Transcription of

Dr. Edwin Friedman Speaks:

A Series of Talks presented by The Seven Oaks Foundation

I want to talk about leadership. It has become one of my favorite topics because almost everything else I talk about seems to stream into the issue of leadership. I would like to begin with the reading of a fable called "The Bridge."

There was a man who had given much thought to what he wanted from life. He had experienced many moods and trials. He had experimented with different ways of living, and he had his share of both success and failure. At last, he began to see clearly where he wanted to go.

Now I told that fable first on Jewish high holy days one night. When I first started writing these fables I would tell one and the choir would get up and sing afterwards. (Laughter)

I did two or three of these instead of a sermon and the choir was almost songless after this one. People told me they were up to 2:00 in the morning coming up with new ways of ending it. I remember one of my favorites, from a fairly close friend, who said, "The guy falls down into the river, swims to shore, and says you win some, you lose some." (Laughter)

That fable, that fantasy came out of my experience of observing, throughout all the institutions I see, how the more dependent, the more recalcitrant, the least motivated to really do something with their lives, seem to be tying up everybody else in knots and calling the shots. The focus is always on helping the "poor me" people. And while that sounds Christian, Jewish, it sounds like the proper thing to do, it is as though somebody is perverting or some force is perverting the good intentions in society. As I see it, leaders are constantly enervated, frustrated, by the recalcitrance of their followers.

And most leadership approaches are aware of the problem of recalcitrance and they quote the issue of motivation. And so all leaders, whether they are political or religious or in sports, are always looking at how to motivate others. Books on management and administration are concerned with motivation. And you wind up with a spectrum of opinion with the extremes being charisma and consensus.

At one end the assumption is it must be in the personality of the leader to get the group moving. At the other end the assumption is it is by bringing the group together through consensus that you move forward. I am going to bring to you tonight a different view of leadership that does not fall on that continuum. The continuum between charisma and consensus puts the leader in one position and the group in the other. And you get constantly a tension between the leader and the group.

Someone was telling me today that another person who does the same kind of work I do said it’s important to create tension in congregations. While that’s creative, I’m not sure that I agree with that. With some congregations if they are phlegmatic and apathetic probably that’s the right thing to do. But in some congregations if they are anxious that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do and the same thing is true with families. There’s a more subtle factor in this which I want to head toward.

Similarly, a lot of people over the past couple of days were saying, "Well it seems what you’re saying is change comes when you get crisis, so we should precipitate crisis," but that’s not quite accurate because crisis in and of itself will not produce change. It depends upon how you handle the crisis and that’s where I’m headed.

I’m going to present to you an organic notion of leadership in which the leader is not seen as separate from the group nor totally undifferentiated within the group as the consensus approach tends to move toward.

But before I do that, I want to discuss the problems of leadership a bit more. What I will do is talk a little bit about what I see as the issues of leadership. I will then talk a bit about problems I see with both consensus leadership and charismatic leadership, and then from that I will move to the final idea of what I call leadership through self differentiation. It will relate back to everything I’ve been talking about the last couple of days.

First of all, if you look at nature, if you look at biological forms it becomes fairly clear that almost all forms of protoplasm require leadership to function effectively — whether it’s a swarm, a herd, or a flock. It doesn’t matter. Sometimes the leadership seems to be built into the group itself. If you watch a school of fish, each one seems to be the other one’s radar. So the school is going along and all of sudden one of the extreme ends senses danger and in a second the entire group knows it. Recently, I read on the sport’s pages of a football player describing how one player seemed to sense something and the whole team picked it up. It was like watching a school of fish or a flock of birds.

On the other hand, there also is clearly a genetic factor in some species as to who becomes the leader. Ethologists, those that study this, clearly see that certain animals in a herd will fight for the leadership. They do not fight until one kills the other usually. They fight until one quits. Somebody was saying to me today that he had been in the same congregation more than fifteen years and added, "I guess I just out lasted everybody." There is something to that. I know of a Rabbi in the Washington area who’s been in his congregation for thirty-five years and the first five or ten were hell. The reason I know it is I inherited all his past presidents when I first came to Washington. (Laughter) And they took out on me what they couldn’t deal with with him.

In all events, there is such a thing as outlasting. There is such thing as winning not by destroying the other one, but just by persevering until the other one quits. A lot of this seems to go on and it seems to be genetically related in herds.

But here is the major point I want to make. Hierarchies seem to be necessary for protoplasm to function effectively. And, while we hear the word hierarchy we sometimes think autocracy, and therefore get scared of it. Without hierarchy in protoplasm, anxiety is higher. I think that’s a fundamental notion of protoplasm. If you do not have hierarchy in the system, it’s more likely to panic. But hierarchy shouldn’t be heard immediately as necessarily someone autocratically telling others what to do.

I’ll get back to the point later, I just want to emphasize what appears to me to be the extraordinary significance of structure in emotional systems. There are many different schools of family therapy, yet I think there’s one thing on which all schools of family therapy would agree. Until the parents start taking charge of their own lives, you can’t expect kids to function better.

In other words, you have a family come in with a problem in the children, rather than in the marriage or in the health of somebody, unless those parents can establish hierarchy as I will explain later, forget it. The kids just aren’t going to function better.

As I suggested earlier today, a leader also seems to function as the immunological system of the structure he or she is a leader in. When that leader is functioning in a well defined way the pathogens don’t get going. There’s less likelihood of chaos.

