Name Edwin Friedman | ||
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Died 1996, Bethesda, Maryland, United States Books A Failure of Nerve, Friedman's fables, The Myth of the Shiksa and Other, What Are You Going to Do with, Generation to Generatio | ||
Edwin Howard Friedman (May 17, 1932 – October 31, 1996) was an ordained Jewish Rabbi, family therapist, and leadership consultant. He was born in New York City and worked for more than 35 years in the Washington DC area where he founded the Bethesda Jewish Congregation. His primary areas of work were in family therapy, congregational leadership (both Christian and Jewish), and leadership more generally.
Contents
Approach
Friedman's approach was primarily shaped by an understanding of family systems theory. His seminal work Generation to Generation, written for the leaders of religious congregations, focused on leaders developing three main areas of themselves:
Self-differentiation
Building on his work, Generation to Generation, Friedman's family and friends published A Failure of Nerve--leadership in the age of the quick fix finishing Friedman's work on his understanding of leaders as "self-differentiated or well-differentiated."
Friedman illustrates good “self-differentiated” leadership to that present in the great Renaissance explorers, where leaders had:
Two concepts are critical in Friedman’s model: self-knowledge and self-control. Friedman attacks what he calls the failure of nerve in leaders who are “highly anxious risk-avoiders,” more concerned with good feelings than with progress–one whose life revolves around the axis of consensus. By self-differentiation, the leader maintains his/her integrity (a non-anxious self as opposed to an anxious non-self) and thus promotes “the integrity or prevents the dis-integr-ation of the system he or she is leading."
In other places, Friedman argues that the well-differentiated leader: