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You know your business needs to change, but you’re caught in the emotional and relational dynamics that are holding you back. Welcome to Noble Metal, the podcast that helps you forge a new kind of leadership. Host Phillip Weiss, a seasoned executive coach and organizational consultant, reveals how to become a more resilient, deliberate, and less-anxious leader.
Through powerful insights based on Bowen Theory and systems thinking, you’ll learn to navigate complex workplace relationships, manage challenging strategic issues, and lead your team to sustainable change. Get the clarity and tools you need to forge a new path for your business.
Ep13
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[00:00:00]
Reading the Room
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Phillip: So picture a room. There are 12 people seated around a conference table. The quarterly numbers just came in, and they are not good. CEO is at the head of the table, and she hasn't said anything yet, and the room is waiting. They're not waiting for a strategy. They're not waiting for a PowerPoint. They are waiting to read her.
They're waiting to feel which way the wind is blowing. Waiting to [00:01:00] know, is it safe to speak up? Is she gonna blame somebody? Is she gonna pretend this isn't happening? Is she gonna hold her ground or collapse under the pressure? They're not doing this consciously. They don't even really know they're doing it, but they are because that's what systems do.
Steady Leader Example
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Phillip: Now, picture the same room, same numbers, but a different leader. This one takes a slow breath. She makes eye contact around the table, unhurried, genuinely curious, and she says something like, this is hard news. I want to hear how every- everybody's thinking about this. Let's start there." So the room exhales, breathes a little bit, not because the problem is solved, and not because really that she said anything particularly brilliant, but they, they're breathing because she stayed steady and honest and connected and kind of realistic.
She didn't [00:02:00] panic, she didn't perform, she... and she didn't disappear. She was present, and to use sort of family system speak, she was defined. Calm in a way that wasn't indifference but was something harder, in some ways, something harder than indifference to achieve.
Noble Metal Leadership
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Phillip: I want to be clear here as we get into today's topic.
I'm not simply talking about being calm, being chill, and never flustered. , There are actually meds for that. And neither am I saying that we should never get angry or express emotion. There are times for that. What I'm talking about, though, is a quality, a grounding that is behind the sort of steadiness that I described.
It's a solidity. It's a noble metal-like quality that doesn't corrode and that doesn't corrupt its environments. That's what this episode's about. And I want to [00:03:00] consider today that this concept might be one of the most under-examined and undervalued dimensions of leadership This isn't a skill, it's not a style, it's not a technique that you can acquire at a weekend retreat.
It is, in the deepest sense, it's a matter of self. It's a matter of who you are. Murray Bowen, to an extent, spent his life helping us understand exactly what this might mean. So I ask, how might Bowen theory inform our definition of leadership? I think it's important that each person thinks this through for him or herself.
How do you define leadership for yourself? So today, I want to add a dimension to that. I want to bring home a key point here that maybe that leadership is not a technique or a process, but it's the leader or let's even say the parent's own self that is the most [00:04:00] powerful leadership tool you have.
Bowen Systems Lens
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Phillip: So as a refresher, Murray Bowen was a psychiatrist.
He was a serious, rigorous, and sometimes contrarian figure working in the middle of the twentieth century. Started out right after World War II at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, and then on to the NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, where he conducted his famous observations, which was the basis for the theory, and finally to Georgetown University.
And he was practicing at a time when psychiatry was almost entirely focused on the individual, and I would say that's still pretty much true today. Bowen challenged the Freudian perspective and said, basically what he said is, "You've got the unit of st- the unit of study or analysis wrong." Es- essentially, he was saying you can't understand a person's behavior.
You can't really truly understand it without understanding the larger emotional system that the person is embedded in, [00:05:00] and that's the, the, the family, the group, the congregation, the organization. Because here's what Bowen observed. We are not as individual and independent as we think we are. There's a force he called the togetherness force, and we talked about this before.
It's a deep, even biological pull toward connection, belonging, conformity, group membership. We want to belong. And it's not pathological, and it's, it's not weakness. It, it's actually really an-ancient. It's what keeps us alive or kept our ancestors alive on the savanna, and it's what makes a family a family and a team a team.