Now I want to say something about the relationship of a head and a body. In the early 1970's, something occurred which to my knowledge only occurred once in sport’s history in America. That is whole teams, the Baltimore Colts and the Los Angeles Rams, were traded. That’s the only time that ever happened. Of course, you could argue that the owners were traded. How would you prove who was traded? It was the owners that moved cities not the teams.

If the day comes when they can do head transplants, you would never be able to prove whether what was transplanted was the head or the body. That’s the only organ which that is true.

What happened of course between Baltimore and Los Angeles is that the personality of the teams went with the owners. The Colts, which had been a great team, went downhill, and the Rams, which was a poor team, went uphill. The switch was unbelievable.

There are a lot examples of this in sports which are interesting to watch because sport teams come as close to the ethology of watching herds as any other human form that I know. We all know the winners are never necessarily the teams with the most talent. And that’s why teams rarely repeat as champions because there’s something else that’s got to go just right.

Now, I want to talk a bit about the head. If you have been on a beach and you’ve seen a horseshoe crab, you may know this is cul-de-sac evolution. The horseshoe crab has been the same way and has not evolved for millions and millions of years. The head is not differentiated from the body. It is all head. You can inject into a horseshoe crab a substance that’s not chemically noxious to the crab, and the crab will kill itself in an autoimmune response in about an hour. In other words in a creature where the head is not differentiated from the body, the head cannot be objective about threat.

Now there is some very new material coming out of microbiology which is so new that probably the average physician is not up with it yet. Over the last seven or eight years, there have been a series of discoveries which in effect show that all the major systems of the human body are interconnected with one another.

Some of what I’m going to tell you is related to biofeedback. One of the first discoveries involving biofeedback was simply the discovery of endorphin. These are chemical substances that the brain releases. And, it has been found that their chemical structures are the same as morphine and heroine. So the body releases its own chemical substance.

Then some people went a little farther and they found that these substances have specific receptors around the body and the substance will only hook on in the lock and key way to these particular receptors. Then someone discovered that there was a relationship between the nurturing that infant rats got and the number of receptors they had for these endorphin substances. All this was leading to a kind of organic unity that goes deeply and organically unified within the body as well as outside into the family.

Then what began to be realized was that the brain is the largest organ of secretion in the body because what was realized is the autonomic nervous system, which we were all taught worked on synapses across gaps in a kind of electrical way, is not the way the nervous system functions primarily, but that the nervous system releases a substance called a neuro transmitter. The important significance of the discovery of neuro transmitters is that a nerve in one part of the body can connect up with other parts of the body. In other words, no longer is contiguity essential, no longer is it essential for one part of the body to be in some kind of immediate direct relationship with another part in order to influence it or affect it, and that the hormone system and the autonomic nervous system come together in a way that what we really have is a liquid nervous system.

And then the biggest discovery of all of them has been that the brain, which produces a lot of substances, releases these substances not only to what was always known as the receptor sites but to sites that were hitherto never realized. The biggest one being the immunological system. The immunological system contains receptor sites for substances released from the brain. Not only that, the immunological system releases substances to a brain that has receptors.

What is happening now would be Alfred North Whitehead’s dream. Recently, I went back to reading some of Whitehead and his philosophy of organism and so on. I saw some of his biological metaphors and I thought "Wow" if he were alive today and understood the sense of organism that microbiology is releasing and being aware of.

Now, what has gone along with this of course is the awareness that the head by its functioning can potentially affect other parts of the body that hitherto were not thought to be regulated by our thought processes. This has led to concepts of imaging with certain kinds of disease and it has also led to the whole biofeedback phenomenon in which about 150 different types of physical dysfunction are now considered susceptible to regulation whereas until about 30 years ago people talked about the smooth muscle cells. People talked about the involuntary muscles.

It is now being realized that an organism that we know of as the image of God can teach us an enormous amount about how to function in life. The image of God it now turns out has so many paths of redundancy of communication, it has so many pathways by which one part can connect up and communicate with the other, that it’s a model for almost any society you try to create. But, the image of God only functions well to the extent the head is well differentiated. Where I’m headed is toward a model of leadership that says the effect of the head on the body and the effect of the head of an organization on the organization are identical. Not similar, not parallel, not analogous, but identical because we are made up of cells and we function like the substratum within us. That’s where I’m headed. This is really different.

What you will see it leads to is the notion that the primary responsibility of the head is not for the body but for keeping itself differentiated. That will have an automatic effect on the health of the body. There has been a recent book that has come out suggesting that the primary function of the brain, as we look at evolution, is not thinking, but the preservation of health. This is really new thinking. Now keep that in mind as I go through the notions of traditional concepts of leadership.

See, I look around at all the leaders who are frustrated. One of the things that I have noticed is, and I say this to all clergy, whenever you are feeling best, watch out. On any given day that you wake up and you say, "Gee things are going great finally," you can count on the fact that you will not feel that way for too much longer. (Laughter) But that is not because all society and worlds go up and down. It is because differentiation, success triggers sabotage and it is not possible to really achieve anything in this world and function well without triggering sabotage in others around you. The sabotage is traditionally seen as resistance. The sabotage is traditionally seen as one of the things you have to get past. I’m saying something deeper than that. I’m saying sabotage is a systemic phenomenon. I’m saying that there is no way you can succeed at anything unless you say in advance that one of the factors that goes into my continued success is learning how to deal with difficulties my early success is going to bring me.

I have a crude analogy that I use with clients. I once had to have my knee strengthened at a sport’s medicine program. You sit down and they put some weights on your leg and they say move your leg up and down fast. Then they say the faster you do it, the more resistance you will get. That is good because it’s helping you build up the muscle. Something like that seems to work in all organizations. The faster you move, the better you move, the harder it’s going to become.

