Self-Differentiation: A Key to Healthy Leadership

This experience helped the pastor understand that people are fairly consistent in their responses to anxiety. It also helped the pastor to relieve himself of much unwarranted guilt. He was able—perhaps for the first time—to let go of guilt feelings and recognize that the situation had not been his fault. This awareness is a foundation for healthy leadership. Murray Bowen,¹ Edwin Friedman,² Peter Steinke,³ and others refer to this awareness as an important part of "self-differentiated leadership." Leaders who have the capacities for self-differentiated leadership are able to stay calm, especially in anxious times.

Congregational leaders desiring to transform anxious congregational patterns have found that teaching self-differentiation to the church’s leadership teams can be one of the most effective ways to begin transforming unhealthy congregational responses to anxiety. Under the direction of Richard Blackburn, the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center is one of the most prestigious organizations teaching this approach throughout the world. Its workshops and seminars provide a remarkable foundation for healthier, self-differentiated leadership.

Even as self-differentiated leadership is directed to the management of healthy emotions, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee describe in their book Primal Leadership: Realizing The Power of Emotional Intelligence how leadership is more about emotion than it is about strategy.

If a leader resonates energy and enthusiasm, an organization thrives; if a leader spreads negativity and dissonance, it flounders. This breakthrough concept charges leaders with driving emotions in the right direction to have a positive impact [in their organization].⁴

One of the most important keys to leadership, then, is the ability to not become emotionally entangled in a congregation’s anxious responses. This means leaders must understand the dramatic effect of emotionality and anxiety in organizational systems. This also requires that leaders be able to overcome their own anxious reactivity and stay the course even among the most highly anxious churches. Obviously, this is much easier said than done. The best leaders may find this difficult in the most anxious congregations, even over the short term.

1. Murray Bowen and Michael Kerr, Family Evaluation (New York: Norton Publications, 1988).


2. Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: Guilford Press, 1985).


3. Peter Steinke, How Your Church Family Works (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 1993).


4. Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (Boston: Harvard Press, 2002).