joy has evaporated. You can tell you’ve “lost your shine” in the eyes of the energetic crew you’ve been leading; they may even have been replaced with a set of minions who, while appearing identical, are hollow-eyed and slow to carry out their duties. Added to all this, a sea of troubles is looming on the horizon, threatening to capsize the whole enterprise. After an extended period of floundering along hopelessly, maybe, like Ender Wiggin, you just want “out.”
[If they tell you that they don’t know that failure is inevitable–but that you’re the best hope they’ve got–maybe run if you can? Not that they necessarily said that to Ender in so many words!]
Okay, okay, you say you don’t have time for this unless I can “boil down” a 250-page book into a few critical principles? You’ll stop reading if I don’t tell you how to fix most of your thorny leadership quandaries within the next 200 words? Fine, fine! Here you go!
The first of these three pops onto the scene as a surprise answer to the question of what you do whether you’re utterly at the breaking point from an onslaught of internal opposition–or even if you’re just facing another wearying round of garden-variety employee sabotage. But maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that when confronted with sabotage from below, a leader should stop the show right then and there to ask, “What are we here for in the first place?” Because the true answer to “Why are you making me changes that are inconvenient to me personally?” or “Teacher, she has something that I don’t; why can’t I have that?” isn’t to humor those childish impulses by responding to them on their own terms. It’s to lift up the eyes of everyone who’s present to a much greater vision. It’s for that vision–and not for yourself–that you make demands on the time, energy and attention of the members of your team.
The second line–on the power of humor–is full of life and encouragement, applicable in situations where it’s expected, but especially where it’s unexpected. It’s neded in some of the darkest moments: contending with the most immature, recalcitrant members of one's organization–those who can be neither reasoned nor negotiated with–and navigating one's own health crises. (which also typically cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with.)
The third insight is threaded throughout the entire text, from start to finish–as is suitable, because it is indeed in the title of the book.
Now you’ve gotten the “cheapo buffet” introduction, if you’re ready for something more substantive such as: What Each Of Those Things Even Mean, or–also popular on the menu–What The Author Means When He Says “Leader,” then carry on! Have I got a show for you!
So Ed Friedman presents a vision of the chaos, anxiety, and bottom-up sabotaging in present-day America. Then, he tells the story of how, after he published his book “Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue”, he received phone calls from leaders across the country asking for help. It was instructive.
At first, he was “listening to the details of their experience, trying to learn more about his own theories.” But soon, the content of those conversations prompted him to make an unexpected shift in how he handled them. He recounts that he:
“...stopped listening to the content of everyone's complaints [about their leadership struggles] and, irrespective of the location of their problem or the nature of their institution, began saying the exact same thing to everyone: "You have to get up before your people and give an 'I Have a Dream' speech."
To determine what we think of the relevance of this coaching tactic, though, we need to know more about where these people “found themselves” at the point when they called him. Remember, these were people invested enough–or desperate enough–that, after reading a book about the intergenerational nature of dynamics that sustain weird norms and drive crises of their communities, they picked up their landline, dialed up the author, and asked for help. He explained the pattern he saw:
“...one day I realized that almost everyone who called was functioning in a reactive, defensive way and failing to define his or her own position clearly. They had become so focused on the aches and pains (the pathology) in the system that they had been thrown off course by the complaints… stopped supplying vision, or burned out fighting the resistance; they had ceased to be the strength in the system. In short they had forgotten to lead.”
Even so, I realize that getting to give the exact same advice to everyone who calls for leadership help sounds like it’s too good to be true! Wouldn’t it be less valuable than customized individual counseling? Nonetheless, he chronicles the success of the ones who took him up on his idea:
“The outcome was dramatic! Most of those who followed through with what I had suggested found that the chaos in their group soon waned.”
So that’s the people who could see a path to taking that advice. Good. What else?