What happens is when people meet that sabotage, if they are not prepared for it, they get reactive to it and get thrown off course or get all caught up in it and forget their job. Being aware that sabotage is a systemic phenomenon can help you stay on course if you have a goal or project. But it requires having an organic concept of the organization, something similar to the image of God where everything is somehow related to everything else.

Now, most approaches to leadership, which have some sense of the sabotage phenomenon, either suggest that you ride over it by the dent of your personality or that you appease it. I don’t want to go in either direction. Let me talk about charismatic leadership and then about consensus leadership.

Charismatic leadership is based on the recognition that there are some people that exude a certain personality trait that is attractive to others. It seems to be the nature of protoplasm, that if there’s not somebody in the head position, at the top, then it’s hard to get organized. The right charismatic person can come into a system and really organize it fast. Charismatic leadership can get a group moving much quicker than democracy. Charismatic leadership, however, works best in a depression, whether it’s a political depression, economic depression, or therapeutic depression. The problems with charismatic leadership however are enormous.

Some of the problems with charismatic leadership are as follows. First of all, it creates an enormous amount of dependency on the leader. Second of all, it ain’t good for the health of the leader who must continually keep up being the pacemaker of the organization. Third, it personalizes all the issues. When a group is led by a charismatic leader, it will tend to polarize around the personality of the leader or it will go to the opposite extreme and become cult like around the leader and then you get the phobic fear of strangers.

The group is liable to split on the one hand because of the intensity of the feelings about all the issues or conversely it is liable to fuse into a homogenized group that is negative about all other groups. Jonestown, of course, was the obvious ultimate example of this. But you see families that way and you see churches and synagogues that way. In fact it is extraordinary the extent to which troubled institutions and families are cut off. It is a remarkable phenomenon to observe them. In talking about charismatic leadership, I’m saying here are some of the benefits and here are some of the deficits.

There’s one more point to bring up in this context. Charismatic leadership rarely provides for succession. I learned that one when I was a Rabbinic student back in the 50's. I read this article which described what happened when Cusavitsky and Toscanini died within months of each other. They were the great orchestra leaders of their time. The NBC symphony — Toscanini’s pretty much fell apart, got reorganized by somebody else in a different form and the Boston symphony went on beautifully. Everybody said, "Well, you have to understand that the Boston symphony was a structure that had a long history whereas the NBC symphony had been created for Toscanini." This article said there’s another possibility and that has to do with the types of leadership of these two men. If you had reversed those men you might have seen the NBC symphony go on and the Boston symphony having much more difficulty going on. What the article tried to suggest was that Toscanini, to use my term tonight, was charismatic. He made the functioning of the organization dependent on his functioning. It produced a beautiful sound but there was no way of continuing that sound in his absence. Cusavitsky had a way of bringing out what was in the group itself and had somehow created structure so that someone else could fit in. This is not the whole story, but the important point was the distinction that the article was making and I never forgot that. It is rare for a charismatically led group to find another personality of similar charisma personality to follow with. Maybe you can do it twice, maybe even three times, but rarely I think will a charismatic movement will last more than three generations.

So these are some of the major problems with functioning in charismatic ways. If you got it, you got it. On the other hand one should be wary of the dangers of a leadership that is based as much as possible on the functioning of the leader.

I’m giving you pure forms and perhaps these pure forms don’t exist in reality, but it helps set up the spectrum. At the other end of the continuum is what has come to be called consensus leadership and consensus leadership would tend to see the leader, the head, (probably would not want to call them the head), as an enabler. That’s the favorite phrase. The idea is that we don’t like autocracy, we don’t like people telling us what to do, and it’s the will of the group that should be expressed — which I agree completely.

Though to tell a story that just occurred to me. For years, I taught a confirmation class and these are fifteen year old children and I was always careful never to put in my ideas because I figured I have so much more education, I’m so much more knowledgeable about all the theological issues that I would keep challenging them and never put in my ideas. I was the enabler. Then one year I decided I would do it differently and I started putting in my ideas. Overwhelm them? Ha, the more I expressed myself, the more every one of them expressed themselves. I realized than that I had thrown out the baby with the dirty water, when I decided never put my ideas in.

Now what happens with consensus leadership is this, consensus leadership is more concerned with peace than progress. That’s generally the rule. Few of the world’s great ideas have come to people in a crowd. (Laughter) Again to go back to Whitehead. He defines religion as what you do with your own solitariness. It’s not that the consensus approach can’t come up with an idea, it discourages the initiative to be solitary.

But there are bigger problems with consensus. One of the major problems with consensus leadership is it has a devil of a time dealing with panic and anxiety. One of the things about charismatic leadership at the very least is, to use the baseball phrase, you’ve got a "stopper." Baseball talks about losing streaks. The great successful teams rarely have long losing streaks. Baseball managers are constantly looking for a pitcher who doesn’t lose too many games and he is called a stopper. What happens if you think of losing streaks as anxiety running amuck? Suppose what losing streaks are about on sport teams is panic? In all events the stopper seems to be more than somebody with a great arm. It’s someone who doesn’t get caught up in the panic of the system.

