A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix

by Edwin H. Friedman

“The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them.”

The more immediate threat to the regeneration—and perhaps even the survival—of American civilization is internal, not external. It is our tendency to adapt to its immaturity.

For whenever a “family” is driven by anxiety, what will also always be present is a failure of nerve among its leaders.

the need for clarity and decisiveness in a civilization that inhibits the development of leaders with clarity and decisiveness.

This book is not, therefore, for those who prefer peace to progress. It is not for those who mistake another’s well-defined stand for coercion. It is not for those who fail to see how in any family or institution a perpetual concern for consensus leverages power to the extremists.

The conceptual dimension is the inadequacy of what I shall refer to as the social science construction of reality.

The emotional dimension is the chronic anxiety that currently ricochets from sea to shining sea.

The way out, rather, requires shifting our orientation to the way we think about relationships, from one that focuses on techniques that motivate others to one that focuses on the leader’s own presence and being.

the universal problem for all partnerships, marital or otherwise, was not getting closer; it was preserving self in a close relationship, something that no one made of flesh and blood seems to do well.

maturity will be defined as the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.)

Sabotage is not merely something to be avoided or wished away; instead, it comes with the territory of leading, whether the “territory” is a family or an organization. And a leader’s capacity to recognize sabotage for what it is—that is, a systemic phenomenon connected to the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system and not to the institution’s specific issues, makeup, or goals—is the key to the kingdom.

Contemporary leadership dilemmas have less to do with the specificity of given problems than with the way everyone is framing the issues.

A regressive, counter-evolutionary trend in which the most dependent members of any organization set the agendas and where adaptation is constantly toward weakness rather than strength, thus leveraging power to the recalcitrant, the passive-aggressive, and the most anxious members of an institution rather than toward the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the motivated.

A devaluation of the process of individuation so that leaders tend to rely more on expertise than on their own capacity to be decisive. Consultants (to both families and organizations) contribute further to this denial of individuation by offering solutions instead of promoting their clients’ capacity to define themselves more clearly.

An obsession with data and technique that has become a form of addiction

and turns professionals into data junkies and their information into data junkyards.

avoid o...

A widespread misunderstanding about the relational nature of destructive processes in families and institutions that leads leaders to assume that toxic forces can be regulated through reasonableness, love, insight, role-modeling, inculcation of values, and striving for consensus. It prevents them from taking the kind of stands that set limits to the invasiveness of those who lack self-regulation.

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 100 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.

Rather, I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals and, therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected and, therefore, can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity in response to the automatic reactivity of others and, therefore, be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing.

what was needed to explain an emotional process orientation to leadership was a concept that was less moored to linear cause-and-effect thinking. It had to be one that conceptualized the connection between leader and follower as reciprocal and as part of larger natural processes, many of which were intergenerational.

While our species is fond of emphasizing the distinctions between humans and animal life, this focus on the intellect can also be a distraction. While the intellect gives us an advantage over other species, it is only an advantage when we are able to deal adequately with what we have in common with other forms of life—in particular, the instinctual side of ourselves as manifest in the anxiety (reactivity) that automatically responds to change and the tension in any community between self and togetherness.

In any age, concepts of leadership must square with the latest understanding of the relationship between brain and body. Recent findings about the brain-body connection have the potential to revolutionize our concept of hierarchy. They suggest that to a large extent we have a liquid nervous system. The brain turns out to function like a gland. It is the largest organ of secretion, communicating simultaneously with various parts of the body, both near and far, through the reciprocal transmission of substances known as neurotransmitters. In other words, the head is present in the body!

So, too, the connection between a “head” and its body in any family or institution is not necessarily a function of proximity. The functioning of a “head” can systemically influence all parts of a body simultaneously and totally bypass linear, “head-bone-connected-tothe-neck-bone” thinking. What counts is the leader’s presence and being, not technique and know-how. It is precisely these systemic aspects of an institution’s emotional processes that explain why a leader does not have to know personally those who are being sabotaged or those who are the saboteurs in order for the leader’s own functioning to contribute to that nefarious process.

