Power, Love and Leadership
What is the shape of leadership in a family system that endures for generations? There is a quote I use in my work that I have cited in other blog posts. One could spend a lifetime mulling this one quote in the context of family work and not exhaust its meanings and implications. It goes like this:
Power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” 1967
As student of the German theologian Paul Tillich (who wrote a seminal book entitled Power, Love and Justice), King had a very specific set of meanings in mind when he used the terms “love,” “power,” and “justice.” Love, to King, meant the innate drive in human beings (individually and collectively) to be connected with one another. Love drives us to engage in authentic relationships. Power for King was the drive to actualize the self – to gain autonomy and freedom. Power leads us to carve out our +unique place in the world. These drives create an apparent paradox of estrangement and reunion; a dynamic polarity in all of and between all of us. We are irreducibly independent, yet most of us also long to be understood and accepted – to have a place within and among humankind. It is the drive to differentiate that causes the distance or estrangement that love resolves in re-union in the ebbs and flows of personal and collective life. Power and love are as entangled as quantum particles – they give rise to each other much like the ancient taijitu (yin-yang) symbol of Taoist philosophy. They are intimately related and deeply interconnected.
In some situations, the relationship between power and love is not in dynamic motion but become polarized or over-weighted and, therefore, “unhealthy.” Power becomes reckless and abusive, and love becomes sentimental and anemic. In wealthy families, the separation into unhealthy love and power can show up in individuals – the hard-edged business magnate who indulges every whim of the children. Or it can show up in marriages – the powerful, competent executive and the subservient, naïve spouse. And the bifurcation or failure to integrate the drives for power and love shows up in generational patterns where siblings struggle to find ease between the expectations of meaningful connection and purposeful autonomy in their relationships with their parents and siblings.
It seems as night follows day; wherever power and love are in play, there is anxiety. The tension between these psychological, familial, and cultural forces of autonomy and belonging creates real stress within family systems. These tensions find expression in the individual psyches of the family members as anxiety. The anxiety does not so much belong to the individuals as the individuals become the conduits of its expression as part of the cultural field created by the family. In this way, anxieties move through family systems in waves and eddies and undercurrents of emotional energy. The responses to anxiety are well-understood: as human beings, when we become anxious or threatened, we fight (overtly or covertly), we flee (denial or withdrawal), we freeze (become stuck), we flock (create alliances or find comfort), and we fix (we start flailing about to resolve the ostensible issue). These responses erode most families. It is simply too uncomfortable to remain permanently stuck in situations of such ungrounded anxiety. Most families fracture under this pressure – some dramatically, but many more do so very quietly – there are holidays that are mercifully short but without much authentic closeness. “Obligcations” we call them, where we take some hard won vacation time and do our filial and familial duties. We spend less time together, and our communication becomes ritualized and safe. The great enemy to most families is not open conflict; it is unaddressed drift.
Another Way
Yet some families manage to find another way. In these family cultures, there arises something more powerful than the pedestrian dynamics of power and love. This force can not only “contain” the dynamic energies of power and love, but harnesses them to greater purpose and meaning. In King’s quote, he speaks of this on a societal level as “justice.” Realistically justice is probably about as close as society will get to the reconciliation of power and love. But in families, “justice” is merely a baseline – a starting point. There must be justice, but there must also be more to create cross-generational sustainability. Justice is always necessary but rarely sufficient. For businesses to endure and families to cohere for generations, they need more than the simple fairness of distributive and transactional justice. And it is in this evolution beyond mere justice where effective family leadership emerges.
There are many types of leadership. Most of us think of leaders as standing in front and leading the charge. They may be iconoclasts or inspirationalists. They may be authoritarian and rest their leadership on the exercise of raw power or rely on positions within hierarchies. Or they may be charismatic and lead by dint of personal will. But almost all of these “leaders from the front” move in a direction they set and people follow.
There is another kind of leadership that has emerged in the last few decades that involves “leading from behind.” In its less healthy forms, this leadership from behind looks like manipulation and backroom deals. In its healthier forms, these leaders empower their people to become their best selves. They are leaders who believe deeply in egalitarianism, in serving their people, and in serving the institutional or social imperatives that are at the heart of their leadership concern. More and more institutions are moving to this form of leadership as our world becomes increasingly complex and post-modern. The old hierarchical structures are not agile enough to be effective in a world as kinetic, diverse, and complex as the one we face.