“There was, however, another group of "leaders" who were absolutely desperate to stay in their position. They might have been at an age where it would be difficult to find another job, or their spouse had finally found the position of a lifetime, or their kids had just one more year to finish high school. As they put it, "to have to leave right now would be a family tragedy." Yet, when they heard my advice—that the way out of their dilemma was not some quick-fix technique to apply to others but rather a matter of developing their own self-differentiation—their nerve failed them, and they quit their position rather than having to grow.”
These leaders needed to be willing to face their own selves. Our society’s traditional models for how to help leaders falls short, only providing one more way to evade doing the tough work needed to usher in true, lasting change.
[She is small, but she is decisive.]
PC: “The Little Maidservant of Naaman’s Wife,” William Hatherell, created circa 1910. (via: www.meisterdrucke.com)
Near the beginning of the book, Friedman explains another shift in the way he counseled–this, especially in a family context. Rather than making heroic efforts to get family members to talk to each-other, and to engage people who didn’t want to be in the sessions, he:
“…began to search instead for the member with the greatest capacity to be a leader as I have defined it. That person generally turned out to be the one who could express himself or herself with the least amount of blaming and the one who had the greatest capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.”
Decades ago… back in the 1980s, my dad’s job involved sending hard copies of reams of data from one office to another. The security protocols were onerous, in spite of the fact that the already-boring data was anonymized. He’d ask his boss, “Is all this worth the trouble? If someone wanted to get at it, our protocols aren’t actually enough to prevent that.” I think there really was no good thing for his boss to say to that. But my dad remembers his response perfectly: The boss walked over to the window and looked down at the busy city streets below. Then he said conspiratorially, “There’s people out there who would kill for this stuff.”
Years ago, I watched my closest friend lead a team (he put forth superhuman efforts to keep it from becoming a faction, really.) in an organization that was fraught with quarrels–serious long-standing relational frictions from long before he came on the scene. The people in the larger organization really wanted his program to become awesome; however, they wanted to see the awesome results immediately, and preferably as a result of their own brilliance (in providing solutions for him to implement). Magic button-ism. Their anxieties were constantly on display as they cast about for “what other people did that worked”-type scenarios in their pathetic, despair-ridden cluelessness.
As you can imagine, that sucked.
You can only do so much, but some kind of catharsis helps. So some days, I’d catch him playing the same song on infinite loop. (but it was a good song!) Some days, we’d watch an episode of The West Wing together, and laugh harshly, and say “YES, THAT!” (Oh yeah–I was his right hand in the operation.) Because it really is “lonely at the top.” There really are things you can’t freely explain to the minions (or the “outside world,” for that matter!) about the obnoxious constraints that bind you. You can’t go ahead and “share” quite how high your uncertainty is for even the most important decisions you make in this work–lest they catch your fears.
If you read this book, you might find yourself motivated to “work on” your family-of-origin issues. I notice I stated this topictitle in the negative, rather than the positive. This is probably because I’m someone who had not-perfect relationships with members of my family-of-origin when I was a newly-fledged adult, and has seen (I mean, and participated in!) them grow better and closer. I’m sure there are other people who’ve weathered a similar storm, braced themselves, and come out on the other side to find their heart’s desire, so I don’t want to put myself out there as a special expert in this area. (unless I do.)
Am I going to tell you that “moving forward” in the strength of healthy leadership, has “fixing your relationships” with parents and siblings as a prerequisite? No! Am I going to claim that even if you’re motivated to, you can unilaterally fix family-of-origin relationships? No! (Not because I strongly believe it’s impossible to do that unilaterally, but because I don’t know. But even if I did, it might not help you much if I say so right now!)
You don’t have to fix it now-now, but you might be motivated to if you read this book. However, the author’s main pitch is for understanding the dynamic of them. (And since you were probably already mashing your brain against the problem in frustration, why not try for a little understanding?)
But the author says it better:
‘In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of the time, regardless of whether the disrupters 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.’