Anxiety Spreads
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Phillip: But this togetherness force has a shadow side for us, especially as leaders The system will always try to pull you into its own emotional logic, and it will do it invisibly, automatically, and with tremendous, tremendous [00:06:00] force. Here's how it might work, actually. A system experiences anxiety, a threat, a loss, a conflict, something, an uncertainty.
That anxiety doesn't stay in one person. It moves. It spreads. It spreads through the network of relationships, almost like a contagion. Person A gets anxious, pulls in or triangles in person B. Person B reacts to person C. C avoids D. D starts over-functioning. The system starts to reorganize around this anxious moment, if you will.
And the leader, who's the most emotionally significant person in the system, and that's key. I could spend a whole podcast beyond on that. But this leader becomes the primary conductor of this anxiety, for better or worse. So when the leader's reactive and when she absorbs the anxiety and amplifies it or collapses under it or [00:07:00] manages it through trying to control others, the system starts to destabilize.
But when the leader's regulated, or the parent, when she can absorb anxiety without being taken over by it, then the system has the potential of settling more. I'm going to ask you to sit with that for a moment because to some extent, it really, it's, it's kind of a radical claim.
It means that leadership is not necessarily about strategy or vision or communication style. And those things are all critical, and we, we will be getting to those as we go. But as we lay kind of this foundation in family systems theory, at the level that Bowen's talking about, leadership is actually more of an emotional phenomena.
It's about what happens to some extent in the nervous system of the person in charge or at the front of the room and how that propagates outward through every relationship in the organization.
Crucible of Pressure
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Phillip: Let me just tell [00:08:00] you, most leadership training or education doesn't touch on this. I've never even really seen it in HBR. I mean, really, I, , I haven't seen anything speaking to this specifically in our k-key publications. Those theories are speaking more to what it is you do.
Bowen theory is going deeper. It's asking, who are you? And more specifically, who are you when the pressure is on? It's fairly easy to kind of be reasonably calm when, you know, the anxiety is low. But as soon as the heat goes up, that is in, in a sense, that's a crucible where we're, where we're proven.
Family Business Case
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Phillip: So let me tell you about a family.
, A father built a business from nothing, in this case, a hardware distribution business. Started in his garage, spent thirty years making it something real. Eventually three locations, sixty employees, and he really was building a legacy. also built his [00:09:00] family the same way he built his business, through force of will.
His, his own anxiousness, I would say, in some measure, drove him. When things were uncertain, he got tight, he got controlling. He made decisions before anybody else could, you know, get things wrong. Now, of course, he loved his family deeply. He also made it somewhat difficult for people to breathe, in a sense, inside of his orbit.
And so you can imagine the intensity. You've got not only a family, but you've got a family business. So, it just amplifies all of this. So his youngest son, Marcus, came into the business about in his late twenties. Really smart guy, had ideas, had, , ambitions in a way, legitimate, and also had his father's own patterns kind of without knowing it, really.
So Marcus and his dad had a ritual. Every week, a meeting that was supposed to be s- strategy session usually became, within ten to fifteen minutes, a version of the same argument they'd been [00:10:00] having for years. The dad pushed, Marcus reacted. One of them would cave, usually Marcus. The other would feel guilty for kind of winning, more or less, and then they'd do it again the following week.
Kind of a, just a, a pattern.
Marcus Gets Defined
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Phillip: Along the way, somebody introduced Marcus to Bowen theory, not as a leadership tool really initially, but just as a way of understanding his own family and dynamics. And as he began to read and explore and kind of soak, in a way, in these concepts, he realized that he had been spending enormous energy trying to change his dad.
And as I like to say, and I think I might have said it on the last episode, breaking news, we cannot change other people. But Marcus was trying. He was trying to convince his dad, trying to con-- win arguments, trying to make his father less anxious so that Marcus himself could feel less anxious. In a sense, I think I would say he was managing his own anxiety by trying to manage his dad's.
[00:11:00] And, and ultimately, I think we're learning that that really doesn't work. And Bowen theory is very clear about this. You cannot regulate someone else's emotional system by sheer force of will. The only thing we have a shot at is regulating ourselves, and even that, I think we all know, is tough to do. So Marcus, in this case, started doing something different.
He stopped trying to win. He stopped caving, so taking some stands, if you will, principled stands. He stopped trying to manage his dad. He started showing up at those weekly meetings more true to... what I would say, true to himself, with his own clear position, his own read on the business, his own values about where things should go.
