Life’s Lesson

I was the graduate who had it all—all the skills, knowledge and gifts necessary to become a great leader and change the world. I was bright and ambitious, a never-ending source of energy, enthusiasm and optimism. As an upbeat, joyful charismatic visionary with a shelf of trophies in public speaking, I could easily draw a crowd. You would think this combination was destined for greatness, but I did not become a great leader. Instead, I failed miserably.

Inside the body and soul of this gifted young woman dwelled brokenness and fear in overflowing quantities. It spilled over into everything I did and every relationship I entered into. By the time I was in my mid-thirties, I was involved in a career and a trio of community groups all enmeshed in conflict. To top it off, I wasn’t speaking to my entire family of origin, I didn’t give my husband the time of day, and I had three children I barely knew. In 1996, when I was out of work and suffering from burnout, I was diagnosed with cancer. This triggered the age-old anxiety disorder that I had been dealing with--and hiding—for over 30 years. Did I mention that I was an ordained minister, yet I had no idea where God was? There was but one certainty in my life: things needed to change.

It’s not like my entire being came crashing down at once; it was a slow and steady degeneration, and I didn’t realize until some time later that the common denominator in all these failures was me. Gee, I thought it was the state of the church, my dysfunctional family and/or the going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket world. It was not so much that I blamed everyone and everything for my problems but more that I thought I could have evoked some meaningful change in my situation if I had simply learned more information or had more skill.

In my great quest for the acquisition of this skill, I attended numerous continuing education classes on preaching, teaching, theology, counselling, small group theory and the Enneagram. I devoured literature on church growth, enlivening worship, the latest Bible study curriculum, congregational organization and every program under the sun. I did marriage enrichment weekends and parenting courses, and spent more “quality time” with the family. I became exceedingly skilled in “communication,” “conflict resolution” and “training leaders.” I even studied in depth Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, which describes a great theory and is a great book, but despite my knowledge of it, I was far from highly effective.

I saw a therapist for two years who sat like a dummy bridge hand and nodded agreement that my mother was to blame for almost everything. I underwent psychoanalysis, hypnosis, original grief work, primal scream therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy, embraced my inner child and studied my family system. I enrolled in an M.B.A. program. I began working on a PhD in psychology. Then I got cancer. With similar enthusiasm, I attacked it on all fronts: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, healing touch, prayer, herbal remedies and a vegan diet. Out of this entire quest for more information, the only thing that seemed to be of any lasting value was whatever I did that contributed to not dying of cancer. Who knows what it was, out of all that! Instead of dying young, I was left alive, by the grace of God, or some fluke of the universe, to figure out how on earth I could make sense of it all.

Sometimes life leads you to an Alcoholics Anonymous “Step One” whether you’ve ever been an addict or not. Step One is known as “bottoming out.” I came to believe I was powerless over [all this crap] and my life had become unmanageable. It’s a humbling experience for anyone, perhaps more so for the one voted most likely to succeed.

Since I had some time on my hands while recovering from illness, I set out to learn how to do leadership properly. If I could no longer blame God or the world, then poor leadership must be at the root of my failure in my career, in my family and within my own life. After all, when I went to theological college in the 1980s, the word “leadership” was frowned upon. It was hierarchical, patriarchal and indicated an abuse of power. We were encouraged instead to use words like “collegial” and “community.” Assuming more knowledge about techniques was what I needed, I set out to research and absorb as much data as possible on the topic of leadership.

 

Theory, Controversy and Discovery

Some of what I studied was very good: I value it to this day. Tops among the good stuff was Stephen Covey’s emphasis on “the inside-out approach.”[1] It turned on a light bulb for me. If I wanted to change anything or anybody, I had to start by getting my personal “act together.” I came to realize that my failure in ministry was linked to the quality of my relationships at home and everywhere else.

Unfortunately, much of what is written about leadership is technique or tricks of the trade: manage people in 60 seconds; learn communication, delegation, negotiation; draw on teamwork, empowerment and methods to inspire, enthuse or challenge. “Experts” talk about leadership style as if being a good leader depends on choosing a way of being as one would choose accessories.

