Leadership Quote by Edwin H. Friedman

““The more my perspective broadened, the more confirmed I became in my view that contemporary leadership dilemmas have less to do with the specificity of given problems, the nature of a particular technique, or the makeup of a given group than with the way everyone is framing the issues. In addition, I began to realize that this similarity in thinking processes had to do with regressive (in the sense of counter-evolutionary) emotional processes that could be found everywhere. Nor did gender, race, or ethnicity seem to make a difference in the strength or the effects of these processes.””

Edwin H. Friedman

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Leadership

More by Edwin H. Friedman

“It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from nonprofit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation’s infrastructure is different from another’s,…

Edwin H. Friedman

“I will begin by describing the nature of an emotional regression and showing how in any society, no matter how advanced its state of technology, chronic anxiety can induce an approach to life that is counter-evolutionary. One does not need dictators in order to create a totalitarian (that, is totalistic) society. Then, employing five characteristics of chronically anxious personal families,…

Edwin H. Friedman

“By the term regression I mean to convey something far more profound than a mere loss of progress. Societal regression is about the perversion of progress into a counter-evolutionary mode. In a societal regression, evolutionary principles of life that have been basic to the development of our species become distorted, perverted, or actually reversed. Chief among those evolutionary principles are:…

Edwin H. Friedman

“The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely…

Edwin H. Friedman

“The focus on “need fulfillment” that so often accompanies an emphasis on empathy leaves out the possibility that what another may really “need” (in order to become more responsible) is not to have their needs fulfilled. Indeed, it is not even clear that feeling for others is a more caring stance (or even a more ethical stance) than challenging them…

Edwin H. Friedman

“Although the social science construction of reality tends to emphasize how families differ from one another, I began to see that knowledge of what they have in common could be more important, as a basis both for promoting change and for enabling leaders and consultants to recognize the universal elements of emotional processes found in all institutions as well as…

Edwin H. Friedman

“It was then, after my presentations to thirty-two generals, that I first began to see how similar the approach to leadership problems was throughout our civilization. After two days of presentations, a three-star general, the commander of an entire Army corps—two panzer divisions—stood up and said to me, “You know, one of our problems is that the sergeant-majors coddle the…

Edwin H. Friedman

“Those five characteristics are: 1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another. 2. Herding: a…

Edwin H. Friedman

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“Chronic anxiety is systemic; it is deeper and more embracing than community nervousness. Rather than something that resides within the psyche of each one,…

Edwin H. Friedman

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“the extent we function and grow within the context of our own souls (a lifetime project) and abet the emergence of our own selves…

Edwin H. Friedman

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“In 1970, an experiment was conducted in a French laboratory in which two organisms from the same species that had not developed immune systems…

Edwin H. Friedman

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“The second attribute of imaginatively gridlocked relationship systems is a continual search for new answers to old questions rather than an effort to reframe…

Edwin H. Friedman

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Explore all 23 Edwin H. Friedman quotes

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