Consensus led groups have more difficulty dealing with panic and anxiety because generally speaking someone’s got to emerge from the group to stop the dominoes from falling. I have a fable which I wrote about. A group of dominoes are all standing up in some sort of an S curve. They live in perpetual panic that one of them is going to fall over. (Laughter) And it happens and they all go over and they go over so fast that they go back up again and go over the other way and so on. And then all of a sudden at number 715 they stop. 715 doesn’t go down and the result is that everybody reverberates and everyone stands up again. All of the dominoes look at this one and they say, "How come you didn’t get dominoed?" and he says, "I don’t know, the only thing that I can figure is when all you guys were trying to hold everybody up, I was concentrating on the notion that I wouldn’t go down."

That’s what is hard to find in a consensus led group. The focus tends to be on the group rather than on the self of people. Self is a threatening notion. Most people can’t distinguish between self and autocracy, between well defined positions and autocracy. The key to autocracy is emotional coercion, that’s different from self definition, but I’ll get back to that one too. Another major problem as I see it with a consensus led group is, it gives strength to the extremists. If your major concern is consensus, then the furthest out group can always hold out their inclusion by asking or demanding a price. Over and over again, I see groups that are mediocritized by the concern for consensus. I see groups lose their verve, lose their momentum because they are so concerned with including everyone.

The interesting thing about consensus groups is that they can also lead to the same kind of emotional intensity if everybody gives up self that you get with charismatic leaders. In all events thus far I have just tried to describe to you two different forms of leadership, both of which are at opposite ends of the extreme, neither of which deals I think enough with the problem of sabotage. I want to present to you a third approach to leadership based on the biology I mentioned earlier. This notion is that the primary concern of the head is not for the body politic. It is for the preservation of the position of the head. While that at first sounds selfish and at first it sounds weak and not forceful, as you will see it is really very powerful, but very difficult to do.

By talking about responsibility for the position of the head, what I mean is something like this. There is a reason the eyes are on the head. Your eyes are not on your kidneys. Your eyes are not on your shoulders. The survival and the evolution of the image of God has been one which sticks the eyes at the top in the position that is most capable of seeing. The head provides vision. Without vision not only can you not move forward, but without vision, you probably can’t survive crisis. I believe that the major function of the head of the body and the head of an organization is to provide vision. But they may not follow your vison. Well, how much success have you had getting them to follow your vision? But the body can’t move without vision.

I realize the uniqueness of the position of minister early in my Rabbinic career when my first congregation set out to build the building. And everybody was coming up with ideas for the plan of the building and I thought up a cartoon which I wanted to put in the synagogue newsletter. But, I was dissuaded from the idea rapidly. My idea was to draw the same synagogue differently from the viewpoint of the various affiliates. The sisterhood, for example, would have this enormous building that would be the kitchen and there would be a little sanctuary next to it. The brotherhood might have a gymnasium and the youth program and then the religious school director would have this huge school, etc. etc. What I hadn’t realized at that point yet was that I was the only person involved in this who could see the whole congregation. I submit that to you as 100 percent true in all religious institutions. Only the minister can see the whole thing. You can never count on any member of the congregation to see it all, not even the senior warden. It is only the minister who has the perspective to see the entire thing. It is therefore, I believe, imperative that the minister keep providing vision to the congregation. Will you always get your vision? No, but without the vision no progress can be made at all and you can’t count on your kidneys to do it. That is you are the only one situated in that position to do it.

Quite often people will call me. This is not an encouragement for anybody in this room to call me, but I’m running almost a private hotline now as a result of a book in which people will call me and want to talk about problems. Over and over I will hear a minister describe a problem from a kind of "poor me" position. I can’t get this congregation to do this, this congregation won’t do this, etc. They are back biting, etc. I have taken to providing the same advice to every minister who calls me no matter what their problem is and that is, get up before your congregation at the next time possible and give a "I have a dream" speech. Get up there and tell the congregation your dream for the future of the congregation. The most extraordinary thing gets reported back to me. From the time the minister gets up there and does that, with some exceptions, it’s like iron filings that have been moving in all kinds of different directions facing all over the place, you turn on a magnetic field and flip, everything is pointed in the same direction. That seems to be the effect on a group when someone gets up and provides vision. People line up. Without doing that you have chaos and the people don’t even know what they are reacting to, all they know is they are reacting. There is something about the provision of vision that gives purpose to institutions, lowers anxiety, and reduces the back biting. It is not the panacea all the time, but without it I don’t think anything else can happen and it can go far toward setting up a lot of possibilities.

Of course, as some people say to me, "Yea but to have vision I have to think out what I believe in." (Laughter) Right, but you see what that leads to then is it is far more important that you spend your hours and your spare time and in your office figuring out what you believe than what’s good for the people.

I can tell you personally that I as a Rabbi for twenty years, I never came up with a sermon title or topic in terms of what I thought the people ought to hear. It was always an issue I wanted to work out for myself. I always used the construction of the sermon as an opportunity to think through an issue for myself. And guess what? Everybody else was trying to think through the same issue, always. But the effect was far different if I was expressing my feelings, my doubts, my way of coming to conclusions, defining me than when I was trying to define them. The power was clearly different. I was simply taking some of the concepts of family therapy and Bowen’s ideas about taking what he calls an "I" position. It’s the same thing in marriage, with children and so on. When you work at letting the other know where you stand rather than telling the other one where they should stand. It sounds less forceful, but it’s powerful.

Why is it powerful? Because while nobody in this room may believe this when I say this, the body needs the head more than the head needs the body or, it’s at least a draw. What we as leaders always get ourselves caught in is the notion that they don’t need us and we have to prove our value to them or they will quit us. Nothing gets the other one more pursuing after you than conveying to them that you don’t know whether you like them or care for them or want to stay or are bored by them. That is as true in a marriage, with children, or with congregations.