Q1: Is this a Christian Book™?
When I call up this book on The Internet Archive, (where you can read it for free!) I see that “Religion - Christian Life” is typical of the tags it has. I find this strange. The author has been consulted by lots of churches. Maybe some Christians who were really grateful for his work were involved in adding it to that library!
But, please be assured that:
“The regression came about because the moderator (that is, the leader) of the panel was a "nice guy" (a former minister and president of a local educational institution) who did not have the temerity to set limits on this person's invasiveness. He was more concerned to assuage her hurt feelings, to right her perceived slight, and to keep good feelings going in the community. By letting her speak and guiding the panel in a discussion of her remarks, he thereby adapted the entire community to her demands…”
Q2: Do you have any disclaimers for me?
There’s a few disclaimers to this book. For one, this guy hates the word “empathy.” I love it!! Whatcha gonna do? Well, I know I’m gonna do–try to figure out what he means by “empathy” (in case it’s different from mine, which I treasure so!) and what his deal is. (Oh, right–it’s such a big deal that he tells it to us!) Lastly, I’ll try to test if his claims are right, and then reconcile that with what I’m thinking–whether I’m using a different meaning for the same word, or I have some tweaking and updating of my model of Reality ahead of me.
The next thing you need to know is that the author was unable to finish writing the book before he died. That’s right; it was a mostly-finished manuscript, a collection of notes, and a set of overall intentions about “where he was going” with it all. Family members and associates helped put it into the form it is today, on the basis that this is just to valuable to not have. (Additionally, it had a lively “underground” following as the contents of the book were passed from person to person before it was published. That definitely encouraged people to keep going with the project!) So, it has some of the flaws you’d expect from that.
Also, he is probably not great when he gets into science metaphors! And he really likes his science metaphors! He draws one major model from neuroscience and metaphors from cell biology and contemporary physics. (Is nothing sacred?) For this, I’ve settled on, “He’s good at what he’s good at, and I’ll assume maybe he thinks he knows more than he does outside his specialties. Like most people.” He makes it clear that he thinks that building his models of leadership requires him to contemplate the current state-of-the-art within the sciences. Who knows? Maybe he’s HAS benefitted from thinking about them.
For example, when he describes an unethical study dubbed “the Executive Monkey Experiment,” he mis-remembers some of the procedural details–the experiment involved control over electric shocks, not having access to food supply. The ‘executive monkey’ didn’t have the power to get food for the pair; It had the power to use a lever to pause the shock for 20 seconds. However, it was unable to stop all shocks. The inaccuracy in the book might have been repaired if he’d gone through a conventional editing-and-publishing cycle. (It may even be fixed in the newest edition: I haven’t seen it!) Here it is as it’s described in the 2007 edition:
“An effort was made to give monkeys ulcers or to promote some other kind of somatic disturbance through frustration. The monkey was taught how to get food and then frustrated when it finally learned. But no amount of frustration seemed to create the desired somatic dysfunction. Then someone got the bright idea to make the monkey responsible for getting food for other monkeys; then, they claimed, they did produce a somatic disturbance. Whether or not the experiment was scientifically valid, [due to the fact it was not repeated] it captures an existential reality.”
But the point wasn’t the experiment itself, he seems to be saying; the point was to darkly underline the unique vulnerability of leaders. It’s black humor: Merely putting an intelligent creature in unavoidable pain won’t lead to its demise. The thing to do is to put it in charge of the well-being of itself and at least one other amid a hopeless situation.
For the last of my disclaimers: unsurprisingly, the book is also not written with an eye towards political-correctness. It’s certainly not written specifically to primarily offend political sensibilities, but to get the job done. Take what you can; leave what you can’t.
