A Failure of Nerve

I’m working through Edwin Friedman’s posthumously published “A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.” Friedman offers four similarities in the thinking and functioning of America’s families and institutions that he observed and believed to be at the heart of the problem of contemporary America’s orientation toward leadership:

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

2. A demeaning and devaluing of the individuation that goes into self so that leaders tend to rely more on expertise than on their own capacity to be decisive.

3. An almost panicky obsession with data and technique that has become a form of substance abuse, turning professionals into data-junkies.

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

He unpacks these provocative statements throughout the rest of the book. It is hard to find, but it is well worth the read. Even if you don’t buy everything he says, it will challenge you to rethink what a leader is and what a leader does.