What I am suggesting is by focusing on your own self definition, by focusing on the expression of your own evolution as a human being, you really can count on it being forceful because of their need for you. What it does is it reverses the pull of the dependence. In other words my original point was what do we do with all this sabotage we keep getting? The sabotage is only effective when you are dependent on the other one’s functioning, or to the extent that you are dependent on the other one’s function. To the extent you think of the issue in terms of how to get them to move rather than how to be clear yourself, you’re more susceptible to triangles and you’re more susceptible to being sabotaged. To the extent that you say the organic connection will take care of the motivation, what you have to focus on is yourself.

Now let me put in the caveat at this point. It will help explain many of the things that I am saying. I am going to draw on the board an arc, here’s a curve. This curve represents a spectrum of any congregation in this room, in fact on this planet. And let’s say you are here and I want to make a prediction and you can all test it out. There’s a big curve, there’s an x there. The x represents you facing your congregation. Get up sometime and take a strong well defined stand on any topic you want, anything from contras to the trinity. Take any issue you want, something you really believe in, and get up there and express it as your beliefs, by which I mean don’t say this is what you must do to be a good Christian. Say instead this is the way I have interpreted my Christianess or this is the way I interpret the Episcopalian tradition. Put it in a clear definition of what you believe. Here is my prediction. It doesn’t matter who you are. You will get the exact same spectrum of responses. I am going to cut this arc into three pie shaped wedges. If you take a strong "I" position before any group, what you will see happen is one group over here will respond to your "I’s" with their "I’s." They will respond with, "I couldn’t agree with you more." They will talk out of their own experiences or they will say, "Well, I agree with you somewhat, but not completely because I’ve had opposite experiences." Whatever it will be they won’t be fighting you. They will be dialoging with you and responding to your "I" with their "I." That’s the smallest group in the congregation. (Laughter)

The biggest group in the congregation is some "I," but a lot of "you." They will put in some of their ideas but they will put in far more questions about how you got there. Maybe they will pick up on what appears a contradiction or something.

And over at the other extreme are the totally "You" people. "You" people will strictly be focused on you. There will be no "I" in them at all. "How can you say that Mrs. Smith when last week you said such and such?" Or, "How do you reconcile what you said this year with what you did in the city of such and such?" Or, "Rabbi when you say things like that I don’t believe you are Jewish." (Laughter) They’re totally focused on you.

But here is the second interesting thing. You can use this as a litmus paper test for the way people will function in crisis in the congregation and in their own lives. To the extent people shade over toward the "I" position, those are the people you can count on to be the most objective in congregational crises and in family crises in their own life.

But now look at what I have put together. I am suggesting that people’s capacity to hear you objectively and to be clear-headed about their own goals is connected up, somehow, with their emotional being. One of the major problems with leadership is we forget that we are dealing with emotional creatures in an emotional system in which these various emotional creatures have come together and melded parts of all kinds of systems. To try to deal with such groups, simply by asking them their opinion all the time, is to invite chaos. To take strong stands about what you believe is not autocratic if you do it as a definition of yourself rather than as an emotionally coercive effort to change others.

Most of our people are deeply needy. They don’t know what they need and to just fulfill their needs is to abdicate our situation because there are many people whose real need is to not have their needs fulfilled. If you understand need being an existential growth notion.

What I am suggesting to you all is, just as biofeedback is showing, that to the extent that the head, in connection with the body, can learn to get an information loop of what is happening and can learn to think in a well differentiated way, it can affect the health of the body. The same is true with the body politic. That when the person who occupies the head position can function, not like the horseshoe crab and lose itself in the body, but can function in a well differentiated way, apart from the body but still connected to the body. That’s the key. The problem for all protoplasm is how do you get close and maintain self? How do you stay connected and still preserve your integrity? That is as true as in a marriage as in a parent-child relationship. It is equally true in a congregational relationship.

One way I have tried to diagram this is as follows. I will draw a body on the board represented just by a circle and then put a little semicircle on its perimeter that is the head. Here’s what I want to convey to you. Here this big circle represents any organism, and I am suggesting to you that organizations are organisms. Now any organism has components. If the organism is a body these components are the various systems or glands and parts. If the organism is a group of people, then the components are the individuals. What I am saying is when the head, which was originally in the charismatic leadership style, the head is up here but unconnected to the body. In the consensus style the head is one of the x’s which is part of the body. What I am trying to suggest is that if the head will emerge from the body in a more differentiated way but take care to stay connected to the body, it will have an organic effect on the entire system. This is what the new microbiology is bringing out in a way it never could before.

Let me try one other way. Normally you hear about how a leader should be a role model. I don’t think it works that way. And I am not saying that when the head differentiates, it creates a role model for the various components to follow. What I am saying is when a head becomes differentiated, it has a systemic effect on the entire organism and that in turn affects the components. So that when the head emerges as a well differentiated creature, the relationships among the components change. They don’t change because they are modeling themselves after the head. They change because of the systemic effect that a differentiated head has on a system. That’s where I have been headed for two days. It requires a really different way of thinking about yourself in relationship to the people you lead.