From this perspective, “the great American divorce” was ultimately the result of the failure of the five presidents before Lincoln (particularly Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, but also to some extent Polk and Taylor) to function in a differentiated manner. The way in which these glad-handing, conflict-avoiding, and compromising “commanders-in-chief ” avoided taking charge of our growing internal crisis when they occupied the position “at the top” is exactly the same way I have seen today’s leaders function before their organizations (or families) “split.”

if a leader could learn to be a well-differentiated presence, by the very nature of his or her being he or she could promote differentiation and support creative imagination throughout the system. These emotional processes could therefore be salutary rather than destructive. This would be the case not by focusing on techniques for moving others, but by focusing on the nature of his or her own being and presence.

A leader must separate his or her own emotional being from that of his or her followers while still remaining connected.

Vision is basically an emotional rather than a cerebral phenomenon, depending more on a leader’s capacity to deal with anxiety than his or her professional training or degree. A leader needs the capacity not only to accept the solitariness that comes with the territory, but also to come to love it. These criteria are based on the recognition that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Chronic criticism is, if anything, often a sign that the leader is functioning better. Vision is not enough.

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.

before any technique or data could be effective, leaders had to be willing to face their own selves.

the chronic anxiety in American society has made the imbibing of data and technique addictive precisely because it enables leaders not to have to face their selves.

the devaluing of self inhibits an adventurous spirit.

empathy misleads them as to the factors that go into growth and survival and the nature of what is toxic to life itself.

power lies in presence rather than method;

the tendency to attribute the Renaissance to a renewed interest in learning may, despite its origins, be the same kind of academic bias that focuses leadership-training programs on data and technique rather than on emotional process.

It certainly has not been my experience in working with imaginatively stuck marriages, families, corporations, or other institutions that an increase in information will necessarily enable a system to get unstuck. And the risk-averse are rarely emboldened by data.

Anyone who has ever been part of an imaginatively gridlocked relationship system knows that more learning will not, on its own, automatically change the way people see things or think. There must first be a shift in the emotional processes of that institution. Imagination and indeed even curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive, phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves ...

The great lesson of this turnaround is that when any relationship system is imaginatively gridlocked, it cannot get free simply through more thinking about the problem. Conceptually stuck systems cannot become unstuck simply by trying harder. For a fundamental reorientation to occur, a spirit of adventure that optimizes serendipity and enables new perceptions beyond the control of our thinking processes must happen first.

for that type of change to occur, the system in turn must produce leaders who can both take the first step and maintain the stamina to follow through in the face of predictable resistance and sabotage.

just because an idea is sophisticated does not prevent it from functioning as a superstition when encompassing emotional processes put it to their regressive service.

The treadmill of trying harder is driven by the assumption that failure is due to the fact that one did not try hard enough, use the right technique, or get enough information. This assumption overlooks the possibility that thinking processes themselves are stuck and imagination gridlocked, not because of cognitive strictures in the minds of those trying to solve a problem, but because of emotional processes within the wider relationship system. The failure to recognize those emotional processes, if not the outright denial of their existence, is what often initiates and ultimately perpetuates the treadmill effect.

So deeply fixed was Europe’s attitude toward the East that despite the succeeding exploration and colonization, the land mass of the Western Hemisphere was considered largely “in the way.”

In 1747, King Ferdinand VII of Spain issued a royal decree stating flat out, “California is not an island.”

The third characteristic of gridlocked relationship systems is either/ or, black-or-white, all-or-nothing ways of thinking that eventually restrict the options of the mind.

Paradigms that might begin simply as theoretical differences become hardened into intense, oppositional, emotional commitments over even the most unemotional subject matter.

a Portuguese king who came to be known as Prince Henry the Navigator.