And he stayed in the room. He stayed in the relationship, not attacking, not withdrawing, but he was present, he was steady, and I would say he was more defined. So the first time he [00:12:00] did this, as you might imagine, his father kind of escalated in a way. He pushed harder because the system was used to a certain equilibrium.
And Marcus was disrupting that. The system was trying to pull him back. And that's exactly what Bro-Bowen theory would predict, that if Marcus holds his position, not rigid... Well, first of all, this theory would predict that there would be pushback, but it would also predict this: that if Marcus held his position, not rigidly, not combatively, but with genuine groundedness and ongoing connection, the system, in, in this case, specifically around his dad, would eventually reorganize around an equilibrium, a more healthy one.
And that's exactly what happened. It took about eight months. Marcus didn't change his dad. He changed himself. So as I might say here, you can't successfully react your way out of an anxious system But you can lead your way [00:13:00] through it in a, in a sense, from the inside of ourselves. I like to say, we like to say in our organization, it's about leading yourself first.
Before I really get serious about motivating and inspiring others, I have got to take responsibility about managing or leading the one and only person that I really can control, and that's myself.
Differentiation Explained
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Phillip: So it bodes this question again of what is differentiation of self? At least to me, it brings up that question here 'cause that's what we're talking about.
I, I know I've been beating this drum, but it, it is the main drum in the theory, and it's worth, I think, solid emphasis here as we talk about defining leadership. So Ed Friedman, I've mentioned him before, Failure of Nerve, one of his more famous books on leadership, was a rabbi, a family therapist, and probably, in my opinion, one of the best thinkers on leadership in the last century.
He took Bowen's [00:14:00] ideas and applied them specifically kind of beyond family. Yes, family, but also into organizations, congregations, and, and other communities. I want to be precise here because I think it matters. The concept at the center of all this, this differentiation of self, belongs to Murray Bowen.
It was his original formulation. Bowen saw it as the fundamental variable in human functioning. Friedman took that concept and showed it what it looks like in the leadership context of an organization or congregation. And Friedman spoke, I think, very articulately about the leader's level of differentiation.
Not their strategy, not their personal charisma, not their credentials. It's that presence that is the primary driver of whether a system or organization is healthy or chronically anxious. That's the thread that connects these two men. It's the thread that runs through what we're talking about today.
So this differentiation of self or stated maybe more practically, that ability to [00:15:00] define yourself in an anxious system while still staying in contact with it. I wanna note there are times, yes, when we have to step away from the anxiety in the system. We might need to move away from somebody that's hard.
But there's this ultimate kind of eye toward, if at all possible, staying connected.
So one of the ways that this is done, as we think about it more Is by knowing what you believe and being able to hold to it when the pressure to abandon it is very intense. This idea of being clear about our own values, our own what we sometimes call operating principles. It means being able to say I when the system wants you to say we.
Not because you don't value the group, but because you will not submerge your own thinking into the group's emotional dynamic in a way. It means being willing to take a position, a real one, not a hedged [00:16:00] one, even when that position maybe makes people uncomfortable. And that's hard, let's be honest.
That is hard to do. It might even make people angry. It might even cost you something. It means being able to state what you will and won't do, not as a power move, but as a genuine expression of your values. And I would say also that, that that's a position of humility. It means doing all of this while remaining in genuine relationship with those around you, not cutting off, not withdrawing, not distancing, not refusing to answer the phone or respond to texts.
But staying present, separate but connected. And it's that last part where most people fail because it's relatively easy to define yourself in isolation. It's really hard to hold your definition of self while staying though in contact when the, when the system's pressing you to do, do otherwise.
Friedman on Presence
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Phillip: As we continue this line of thought or kind of [00:17:00] conclude this line of thought around differentiation, I actually want to quote from Freedhim's-- , Friedman himself, and hear in his own words what he has to say more about a differentiated leader.
So I quote, " First of all, they focus on their own integrity and on the nature of their own presence rather than techniques for manipulating or motivating others. A more differentiated leader is someone who has the clarity about his or her own life goals, and therefore is somebody who's less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes that are swirling around.
They're also someone who can be separate while ~staying-- while still remaining connected," and we've emphasized this a lot, "still~ remaining connected, and therefore be a less anxious and sometimes challenging presence. They're someone who can manage their-- his or her own reactivity in regard to the automatic reactivity of others, and therefore able to take stands at the risk of displeasing."