But there is another path to leadership that has gotten very little attention.
A Third Path
For this third path, we will turn again to Martin Luther King. In arguably the most influential speech of a century filled with exceptional oratory by great leaders, Martin Luther King declared, “I have a dream….” It is important to note that he did not say “I have a vision” or “I have a five-point plan” or “I have a mission statement” or “I have a manifesto” or “I have a set of values I want to pass on to you.” Instead, he vividly articulated a picture of a better future that delivered on the promises of a society founded on deeply humane principles – a future imbued with moral purpose and meaning.
Interestingly, his speech was not so much visionary – but it was a pitch-perfect articulation of what was already in the hearts and minds of his listeners. He said nothing that was not already known to them – but he so perfectly held up a mirror to their own souls and framed their hopes and dreams with such passion and power – and with such simplicity – that he electrified and galvanized their will to act. He was not articulating his personal dream (though he framed it that way) so much as he was personalizing to himself the dream of the people he was leading. I would suggest that this leadership is not so much from the front or from behind as it is leadership from the center.
John Paul Lederach (whose book Moral Imagination I wrote of here), suggests that in war torn countries, the move to lasting peace rarely comes from the top. Peace negotiations and the agreements of leaders fail more often as they succeed. They also do not arise from the grassroots – rarely can grassroots movements endure the slings and arrows of war and oppression. The people rarely rise up en masse and demand peace. In Lederach’s extensive experience, leadership most often unfurls from the middle. It is the patient but persistent emergence of local and regional leadership that brokers enduring peace. Lederach suggests that it is in this middle space that what he calls “moral imagination” takes root. From and to this middle space, King appealed as he articulated a dream that was already there in the hearts of his followers. This type of dream is not a vision or a purpose – it runs much deeper than that. It is an act of moral courage and creativity – it is the ability to be captured by the imaginal aspiration of a future that is large enough to engage and powerful enough to inspire.
It is this dream – a dream that already resides in the human heart for a better, more liberated world – that is strong enough to provide the container for the dynamics of power and love. In a society, this dream looks like justice. In a family, it looks like something more. It is the role of the family champion or the family leader to pay attention to what that dream is – not to declare it as a pronouncement, but to reveal it as a gift. In this model the moral imagination already exists – it simply needs to be unearthed, exposed and articulated. And that requires leadership not from the front or behind, but from the center.
I have often said in other places on this site that families are tribes. Tribes do not have typical org charts with managers and experts – they have councils. Families don’t do their work in lines; they work in circles. They work around tables and in teams, and by groups. The family leader sits at the center of circles – indeed many circles. Circles abound; sibling circles, cousin circles, parental circles, family council circles, ownership circles, governance circles, circles of committees and task forces, and so on. The family leader sits at the center of this cacophony and leads from the center. He or she listens to the quiet pulse of the family, listens to the conflicts, listens to the rhythms, and then moves in harmony with them. Most of all, the family leader holds up a mirror, and that mirror reflects to the family the dream they hold even if they have forgotten it – the dream of what it can be if it pursues the refection of its most noble aspirations individually and collectively. He or, more often she, articulates the dream that is resident at the center of all of this and in protecting and articulating that dream opens the family to a more deeply moral future.
When family leaders can do that – when they can articulate and become the keepers of the family’s moral dream – the family can find the intelligence and will to harness the twin drives for individuation and connection in ways that allow the family to endure. This often starts in the first generation when it finds its balance in the tension between power and love – a balance that is not reckless and abusive or sentimental and anemic. But the work requires the rising of leadership in that next generation. The family that endures begins to arise in the manifestation of those who take the role in the second and third generations of leading from the center – and take on that mantle with profound sensitivity to a dream that reflects a deeply moral view of the family in the world.
Understanding this role of leading from the center becomes a powerful tool in the development of family culture, and we contend that family culture makes all the difference in generational transitions.
— June 30, 2015