Leading a Business in Anxious Times

Have you ever swum in the ocean where there is a strong undertow? You may not notice the powerful current until you find youself struggling to stay afloat. Organizational anxiety works the same way. Hidden from the surface, it can undermine your effectiveness during the challenging times that inevitably confront every organization. Leading a Business in Anxious Times looks at the workplace as an emotional system and introduces systems-based leadership, an approach to leading that is grounded in a well-tested theory of human behavior used for over fifty years by family therapists. The authors show that the same patterns of automatic behavior governing family relationship systems also affect business and have a profound impact on every business's success. This book invites individuals working at all levels of large and small businesses, nonprofits, and service organizations to embrace a new definition of leadership as a reciprocal relationship. Readers will learn how the ability to lead any type of business organization directly relates to the capacity of its leaders to manage their own anxiety in the relationship system - to think clearly and take thoughtful action in the presence of anxious colleagues in order to minimize the crippling effects of anxiety in the company - and how this ability is affected by one's position in one's family of origin as well as one's family history. Using the stories of several successful business leaders - as well as the stories of the authors themselves - to illustrate the concepts introduced in the book, Leading a Business in Anxious Times provides you with the tools you need to make yourself a stronger, more effective leader under stressful circumstances.