For some this will sound selfish. Well, my response to that would be the metaphor of getting on an airplane. You go through the oxygen mask routine and they say, "If you have little ones with you, be sure to put your mask on first." That might be one way to respond to it. Because if you go down the tubes, everybody goes down the tubes. Another way to respond would be to ask the question, "Why is the word selfish the only word that I can think of in the English language with the suffix "ish" that is pejorative?" Why doesn’t the word selfish mean simply having the character of self? To be selfy. If you say somebody is bookish it just means having the character of book. Being booky. Why doesn’t being selfish mean having the character of self? I think one of the reasons is because well differentiated selfishness is, in the good sense of the word working on the development and the expression of our own souls and our own expressed uniqueness, is threatening to others. On the other hand, where you can learn to do that and not cut off from the others when they react, you can get an evolution of the entire colony. Is it easy? Absolutely not, it’s easier to be charismatic. It’s easier to be consensus. Is it powerful? I think so. I think in the long run it’s more powerful and I think one of the things it does is it heads more towards the Cusavitsky notion of an effect on the entire organism. And the person who functions in a well differentiated way, his successor will thank him for life.

Let me stop there and throw it open for questions. Question: What you are saying sounds an awful lot like enlightened self interest. "Be like me and say the hell with everybody. I’m the boss. I’m the best so and so." It sounds so much like that. It’s tantalizing. Answer: Do you know anything about music at all? Do you play any musical instrument? My response to your comment is that many things I say sound a lot like a lot of things other people have said. But you must not confuse mode with melody.

Question: I think, depending on what the group is trying accomplish, that different structures may or may not be appropriate. Certainly there are times when a consensus process is appropriate for a group for a particular purpose. Answer: I left out something I usually say. I would agree with you. My notion about leadership through self-differentiation wants a consensus, but it doesn’t take consensus as a style of life. Similarly, it’s concerned to preserve the importance and value of a well differentiated leader and a strong leader. But it doesn’t make the leader into the pacemaker of the system. Certainly I would agree that there are times when the worst thing that you can do is be smart. I understand that. But I am trying to present a concept that comes in as a tangent to the way most leadership is constructed. It’s the organic notion. That is the key to all of this.

Question: Doesn’t everything boil down to a matter of mutual trust? Can’t we agree to disagree? Answer: My answer to that is why is it no one gets along? I mean congress they don’t get along , the United Nations they don’t get along. I don’t know of any organization that’s ever been formed for the betterment of humanity that everyone gets along. When you say mutual trust, I agree, that would be wonderful. But I ain’t found the system where you get that. So what are you going to do with that? I think that in spite of people’s desires to be trusting, there are emotional factors that go on that cloud our heads like the shadow. What I am looking for is a way that transcends all the emotional blockage that goes on in there.

Question: Isn’t that what we have when we agree to disagree? Answer: But my problem is, I’ve never seen it work. People sit down and say we are going to agree to disagree and the next thing you know they are off. It doesn’t take very long. Someone was telling me here about a congregation in which they were supposed to sit down and discuss whether or not the congregation is viable. They put the group in the room to discuss it and the group went haywire. Here they are discussing whether or not they are terminal or not and they getting terminal discussing it. (Laughter) Well, I remember a movie, a marvelous satire in which these peace marchers were walking along and all of a sudden another peace marching group came along and they wanted the territory and the two groups started hitting one another over the head with their peace signs. I’m trying to think how to put this for you. It gets back to the right brain, left brain, versus top brain, bottom brain and so on. It’s more biology but it gets to the point. Paul McLean is a physician who has studied the human brain for many years, one of the world’s experts on the human brain. And he says our brain has three or four distinct parts that represent different phases of evolution. The brain is not an esthetically elegant organ like the heart, kidney, or lung. It’s like the creator had afterthoughts. I’ll go this way and let another stage of evolution put this on and so on. What McLean has pointed out is several factors which suggest that even though we could be cerebrating, we might not be thinking. The best analogy that I have seen on this was with a driver training car. When anxiety goes up the limbic system takes over. That is what we have in common with animals and reptiles. It is the seat of instinct and the higher anxiety goes, the more likely we are to allow the limbic system to take over the controls of the car. The problem is the brain still thinks it is in charge. But it’s no longer thinking. How do you reduce anxiety in a system? I think well defined leadership will do that even though it will make some people anxious that you are doing that.

Question: You say people desire to have input into the decision making process. Answer: Again, this notion is not that the leader gets up and tells everybody what to do. It’s rather by analogy to that confirmation class that the leader gets up and takes strong stands about what he or she believes. What that does is it enables other people to be more clear about themselves. I am commenting on the traditional thinking that we have to get our plan approved. That is not our job. Our job is to help people be clear. And you can only do that to the extent you get clear yourself.

Question: I believe one of the things you said in your book that you didn’t say here clearly is in that segment over here on the left, the "I" group (referring to the drawing on the board). Not only are these people saying, "Yes I agree with you," they are also sometimes saying, "I disagree with you. I have a different vision." Answer: Yes, I didn’t mean the "I" group necessarily agrees with you. That’s the group that can be free to say we can agree to disagree. I in no way meant to suggest that the "I" group necessarily took positions with you. They might also say, "I’m sorry I can’t agree with you at all." But they don’t need to convert you. And they can relate to you despite the fact they disagree. Thank you for bringing that up so that I could clarify this point.

I had a synagogue in the Washington metropolitan area that was filled with scientists, filled with liberals, filled with a kind of congregation that everybody had either been in therapy or was a therapist. (Laughter) There was not a member of the congregation without a graduate degree. It was that kind of thing. So they prided themselves on the fact, among other things, that they had given up belief in the supernatural. But they believed with perfect faith in the subconscious. So if you trade super for sub, what did you achieve? That’s an example of false change. What I did was suggest to them at one point that a true definition of a liberal would be someone that could have a meaningful relationship with a conservative. I once started fooling around with the notion of: Could you talk about religious groups and say that some were better differentiated than others? Could you talk about religious belief systems and say some were better differentiated than others? Because it’s dangerous to get into ad hominem stuff like that. But I came up with a few and one of them was: Could you relate to people who disagreed with you without having to convert them? That seemed to be a key. It’s as crucial in marriage, parenting, as in congregational situations.