In the midst of the worst years of my existence, my friend Ian gave me a book that marked the beginning of real change in my life. It was Edwin Friedman’s Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. The late Edwin Friedman was both a rabbi and a family therapist. As a therapist, he was a student of Murray Bowen, the founder of “Family Systems Theory,” based on the theory of (natural) living systems.

Bowen was a psychiatrist who became dissatisfied with the lack of scientific precision in a psychoanalytic approach. He began work in the 1950s studying families in a residential/institutional setting, in particular, families with schizophrenic children. Bowen discovered that there was an emotional process in these families that was common to them all and that if the process were changed, the schizophrenic’s functioning improved, even if some other family members or relationships appeared to worsen.

One of Bowen’s most important conclusions was that the family is an emotional system, and as such, it is interconnected and functions as a whole. Bowen theory therefore joins the concepts of systems thinking and emotional process. Since the focus is no longer on the symptom bearer (in the original study, the schizophrenic child), but on the emotional process within the family, then it is more fruitful to modify the process than to try to “fix” the individual with the problem. Of course, Bowen came to believe that once these patterns could be seen in schizophrenia, it was possible to see them in other families without problems (or with less serious problems) as well.[2]

Edwin Friedman studied with Bowen at the Georgetown University Family Center, now known as the Bowen Center. Since Friedman was a practicing rabbi as well as a family therapist, he brilliantly applied the insights of Bowen theory (systems thinking and emotional process) to human institutions such as the church or synagogue.

In his latter years, Friedman gave seminars and consulted to leaders in all sorts of organizations—community groups, medical facilities, education systems and the world of commerce. If you have the incentive and enthusiasm to investigate these themes more intensely, then by all means examine Friedman’s writings and the videos of his seminars. They are an invaluable legacy to the study of leadership. It is also tremendously worthwhile for students of leadership to examine Bowen theory at its source. Once I got started with this theory, I couldn’t learn enough about it. Although Friedman’s theory is brilliant, like Bowen’s, both are lacking the integration of recent research into human emotion.

If I could have recommended any of Friedman’s writings as textbooks to the lay people in my two-year-long leadership program, I probably would not have begun writing this book. Unfortunately, Friedman is pretty technical, and the reading is  “heavier” than most folks are willing to take on. So I set out to write this book as a discussion of living systems theory for lay people. I thought that if lay people can even become aware of the emotional process at work in their organizations and families, then these systems would begin to stabilize and function better.

I quickly became paralyzed in what began to be a simple writing of Bowen theory, largely because I do not even agree with some of Bowen’s most central concepts: his fundamental (unproven) theory of the scale of differentiation of self, for example, and in particular, his idea that one cannot substantially move up the scale.

My main problem with Bowen is related to my own personal story of the overwhelmingly successful treatment of severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I gained success in treatment through “traditional” psychotherapy, which focuses on emotion and attachment with a particular emphasis on the relationship between therapist and client. Bowen and his most prominent disciples (Kerr, Papero) are adamantly opposed to the two most widely agreed-upon principles of psychotherapy: a) that healing is contingent upon a good client-therapist relationship and b) that therapy should focus on the emotional experience of the client. I do believe that the Bowenians are wrong about this. Unfortunately, most theorists who focus on emotion and attachment theory discount all of Bowen, throwing out a perfectly good baby with the bathwater.

A few years ago, I was privileged to attend a conference with the leading Bowenian, Michael Kerr, and the most prominent academic researcher in couples’ therapy (who has an emotion-focused perspective), Dr. John Gottman. Listening to the debate between these two led me to explore aspects of both Bowen and emotion-focused theories further. My formal training in counselling was first in a person-centred (Rogerian) approach, and later in Bowen theory; my greatest interest at this point in my career is in emotional awareness, attachment theory and the use of emotion in healing. If this conference were any indication, then the two “sides” do not understand each other. This book attempts to integrate aspects of both as they relate to our common journey as human beings toward changing ourselves or evoking change in the world. People who are willing to change themselves for the sake of evoking change in their closest relationships or in the world are called leaders. True leadership, therefore, does not necessarily come by virtue of office.

