Edwin Friedman has been a gift to me, with insights about how rela
tionships, families, and church families function. I’m just now reading A Failure of Nerve, his last book. Friedman didn’t complete the book before he died, but the manuscript he left behind is powerful.
The failure of nerve is leaders ability to know themselves well enough to challenge their organizations to rise above mediocrity.
The power-thought from the book I’m processing now is Friedman’s assertion that leaders will always encounter resistance from inside their family/church/organization. Sabotage, he writes, cannot “be avoided or wished away; instead it comes with the territory of leading.”
As an educator of leaders I ask “How do we train new leaders for encountering sabotage?”