We moderns don’t like uncertainty. It reminds us that we are not God. Over the centuries we’ve progressed from not naming children until they are 7 (in case they died and the name was wasted) to designer foetuses. But uncertainty is part of God’s process of bringing us to maturity. He blesses those willing to take risks for Him and His honour.

Andy Stanley highlights the benefits of uncertainty:

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away. Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership. It is the environment in which good leadership is most easily identified. The nature of leadership demands that there always be an element of uncertainty. Where there is no uncertainty, there is no longer a need for leadership. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for leadership. As Jim Kouzes puts it, “Uncertainty creates the necessary condition for leadership.”

It took me several years to figure this out. As a young leader I was tormented by the assumption that I should know what to do in every situation. If I were a good leader, I would reason, I would know exactly what to do. After all, I am the leader! Leaders should know. Leaders are supposed to be able to stand up at any given moment and give direction with absolute certainty. Or so I thought.

To make matters worse, increased responsibility means dealing with more intangibles and therefore more complex uncertainty… In the realm of the intangible, it takes longer to recognize your brilliance or your stupidity. When you make decisions in the realm of business philosophy, values, mission, and marketing, you are forced to lead for long periods of time without the benefit of knowing whether you are actually going in the right direction. By the time the crop starts coming in, it is too late to change your agricultural procedure. You have to wait until the next planting season.

Clarity

…Ulysses S. Grant was clear even when he was uncertain. He was clear even when he was wrong. The uncertainty of his circumstances did not cloud the clarity of his command. So it must be with you if you are to become a leader worth following.

As leaders we can afford to be uncertain, but we cannot afford to be unclear. People will follow you in spite of a few bad decisions. People will not follow you if you are unclear in your instruction, and you cannot hold them accountable to respond to muddled directives. Neither will they follow if you display a lack of confidence. I am not encouraging you to pretend to be something you are not or know something you don’t. Bu as a leader you must develop the elusive skill of leading confidently and purposefully onto uncertain terrain.

None of us want to be wrong, especially as leaders. But next generation leaders must fear a lack of clarity more than a lack of accuracy. You can be wrong and people will continue to follow. If you are unclear, however, they will eventually go somewhere else. You can survive being wrong. You cannot survive being unclear…

A Warning

The relationship between uncertainty and clarity often creates a potentially dangerous dynamic in the work environment. The individual in your organization who communicates the clearest vision will often be perceived as the leader. Clarity is perceived as leadership.

If you are at the helm of your organization, the application is clear. You must be clear if you are to retain your influence. It is not enough to be the boss You must be clear. Clarity results in influence.

If you are not the leader in your organization, there is another, more complex, application of this axiom: As you gain clarity, you gain influence. At some point your influence may be threatening to those above you who are empowered but not clear. Your clarity may be perceived as disloyalty or an attempt to impose your own agenda. if this dynamic develops, your best move it to take the initiative to assure those in authority that your intention is to further, not compete with, their vision for the organization…

Uncertainty is not your enemy. Uncertainty provides you with job security now and unimaginable opportunities in the future. But all of that hinges on your ability and willingness to press on in spite of your surroundings…

Vision vs. Plans

Clarity of vision will compensate for uncertainty in planning. If you are clear and confident about the destination, you can handle a few detours along the way. If you are unclear about the destination of the journey, even the most sophisticated, well-thought-through strategy is useless.

Chances are that you are more certain about your vision than you are about your plans. The arena of plans and decisions is where leaders face the greatest uncertainty. There wil always be an element of uncertainty as it relates to plans. That’s to be expected. Plans change; visions remain the same.

Clarity of vision translates into a greater willingness to lead purposefully into uncertain environments. A clear vision, one that has truly gripped out hearts, has the ability to push us through our uncertainty. When I am convinced something must be, I am willing to take chances…

As a next generation leader you will be forced to abandon your plans from time to time. Clarify your vision and embrace the uncertainty of your plans. Pencil in your plans. Write your vision in ink.