Question: I have an illustration. For the parish I served for seventeen years, I was much into cooperative leadership and sharing ideas, the consensus group model. And one of the things that we discovered was that we really weren’t going anywhere. We really weren’t moving along very well. We brought in a consultant to talk about this and the thing we discovered was that I hadn’t let people know who I was. This prevented anyone else from being comfortable with where they were and we were unable to pull ahead. We really became stalemated to that type of leadership. I had to step down from this chair of the vestry because people were always imitating my consensus. If everybody was trying to imitate consensus, nobody ever became anybody. Answer: I hear you. What I’m suggesting is what you just said is a metaphor for parenting. Parents are constantly saying, "How am I going to get my child to do this or that?" And usually they are in a conflict of wills with them. Years ago, I used to try to give talks like this. I might be invited to a PTA or a church group or something to speak to parents as an expert family therapist and what I learned very quickly was that the parents played the same games with me in the audience that their kids were playing with them. And I had as much success in changing their heads as they had in changing their kids’ heads. I eventually hit on a way-out paradoxical thing to do. I developed a talk called "How to Get Your Kid to Drop Out of College and Save $50,000 in Tuition." (Laughter) I have given this talk all over America and I get the same spectrum of responses. There are people that hear it so beautifully. What I talk about is how to escalate conflict, how to create triangles, and how to screw up communication and so on. The idea being that if you knew you didn’t have to shell out $50,00 when the kid was born, you could have a wonderful life. And the trick was to start early. (Laughter) Every time I’ve ever given this talk anywhere, after the first couple of points, people are laughing like hell and by the third point, people realize that I am telling them to do what they are doing and the impact begins to set in. And then my last point is subversive ideas to stay away from or they will cost you a bundle. And then I put in the straight stuff. Well, it’s interesting to watch what happens there. Again, you’ve got the spectrum. There’s the one group that got up and said they heard what I was saying so beautifully that they will say things like, "But my kids are already in college. Is it too late?" (Laughter) That group is really hurting. But for everyone who says that, someone else gets up and they are still concerned with how to get their kid to take out the garbage?

What I try to teach parents is you can’t have your way with any other person. You have no right to try to demand your way with any other person and the effort to will other people to change is malicious. It is pernicious. Most of the great symptoms in family life come in families with intense willful struggle. Suicide, anorexia, schizophrenia, and so on. You will always find an intense willful effort to change one another. Now, what I’m encouraging parents to do is don’t create rules you can’t enforce. On the other hand it doesn’t mean you have to adapt to the child either just because you feel you can’t change the child. It’s important for the child to know where you stand. "I can’t stop you from going down to Florida this Christmas. If you want to run off down there, I can’t stop you from doing it. I just want you to know it’s totally opposed to my values, my will, and what I think is proper and healthy." That’s enough. Will that stop the kid? No, but if you keep doing that long enough he will begin to reverse the rebellion to more of an adaptation.

Kids lie. Parents are constantly in battles trying to prove the kid lied. There’s no way of doing that. The kid will always come up with something ingenious. You want to make your kid imaginative? (Laughter) The best way to make your kid imaginative is to accuse him of lying. You won’t believe what they will come up with. On the other hand, the parent can take the position, "Look, I can’t prove you’re wrong and you’re not going to prove that you are right, I just want you to know I don’t believe you." That’s powerful stuff. It’s again the definition of one’s own self and if on the other hand you are counting souls you’re saving, you can’t do this. Because one of the problems with this approach is you will never know if it really worked. But boy will you feel better.

Question: Going back to what you were saying about the necessity of vision. When I became the rector of a church sixteen years ago, I preached a sermon "I Have a Dream." Would you say something about the necessity of imagination and vision. Answer: I don’t know if imagination is simply a genetic factor, something to do with genius. I think imagination has something to do with perspective but I think imagination also has something to do with one’s freedom from being all fused and hooked into all the tar babies that we live with all the time. Imagination, the imaginative capacity has something to do with our differentiation as a hunk of protoplasm. And that the more we can define ourselves, even in our thinking, I think the more capacity there is for that. But you know, you’ve touched on a really crucial issue, which is: It’s far easier to keep thinking about what’s good for others than to keep trying to work through the major issues of life. I would like you to know that I would make this same talk to a group of business leaders. I’m going to make it to a group of army officers in Europe in the Spring. I would say the exact same thing about leadership in any kind of organic system made up of protoplasm.

Question: Sometimes I feel you are overly optimistic about our capacity to treat one another as adults. I am just concerned that we’re all involved in pathological systems because we get something out of them. At the moment of crisis, how are we going to distinguish what the payoff is for us and why we are buying into the system and what’s really good for all the people. Answer: If I hear the question right, how do you keep your own objectivity about what’s happening, right? Well, this is almost the point where if I had more time I would put in a commercial for working on self-differentiation in your own family of origin. I believe one of the things that people can do that really helps support objectivity in contemporary relationships is understanding their position in their family at large. I don’t have nearly enough time. That’s a whole other week to go into that. To the extent that people work at differentiation in their families of origin, it just automatically carries over and they become more imaginative about all of the other things that they do. That’s one part of it. The other part that I’m trying to convey is: I think most of the things that we get anxious about we don’t have to be so anxious about. And that if we learn to regulate our own reactivity to the reactivity of others and stop resonating to it, you will see that their resonance eventually calms down. Here’s another way of putting it. To the extent that you work at your own differentiation, it’s easier to keep clear the content from the process. To the extent that you can do that, that calms you down and makes you realize you had a false balm for the problem.