However, he writes his own disclaimers pretty well at the end of the introduction. Here’s some of those:
“In closing, let the reader beware how subtly radical some of the ideas that follow may be. Perhaps subversive is a better word, though not in an obviously confrontational way. Readers may find that the ideas here conflict with what they have always assumed to be the eternal truths of their profession, their politics, their understanding of life, or, sometimes (and perhaps most disturbing), their therapy.”
In other words, if everything here sounds so conventional as to be unquestionably acceptable to you, you’re not understanding it. On the other hand, if you think he’s just out to be needlessly provocative–well, maybe he caves into that temptation a little, but it was never the main point!
Q3: How does the content of this book compare to other books on leadership, counseling, etc.?
Now this book and Brene Brown's work would not seem to be compatible. Brown LOVES the word empathy, and is constantly talking about vulnerability. Can the philosophy of leadership she's putting forward possibly fit with Friedman's? (This section flowed out of a dispute with a friend. Skip if uninteresting.)
Actually, Friedman has some things to say about the inherent vulnerability of pursuing a private vision that diverges from that of all those around you! In his list of five qualities necessary for trailblazing explorers, #2 is, "A willingness to be exposed and vulnerable."
He explains:
One of the major limitations of imagination's fruits is the fear of standing out. It is more than a fear of criticism. It is anxiety at being alone, of being in a position where one can rely little on others, a position that puts ones own resources to the test, a position where one will have to take total responsibility for ones own response to the environment. Leaders must not only not be afraid of that position; they must come to love it.
Fear of standing out. Of being alone and utterly unable to rely on others.
Okay, but Brene Brown is talking about relational vulnerability. In theory, relational vulnerability will nurture the connections between you and your team members so you won’t be alone, right? Yes, but you can’t rely on never having to stand alone. In a workshop with some bankers, Brown asked them what was the biggest issue they were facing in their industry. “Ethical decision making!” someone shouted out nervously after a frenzied back and forth. Brown recounts how she responded to this:
I took a deep breath and asked, “Has anyone here ever stood up to a team or group of people and said, ’This is outside our values’ or ‘This is not in line with our ethics’?”
Most people in the room raised a hand.
“And how does that feel?”
The room got quiet. I answered for them. "There's probably not a single act at work that requires more vulnerability than holding people responsible for ethics and values, especially when you're alone in it or there's a lot of money, power, or influence at stake. People will put you down, question your intentions, hate you, and sometimes try to discredit you in the process of protecting themselves. So if you don't ‘do’ vulnerability, and/or you have a culture that thinks vulnerability is weakness, then it's no wonder ethical decision-making is a problem."
–Brene Brown in "Dare to Lead"
Sounds like she's pushing the value of integrity just like Friedman did!
Additionally, Brown catalyzed that difficult conversation by taking a stand against a group that started out pretty resistant to what she had to bring. After discovering that the bankers she was doing a workshop with were wondering what she was even doing there and weren’t afraid to ask her directly—she responded in kind:
“Tomorrow is my last day in London and I really want to visit James Smith & Sons let's try to figure out why I'm here and if we can't, I'm out.”
So, you see Brown saying in her own polite, southern way, "If you have no time for me, I have no time for your bullshit."—but also acknowledging that both sides have a part to play in bridging the "gap" between them. And a shared interest in doing so. So she's demonstrating the kind of “non-anxious sometimes-challenging presence” Friedman advises leaders to have, in addition to saying things that agree with him.
Additionally, the view she pushes for on the limitations on creativity parallel Friedman's thinking:
“What's the most significant barrier to creativity and innovation?" [Brown asks.]
Kevin [Surace] thought about it for a minute and said, “I don't know if it has a name, but honestly, it's the fear of introducing an idea and being ridiculed, laughed at, and belittled. If you're willing to subject yourself to that experience, and if you survive it, then it becomes the fear of failure and the fear of being wrong. People believe they're only as good as their ideas and that their ideas can't seem too "out there" and they can't "not know" everything.
Sounds like the same core problem Friedman is concerned about, with an extra “side-helping” of an inability to handle ambiguity. Checks out.