Andy Stanley, Next Generation Leader, Five Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future, pp. 79-98.

One more Friedman post. Rich Bledsoe commented that the Biblical Covenant structure is very apparent in Friedman’s writings. Here’s a few of Mr Friedman’s principles for understanding the nature of true and false leadership (I have left quite a few of them out, as they wouldn’t make sense without his elaboration). For the whole outline, you’ll just have to get the book.

1   Society

1. The characteristics of a chronically anxious family, organization, or society—reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, lack of well-differentiated leadership—will always be descriptive of a regressed institution.
2. When any institution, relationship, or society is imaginatively gridlocked, the underlying causes will always be emotional rather than cerebral.
3. All pathogenic (that is, destructive) organisms, forces, and institutions, whether we are considering viruses, malignant cells, chronically troubling individuals, or totalitarian nations, lack self-regulation and are therefore invasive by nature and cannot be expected to learn from their experience.
4. A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.

2   Relationships

1. It is easier to be the least mature member of a highly mature system than the most mature member of a very immature system.
2. Increasing one’s pain threshold for others helps them mature.
3. Stress and burnout are relational rather than quantitative, and are due primarily to getting caught in a responsible position for others and their problems. [MB: In other words, it's not your workload, but the emotional nature of the burden that burns you out.]
4. In any partnership, the more anxious you are to see that something is done, the less motivated your partner will be to take the lead.
5. In any stuck relationship between and overadequate member and an underadequate other (person or organization), the overfunctioner must change before the underfunctioner can change.
6. In any relationship anywhere, the partner doing the least amount of thinking about the other is the more attractive one to the other.

3   Self

1. Trauma lies in the self-organizing quality of the system and the response of the organism rather that in the event. In other words, the trauma is in the experience and the response to it, not in the event itself.
2. What is essential are stamina, resolve, remaining connected, the capacity for sef-regulation of reactivity, and having horizons beyond what one can actually see.
3. There is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.
4. Most of the decisions we make in life turn out to be right or wrong not because we were prescient, bu because of the way we function after we make the decision.

4   Leadership

1. Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.
2. Clearly-defined, non-anxious leadership promotes healthy differentiation throughout a system, while reactive, peace-at-all-costs, anxious leadership does the opposite.
3. Differentiation in a leader will inevitably trigger sabotage from the least well-differentiated others in the system.
4. The unmotivated are notoriously invulnerable to insight.
5. People cannot hear you unless they are moving toward you, which means that as long as you are in a pursuing or rescuing position, your message will never catch up, no matter how eloquently or repeatedly you articulate your ideas.
6. The children who work through the natural difficulties of growing up with the least amount of difficulty are those whose parents made them least important to their own salvation.

Everything you know about leadership is wrong.

The five-fold Covenant pattern is found throughout the Bible. Those who claim that Deuteronomy’s shape was borrowed from other Ancient Near East cultures need to explain how it could then be found not only in the Ten Commandments, but in the shape of every story going back to Genesis 1. Their theorizing is the result of their deluded, naturalistic worldview, and Christian scholars suck it right up.

Edwin Friedman’s observations on leadership training fit right in with the Transcendence/Hierarchy arrangement in the Covenant documents, and also the totus Christus revelation of the New Testament. If we believe the Bible is true, what else would be expect? We should have started with the Bible. It cracks our blind theories wide open.

Here’s Friedman:

I also saw something else regarding leadership and systemic emotional process that ultimately revolutionized my approach to leadership training. When creative, imaginative, self-starting members of an organization are being sabotaged rather than supported, the poorly differentiated person “at the top” does not have to be in direct contact with the person being undercut. In fact, neither even has to know that the other exists. What I began to appreciate from that moment on was the wide-ranging systemic power of leadership—specifically, that the functioning of leaders somehow affected the institution they lead on a far more fundamental level than could be accounted for by traditional psychological concepts that focus on the brain, such as role-modeling, emulation, identification, or personality profiles. Institutions, I was coming to see, could be conceptualized as emotional fields—environments of force that, for all their influence over people’s thinking processes, were, like magnetic fields or gravitational fields, largely invisible to the naked eye.