Friedman [00:18:00] concludes by saying, "It's not as though some leaders can do this and some can't. No one," he says, "does this easily, and most leaders," he says, "I have learned, can improve their capacity." This differentiation of self is something that we can learn.
Costs of Reactivity
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Phillip: So I want to pause here and ask a question that I think deserves a, a fairly direct answer , which is what happens to a leader or a parent who never really engages this larger sort of systems lens of being differentiated in the middle of a, of a powerful system?
What happens to someone who leads entirely by instinct, by, by technique, by personality, and never really looks seriously at their own emotional functioning within the system? A few things I think might, might possibly crop up, and none of them is really dramatic at first, and that's actually [00:19:00] part of what makes this so easy, I think, to miss.
But I, I wonder about the first thing that might happen, is that the leader gets managed by the system's anxiety rather than leading through the anxiety. Every spike in tension produces a reaction. Every complaint becomes a crisis. Every conflict requires intervention in a sense. They're always putting out fires because an undifferentiated leader, big word, is, without knowing it part of what keeps kind of starting the fires.
And Bowen was really quite specific about this. A leader with a low level of differentiation doesn't fail-- doesn't really just fail to calm the system. They actually become a source of anxiety themselves. Their own reactivity ripples outward and gives the system, in a sense, permission to continue being reactive.
The second thing that might happen is subtler and in some ways more [00:20:00] damaging. Leader starts making decisions from a, a, a point of anxiety or anxiousness rather than from conviction. Think about what this might look like in practice. A leader avoids a tough conversation, not because it isn't needed, but because the discomfort of the system's disapproval is just too much.
Or the leader reverses a good decision after enough pushback.
And they did so not because new information changed the picture, but because the pressure on the system overwhelmed them so much, kind of overwhelmed, in a sense, their capacity to hold a position.
Every one of those moves feels justified in the moment. Every one of them is underneath, though, I wonder, anxiety in a leadership costume, really. The third thing that might happen, and this is the one that tends to catch leaders most off guard, really, is that the people around them stop growing.
Whether you're a distancing conflict avoider or an aggressive [00:21:00] micromanager over-functioner, people around you don't develop much in those environments. I mean, and think about it. Why would they? If they're being basically ignored, , if their performance or need for correction is being ignored, essentially, and they're not being coached, or if they're being told what to do, in both cases, the leader's not giving them the opportunity to think for themselves.
When a leader is undifferentiated, the system unconsciously organizes to manage the leader's emotional state. People learn to bring only the news that the leader can take or tolerate. They learn which topics to avoid. They learn to read the leader's mood before they decide whether they're gonna speak They begin optimizing not for what needs to be done out of conviction, but for comfort.
They're optimizing, they're organizing around comfort. And it creates what Friedman calls a stuck [00:22:00] system. The energy that should be going towards getting the work done and toward ma-- is instead going toward managing the anxiety of the moment and of the leader.
None of this necessarily means that leaders are bad people. They're almost always well-intentioned, often gifted in very real ways, and frequently working really hard. And the problem isn't effort or intelligence or even character in some cases. The problem is that they've never been given a framework in some measure for understanding what's actually going on in this larger emotional leadership field around them.
In my opinion, this is where Bowen theory can be-- is just really helpful. It's not a new set of techniques to deploy, but it's a way really of seeing. It's that lens that I like to speak about. It's, it's a way of seeing clearly, honestly, as objectively as possible, as least reactive as possible, seeing what's happening [00:23:00] in and around the leader in real time.
Healthcare Turnaround
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Phillip: So I wanna share a corporate story with you as we move toward a wrap here. A senior vice president of regional healthcare system, I'll call him Drew, was brought in to lead a division that had been pretty much in conflict for two solid years. Chronic turnover, two factions of the medical staff who practically were not speaking to each other, a culture of blame and complaint.
Drew had good instincts. He came in, he did his listening tour, smart move, you know, worked to build bridges. Six months in, things were a little better, ' cause you had a, a pretty level-headed guy here, but the factions were still there, and he was starting to get tired from holding things together. Finally, a, a mentor coach asked him a pointed question, " Who are you, Drew, in all of this?
