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\u201cPhenomenal cosmic power.\u00a0 Itty bitty living Space.\u201d These were Genie\u2019s words to Aladdin as he described the give and take of being a Genie in a bottle.\u00a0 I thought of this line when reading our book this week.\u00a0 Simon Walker\u2019s book\u00a0 \u201cThe Undefended Leader\u201d promises to take the potential leader to the top of a mountain to reveal what it takes to lead as undefended leaders of the ilk of Ghandi, Winston Churchill, and Jesus.\u00a0 Walker\u2019s premise is that leadership is lived out of \u201cwho you are, not what you know or what skills you have\u201d (pg 5 ) rather than having it grow out of situations or behaviors.\u00a0 Friedman would agree that data and skills don\u2019t make the leader. He would counter how one leads through situations in their very behaviors define the leader; Friedman says that the leader who is self-differentiated models how leadership is lived within healthy systems. I think this distinction is important because it means leaders are not merely born; they develop out of intentional work on self-awareness and embodiment in praxis. Friedman and Walker\u2019s similar concept of healthy leadership includes self-awareness. Walker is more focused on the awareness of FOO (Family of Origin) development, while Friedman is focused on awareness of one\u2019s emotions and how to regulate one\u2019s response within the chronically anxious organization.\u00a0 Friedman and Walker agree that systems functioning out of a low threshold of pain are not capable of doing the undefended work.<\/p>\n
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Walker uses the phrase \u201cUndefended Leader\u201d as the lynch pin for a thriving leadership identity.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until I was halfway through the book that I understood what he meant by that distinction; Undefended means undefensive; being able to lead without rationalizing, being compelled to defend choices, or feeling a need to coerce or manipulate others to get one\u2019s way.<\/p>\n
Walker outlays a trinity of \u201cbad strategies\u201d leaders use poorly – when they are lacking self-awareness or efficiently \u2013 when they are tuned in to their selves.\u00a0 These strategies are the workings of the Front of stage and Back of Stage self, Power, and Control.\u00a0 The big takeaway from this section is a leader must engage this trinity of strategies for good not evil.<\/p>\n
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I appreciated Walker\u2019s unpacking of the psychology of the 4 types of Leadership Egos as it relates to dynamics of trust.\u00a0 If found myself enthralled because it helped me put some understanding around my daughter\u2019s anxiety and behavior. She has endured great worry that has impacted her decision making process as well as personal relationships.\u00a0 I\u2019ve spent many a sleepless night fretting over why she frames her world the way she does.\u00a0 Walker\u2019s unpacking of the Definer and Adapting Egos provided some important A\u2019Ha\u2019s.\u00a0 And still, I really struggled to embrace The Undefended Leader as a foundational resource for deepening leadership identity.\u00a0 Some of this struggle for me is due to the poignant echoes of A Failure of Nerve.\u00a0 My husband commented that I am now a Friedmanite. Although Walker makes his Christian background explicitly known and works to create theological space for his argument, I felt there was a disconnect between his statement of Jesus\u2019 intentional act of laying down power and ultimately his life in self-sacrifice, while making the argument throughout the book seems to fly in the face of these undefended leader actions.\u00a0 For Walker, it seems an undefended leader takes up his power, whether it is\u00a0 personality, resource, experience, expert, positional, or given and uses it (as long as it is for good). \u00a0Reading through these sections I couldn\u2019t help but think, \u201cYeah, but this isn\u2019t connected deeply to how Jesus lived as a leader.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another pushback for me is that Walker seems to support the use of coercion through guilt, shame, manipulation of social forces including belonging and acceptance by a leader to bring about behavioral change in a system\u2026which is very Augustinian.\u00a0 Augustine believed that the way to curtail humans inclination toward sinful behavior was through fear\/guilt\/shame.\u00a0 However Friedman might say that a leader using these tactics indicate the leader is not self-differentiated and is reacting to the anxiety of the system.\u00a0 And if we take Walker\u2019s statement that an organization is a reflection of the leader how different is the organization of the \u201cchild leader\u201d (pg127-128) than the organization lead by the undefended leader in Jesus?\u00a0 In all transparency, I finished Walker\u2019s book very discouraged in my leadership.\u00a0 Based on Walker\u2019s presumption, I would have to describe my leadership as one without influence, energy, direction, and imagination because the congregation I serve lacks passion for engagement in deeper community.\u00a0 But I struggle owning the church personality as a reflection of my leadership.\u00a0 Shawn Holtzclaw, speaker at our Advance, talked about being aware of our own DNA and differentiate that from the DNA of the organization we serve.\u00a0 Holtzclaw has a \u201cbalcony\u201d view while Walker has an \u201corchestra\u201d view. So the GIF I used illuminates my reactivity to this book; I came out swinging because I felt a need to defend my identity; I just keep swinging even when no one is there. \u00a0Walker would consider me the epitome of a defended leader.<\/p>\n
This book also made me wonder, what about the prophets of the Old Testament? How does their leadership fit into the constructs of the book? The shape of my call to ministry is prophetic in nature.\u00a0 It\u2019s what gets me into trouble.\u00a0 My leadership has been lived out of that identity.\u00a0 It\u2019s why \u201cA Failure of Nerve\u201d resonates with me, for Friedman seems to understand the risks involved in leading from that place amid anxious people. While Walker hints at the symptoms of a hostile environment he seems to have an oversimplified notion of the dynamics between leader and organization that neglect the prophetic leadership in which he frames his book. \u00a0Walker paints leadership as one with phenomenal cosmic power with itty bitty living space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cPhenomenal cosmic power.\u00a0 Itty bitty living Space.\u201d These were Genie\u2019s words to Aladdin as he described the give and take of being a Genie in a bottle.\u00a0 I thought of this line when reading our book this week.\u00a0 Simon Walker\u2019s book\u00a0 \u201cThe Undefended Leader\u201d promises to take the potential leader to the top of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2050,2049,2004,1718],"class_list":["post-27779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-friedmenite","tag-undefendedleadership","tag-lgp11","tag-walker","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27779"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27780,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27779\/revisions\/27780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}