What made these systemic processes invisible was the fact that they could not be explained by the usual mechanistic models that emphasize flow charts, trickle-down concepts, and motivational techniques. It was not that such models were wrong, but rather that they were inadequate for understanding the organic nature of human colonization. Explaining families and institutions in terms of the nature of their parts, I began to think, was like trying to reduce chemistry to physics…

Relational processes in an institution, I included, cannot be reduced to psychodynamic or personality factors in the individuals of which they consist. A different level of inquiry was required that one that tries merely to understand “the minds” or personalities of the individuals involved.

What was needed to account for the connection between leader and follower, I was beginning to realize, was an approach that did not separate them into neat categories nor polarize them into opposite forces, nor even see them as completely discrete entities. Rather, 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, I came to realize, were intergenerational. Leadership in both families and organizations, I was beginning to see, was rooted in processes that could be found in all colonized life. After all, had not Nature seen to its being built into pods, prides, swarms, schools, flocks, and herds?

…Eventually, I found an uncanny parallel that enabled me to put leader and follower together conceptually in a systemic way. The parallel lies between the latest understanding of the connection between the brain and the body in a human organism, on the one hand, and the effects of a “head’s” functioning on a “body politic” in a human organization, on the other. For 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 have to revolutionize our concept of hierarchy. For 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 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-to-the-neck-bone” thinking. What counts is the leader’s presence and being, not technique and know-how…

My growing awareness of the universality of these systemic principles of leadership raise fundamental questions in my mind about the nature of most leadership training courses (including courses on parenting) that puts primary emphasis on others (children or employees) as objects to be motivated rather than on the systemic effects of the presence, or self, of the leader. [1]

When God makes a new Covenant, it always begins with the Preamble, the part where He announces Who He is. “I am the Lord your God.” God makes Himself distinct from His delegate/s. In this way, He can be present in all of them.

We see this numerous times throughout the Old Testament, but most importantly in the words of Christ.

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” (John 16:7)

As a leader, you must not be aloof. But you must be distinct. A veil, a firmament must be drawn between you and those you lead until you are ready to hand over the job. When the time for succession comes, the veil is torn and your successor sees you face to face. You speak your plans openly and call them your friend, as Jesus did with His disciples, and as God did with Abraham.

Friedman’s book presents ideas that contradict modern wisdom. They are revolutionary ideas to us, but they are ideas that are millennia old, and fully accessible in that dusty ancient book on your shelf.

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Art: Jerusalem Stone.

[1] Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, pp. 16-18. I’d love to share some more of Friedman’s scathing observations of modern “how-to” leadership strategies and our fixation with data. Better if you just get the book and read it for yourself.

.

Edwin H. Friedman writes:

“Living with crisis is a major part of leaders’ lives. The crises come in two major varieties: (1) those that are not of their own making but are imposed on them from outside or within the system; and (2) those that are actually triggered by the leaders through doing precisely what they should be doing.”

(A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, p. 27)

“Recall the phrase: ‘Poor planning on your part does not constitute a crisis on my part’.  The less mature are always attempting to enroll others in their disquiet, their ‘crisis du jour’. A perceived catastrophe on the part of certain members of the congregation does not constitute a calamity for a well-defined leader.”

“Edwin Friedman, in Generation to Generation defines a leader as a self-defined person with a non-anxious presence… A non-anxious presence does not mean carefree, laid-back, detached, disengaged.  It means an absence of anxiety.”

“As Friedman noted some 15 years ago, most of us are leading chronically anxious emotional dwarfs. In many denominational systems, the church has become one of the hideouts for the immature. Sad. We could be the most powerful, clear, selfless, and confident people on the planet.”

Read more.

(HT: Jon Amos)