 

A Critical Time

There is a crisis in leadership in our present day. It was no wonder that Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It’s More Important Than IQ, was so popular when it was released in 1995. People naturally knew there was something more to good leadership than appointing the person with the most IQ points, skill or expertise to lead them. Hiring or appointing leaders for their intellectual ability alone may have appeared to work at one time, but it hasn’t worked at all since about the 1960s, if it ever really did.

Equally popular today to the topic of leadership is that of conflict management. Although conflict is normal and natural, poorly handled conflict is killing us. It is killing our marriages, our businesses, our institutions and governments, and the way we raise our children. In my own work in the church for over 20 years, as well as in observing people’s behaviour in small groups and community organizations, I have seen the degree and amount of destructive conflict escalate. Conflict points to a crisis in leadership and until we figure out what good leadership is, conflict will continue to infiltrate every human institution and slowly destroy us.

There are lots of techniques being marketed today for “resolving” or “managing” conflict, but they are just that—techniques. They do not address the real problem, which is a crisis in leadership. They are temporary bandages at best, covering up wounds but not curing the infection. Ronald Heifetz in his thought-provoking book Leadership without Easy Answers refers to conflict management skills as “technical solutions” and urges leaders to move their organizations toward identifying and working on “adaptive challenges” that force both the group and its leader to grow. [3]

Author, speaker and business consultant, Stephen Covey, in his first book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, implies that conflict management techniques are an example of using “the law of the school,” when what is needed is “the law of the farm.” Covey’s “laws” remind us that when we are in school, we can cram for the exam the night before and still pass the course, but this approach cannot be used on the farm. It’s no good to plough, plant, water and fertilize the night before you expect a harvest. It just can’t happen. Leadership, says Covey, is based on natural laws like the “law of the farm” and must therefore not begin with techniques but with the inward transformation of the leader.[4]

The answer to the crisis of leadership and ensuing conflict is not a quick fix. Change requires patience. True leadership that evokes lasting change is a journey—a lifelong process that begins and ends with personal or spiritual growth.[5] Edwin Friedman emphasized repeatedly in his seminars that the answer to the problems in our organizations is not for the leader to acquire more knowledge or expertise. It is for the leader to improve his or her functioning.[6]

Many, if not most, people are not even aware of their own functioning and have no idea what is going on inside their heads—or hearts, as the case may be. Increasing your awareness of self as well as the awareness of the emotional process going on in the system is critical. The degree to which you are unaware of your own emotions and emotional process directly relates to the degree of conflict (or sometimes chaos) in the systems you hope to change.

A business executive may be the most intelligent, visionary, organized and creative person in the company. This leader’s resume may appear to “have it all”: education, experience, knowledge, skill—even “interpersonal skills.” The leader of the local art gallery, church board or service club may be the most dedicated, faithful, hard-working volunteer in the group (and usually is). Leaders of families may be loyal partners and parents, good providers, nurturing mothers, caring husbands. Couples may go to marriage enrichment classes, weekly dates, spice up their sex life and never fight. But if these leaders have no awareness whatsoever of their own pain and accompanying emotional triggers, or of the emotional process going on in the room, the only change they will experience is a descent into troubled waters. It is a trouble that is common to us all.

 

[1]. Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 15–44.

[2]. General information on Bowen is derived from Daniel Papero, PhD, LCSW, at his Vancouver conference “The Therapist’s Own Family,” October 17–19, 2003. Dr. Papero is a long-time colleague of Bowen, faculty member at the Georgetown University Family Center at Dr. Bowen’s invitation, and the author of Bowen Family Systems Theory.

[3]. Ronald Heifetz, Leadership without Easy Answers, Chapter 6.

[4]. Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,22.

[5]. Growing personally is a spiritual journey. By “spiritual” I do not mean religious. The term “spirit” encompasses all that we are: the sum total of intellectual, emotional, psychological, creative, sacred and meaning-filled. If you feel more comfortable with it, you may substitute the term “personal growth” whenever “spiritual growth” is mentioned.

[6]. Edwin Friedman, Reinventing Leadership (video).