Who are you in this system?" ~Drew looked at him, you know, kind of blankly and said, "You know, what do you mean?" "I~ mean, what do you actually believe about what this division should [00:24:00] be? Not what both sides want, not what's gonna smooth things over and keep the calm, but what do you think? Where are you going with this?"
And Drew realized sitting there that he'd been so focused on managing the conflict between these factions that he ever-- never really actually planted his own flag. He'd been mediating. He hadn't really been leading in this case. He'd been so anxious in a sense about the system's anxiety that he kind of disappeared into the role of peacemaker.
And there's a term for that actually in kind of in Bowen circles and Friedman circles, I think too, this idea of being a peace agree leader. And in doing so, he'd left a leadership vacuum that the system filled with more conflict. So Drew actually went away. Something I like to do. He, he spent a weekend thinking, "I, I do some of my best work alone in those moment sort of scenic locations."
And he came back with something. [00:25:00] He called a meeting, key leaders from both sides of the equation, and he spoke plainly, not angrily, but strongly and clearly. Said something to this effect, "I want to tell you what I believe about what we're doing here and what I think we need to do-- where we need to go."
And he did for about 10 minutes. Very specific. He named what was working with-- and without blaming anybody, and he named what wasn't working without blaming anybody, and he said what he was going to start prioritizing, and he said what he was not going to do. Then as more or less in conclusion, he, he stated, "I'm not asking for a vote.
I'm asking for your honest engagement. I want you to know what I think, and I want us to do this together, and this is the direction I want to go." As you can expect and predict, there were absolutely people that were upset. There were some that were pleased. One of the leaders of the factions came to his office the next day with a-- very hot, very [00:26:00] bothered.
Drew listened. He was genuinely curious, didn't get defensive Essentially said, "I hear you. Tell me more about why this lands this way for you." And he meant it. But he held his position. Not because he was stubborn, but because he thought it through and believed in the direction he was heading.
The turnover eventually stopped. Not immediately, but it did stop.
Drew didn't fix this, in a sense, by managing it. He entered the system as a self, and that was enough in a way to kind of begin to change th-the field, the emotional field of that system.
Fire and Foundation
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Phillip: Before I close, I want to make a dis-- a distinction here that I think is important. Everything we've talked about today, this less anxious presence, the self-definition, the capacity to hold positions while staying in relationship, this is leadership for the long haul, and it's hard work.
And, and I'll, I'll use the word sometimes [00:27:00] journey. It is a journey. This is the work of building something that lasts, a culture, a family, et cetera. But it's not necessarily all there is to say about this massive, massive topic of leadership. There are moments when what is needed is fire. There are moments when urgency, inspiration, classic, what we would call motivation, are needed.
So, for example, when a coach is down by two points with four minutes to go, the locker room probably doesn't need a Bowen theory seminar. It needs someone who can cut through the noise and ignite something. When a team has just survived a crisis and needs to feel the win, a leader should be celebrating with real joy and real heat.
Emotional intensity has its place. Motivation of that sort has its place. But I would say ultimately that without the foundation, without that s-- more solid self, there's a degree to which those tactics can become [00:28:00] noise. Honestly, the best leaders I've encountered or studied or read about, I'm a history buff, I love learning about leaders from the past, they knew when to turn the heat up. They know when to have those emotional moments And they had a bedrock of self that could not easily be rocked.
This bedrock, this noble metal, is what Bowen is talking about. And it's interesting that in a culture that's obsessed with charisma and technique and personality, this bedrock is one of the things we talk about the least.
Closing Questions
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Phillip: So I want to leave you with a few questions. First of all, think about the systems where you lead, whether it's at work or in l- life, in the family or other organizations. When anxiety starts to move in through the system, when a threat appears, a conflict erupts, what happens to you?
Do you get pulled? Do you react before you think? Do you find [00:29:00] yourself managing others in order to manage your own discomfort? Maybe you disappear. Or maybe do you over-function? Or do you fight?
I encourage you, as you consider these key relationships, to ask these questions, I'm gonna ask you to think about two people, one professional, one personal. Who am I with each of these people? What does my presence look like when I'm with them? And finally, what might greater differentiation from me look like as I engage with them going forward?
Lots to think about here.
Thanks and Farewell
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Phillip: Thank you for being here today. Thank you for listening and thinking with me on Noble Metal, and I will see you next time