I once did a wedding for somebody that was a judo expert and I said to them, "You know you must feel really safe in the streets at night." And he said, "Well to tell you the truth, the average thug is so out of shape that all you have to do is spar with them for a little while and they quit and leave you." That is exactly what goes on in congregations. If you can learn just to out-spar them and not take it so seriously. When I was in my first year in Rabbinic school, I was influenced by this greatly, Erich Fromm was invited to my Rabbinic school to spend the week. And we have a meeting. The professor of human relations invited freshmen and other classmates to observe Fromm comment on a role playing situation in which one Rabbinic student played a Rabbi and one played the President of the synagogue. And the guy playing the President of the synagogue with absolute lust jumped on the guy playing the Rabbi. Told him everything he was doing wrong and so on and the guy playing the Rabbi tried to get defensive and tried to explain well, he needs time for his wife, he just can’t put in all this effort on everything. Fromm stopped it in the middle and looked at the guy playing the Rabbi and said, "What the hell is the matter with you? You represent five thousand years of tradition. Why are you letting this guy put you on the defensive?" I never forgot that. A few years ago I was back at that Rabbinic school, thirty years later making a presentation like I am today and afterwards the same professor of human relations was there taking me to the airplane and he says, "Do you remember when Fromm was here thirty years ago?" I said, "Absolutely." He said you were the first guy to do that since he was here. That’s where I’m coming from. The real source is in you.

Question: The group process school says anybody within any given system can exercise leadership behavior by popping up and doing something helpful for the group. A more autocratic approach, with say five thousand years of tradition behind you, says there are certain designated leaders like the Rector, the Rabbi, the Bishop, the parent. Where does self differentiated leadership stand? Answer: I think that is a major question. As I hear that question, on the one hand we are unique. On the other hand we shouldn’t allow that uniqueness to trap us into being the only leader in the system or the one that bears the entire burden. I’m thinking off the top of my head as you speak. The first notion, what I was addressing was the ongoing functioning of the head, and I’m starting to think organically as I respond. There are things that the head can’t do, which only the heart can do, which only the kidney can do, which only the lungs can do. So the head shouldn’t do their job for them, but the kidneys, lungs, and all the other parts of the body will find it easier to do their job when the head is doing its job. I think the same thing carries over into a congregation. The most common complaint of clergy is that they have to do all the work and yet it’s a trap to do all that work and assume that the place can’t function without you. When, I believe, the minister functions in the well differentiated way, that maximizes the possibility of the other components starting to contribute. Are there institutions where it wouldn’t happen? There probably are, in which case, get out. You’re fighting something much bigger than both of you. I guess I think the following is fair to say. It’s circular reasoning to some extent and becomes self serving in terms of everything I have presented to say this, but I think the following is true. If you’re functioning in a well differentiated way and it’s not having the effect I’m suggesting it should have, then you’re dealing with demons in the system, you’re dealing with stuff that goes back generations and not something you can simply overcome by your functioning. The system has to go through some kind of major shift.

Question: You referred previously to head transplants. Most of us are in a position where we do move from congregation to congregation. Answer: I do make a biological analogy in Chapter 10 of my book in which I say: When you come fresh into an established organization, you are a transplant and you must give it time for the graft to become accepted. Sometimes it’s only in the transition period that you can get the most change. But I think, and my advice to all people, all clergy, all people moving into a new situation, is to take a year to become an integrated part of the organization. The head has to get connected before it can expect the body to follow.

There is so much more in this that I don’t know where to begin and we’ve gone almost two hours, but let me end on another way of doing it because we’ve gotten pretty late. It has to do with the effect of the relationship system on people’s heads. I have for the last four years been the facilitator, not the enabler, the facilitator of a group of ten rectors. In other words there are ten rectors in the Washington area who have had their own group for many years and for about four years, I have had some professional part of it. I came on board about four years ago. And I said something to them at the beginning and I have since repeated it over and over again. These ten are now a different ten. They have said that it was one of the most helpful things I’ve ever said to them. Which was, "If you want to get your programs through during a vestry meeting you must take care to remain part of the group between vestry meetings." By that I don’t mean politics, but if I were going back into the active ministry today, I would make sure to have one or two personal contacts with every member of my board of trustees in between the board of trustees meetings. Taking care of being connected to them will do the most to get them behind me. And it’s not just that it’s manipulation, it’s that it cuts down the sabotage.

And I will end with this story about where I saw this happen. A member of the faculty of the University of Michigan decided to run for Congress. He was a Democrat, liberal, urban, and Jewish, and he ran and won in a Republican white Protestant agricultural community. He came to Washington and spent most of his time concerned with a committee concerned with African relationships. I mean you couldn’t have more value conflict or difference. After two years he was reelected. I think he has been reelected three times now. On the other hand, there was a white Protestant Republican Christian from an agricultural background who had identical values of an adjoining constituency, but was defeated around the same time of the first election. The reason was, I think, that the Jewish internationalist went home almost every weekend or every other weekend and stumped his community and he made sure the people on his staff responded quickly to the individual needs of the people. If they couldn’t solve the problems, they at least showed they responded to them. And here it was on a much bigger system than a church. The guy that took care to show his presence was tolerated in his differences. A powerful message! Let’s stop for the evening. (Applause)