Lastly, if Brown’s choice to name the whole book after a turn of phrase from "The Man in the Arena” from a Teddy Roosevelt speech, and explain that's where it gets its title from, yeah, it sounds like maybe criticism and sabotage from the ones who are led is at least an eensy-weensie bit of a concern in her mind too. In fact, it looks like her ideal version of a leader has a lot in common with those praised in "A Failure of Nerve"! (Oh, in support of this, there's also all the parts where she points out that leadership is messy, calls for every last cell of commitment, and wears you down.)
So I'm saying that the two have got some commonality; there's some overlap. Feel free to read both and grab an eclectic toolkit of what you can pull from each: The space that they're mapping is large. It's easy for one author to be "zoomed" in on one set of details that's never "in focus" for the other. If they appear to contradict each-other in some things, so what? Maybe one is wrong about something! Or both! Scratch that, I can almost guarantee that BOTH are wrong about something. Because human.
The only way to avoid these dreadful hazards is to waste your life: You need to refuse to take responsibility, to constantly cower in fear, (and frequently bring others down with you) to allow your only growing passions to be a life-sucking hunger for somebody else to fix your problems for you. (or, perhaps, to give you the “perfect technique for fixing your problems”--in which case you’re holding out for something that does not exist.)
But, dear reader, I don’t think you will. You will be drawn into leadership not necessarily because you are inherently good at it, (I suppose some people are; I’m not sure that’s always as much of an advantage as we might think.) but because you have desires for good things. If not a CEO who makes things work, then maybe a raid boss who makes things work. Maybe you aren’t currently called upon to reorder the structures of Society At Large, but you’re needed to tamp down some chaos on a small Discord server. If it’s not the mewling cry of your firstborn child that ushers you into a new and terrifying era of awe-inspiring leadership demands, perhaps it will be the cry for help you get in a short note from someone you’ve been mentoring.
The question is not whether you will ever have an opportunity to lead; it is whether you will do it well or badly when you DO have an opportunity to lead. Whether you will do it with confidence in the face of being constantly-challenged, or a crushed and despairing heart in the face of being constantly-challenged.
I say this, yet… maybe there is one more sort of person to think of. You are the ones who, if you read the book, might wonder if you’re seeing yourself depicted among the “irresponsible” and the “recalcitrant”… the chronic complainers in a workplace, or the black sheep among the siblings in your family. Your integrity is about as present and reliable as the security of an ancient walled city with all its walls knocked down. Your consumption of emotional resources from those around you resembles, by analogy, that of the proverbial goldfish: you grow to fill the tank. And maybe it hurts you, to even think about that.
I guess… the book would advise you to “sit with” the pain to get to the good results on the other side. And this is good advice, if literally telling you to do something uncomfortable! (Also, you can get better at “sitting with” this discomfort, fear, and discouragement. Rome need not be built in a day.) But maybe you won’t be motivated to do this hard work for me or for some random guy who wrote a book 20+ years ago! So the author himself would probably advise me, “Don’t bother with them; find the responsible people adjacent to them, and help those people who are in their church, or their family, or their team.” But I’m not talking to any of those people, am I? I’m talking to you.
So I will go off-script and add a note of hope. If you can find your way back up to the surface of the ocean before drowning in despair, there’s a reward for you beyond mere survival. Let me whisper this: There is always a scarcity of leaders. And you can be a leader at any level. Find a way to get some integrity and some self-control–and also some laughter–and leadership may well find you. If and when you make it to the other side of the clichéd “dark tunnel'' you're passing through, someone else will want your help and your guidance. And in spite of all I’ve said about how terrible leadership can be… to the weary and the jaded leaders reading this as well, it’s one of the more wonderful things in the world.
Thanks for help with reviewing and editing to: P, RC, G, N, and NZ. Thanks also to Ey and TOTS for help with a past book review, so I would even try this again.
