An Interview with Roberta Gilbert

...Is divided into four sections:

Foundations
Relationships
Systems
Balance

In my leadership work, I group skills and strategies into the four areas above. First, Foundations give the leader the clarity to know how to lead the team because the final result in clear; second, build and maintain effective relationship to assist in getting to the vision; next, develop effective systems allowing each team member to excel and to work together efficiently; and finally, create balance in work, in life, and between work and life.

The format for this year consists of interviews with Christian leaders from many different types of leadership styles and perspectives - some pastors, some musicians, some lay leaders, some Christian business professionals, and more. This month’s edition of Monday Morning Email's “Leadership Tools” is quite different from the others in the series so far. One year ago, I had not heard of Bowen Family Systems Theory. Now, I have acquired many skills that impact my leadership skills in a significant way. My guest this month is Dr. Roberta Gilbert, who teaches these leadership principles with passion. The principles in this system are all life-saving strategies for church leaders.

Dr. Gilbert is the author of five books concerned with applying Bowen theory to life. The first book, Extraordinary Relationships: A New Way of Thinking About Human Interactions, published in 1992, grew out of her work with families and individuals. Her second book, Connecting with Our Children, published in 1999, is an application of the principles of Bowen family systems theory for parents. Both books have received wide acclaim. Her newest books, The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory; Extraordinary Leadership: Thinking Systems, Making a Difference; and The Cornerstone Concept: In Leadership, In Life were written as texts for the Extraordinary Leadership Seminar. For more information on Dr. Gilbert and the Bowen Center for the Study of Human Systems go to her web site: http://www.hsystems.org. Enjoy discovering some really useful leadership tools.  

INTRODUCTION

Hugh Ballou:Dr. Gilbert, I have enjoyed being in your seminar this year and I've enjoyed your books. And I have found the information you have is very practical for church leaders. So I know what you have to offer. If you would, please explain to our readers a little bit about your background, and how you got involved in Bowen Family Systems Theory. And then, we'll talk more about it in this interview.

Roberta Gilbert: Yes, well it's a delight to be with you, Hugh. The Center for the Study of Human Systems began in 1998 when a major denomination in Virginia asked me, a psychiatrist, to design a leadership training program for its ministers. And it began the next year, and from the very beginning has been open to the clergy of all denominations and faiths. We also have many other leaders - business leaders, educational leaders, and therapists. We always have some of other professions in the seminar. And people have been very excited about what they've learned there over the years. It's been very exciting to be a part of the whole thing, and, to get to be the director was icing on the cake.

Ballou: Wonderful, wonderful. Well, I certainly have taken away some practical things that have helped me. So, give us an overview of what Bowen Family Systems Theory is all about.

Gilbert: Dr. Murray Bowen, my mentor, was one of the early pioneers in family. And he, probably more than any other investigator, came up with a theoretical formulation about the family as an emotional unit. And this idea, the family as emotional unit, gave rise to 7 or 8 other ideas, which he formulated and grouped into what he called, in the end, Bowen Family Systems Theory. And it just has turned out to be extremely useful to everybody in life. And now, the latest version of usefulness is for leaders.

FOUNDATIONS

Ballou: I teach and have four categories that I like to interview people with on leadership. And the first one is about the foundations. And that's about strengthening ourselves - clarity of vision, clarity of purpose, etc. So, why would the Bowen System be helpful to a leader in the church?

Gilbert: In the family systems theory, we talk a lot - in fact, of the 3-year curricula we spend one whole year - on the self. And developing a clearer idea of ourselves, and what we stand for. So we spend some time developing guiding principles. We think that all values, goals, directives, statements for organizations should be based on guiding principles. And that the clearer that people can be about these guiding principles, the clearer and the better their vision statements will turn out to be, I think. And the better the organization does the better the people, the leaders in it do, the clearer they are about their own guiding principles, because these guiding principles are what direct the highest and the best part of ourselves.

 

RELATIONSHIPS

Ballou: Absolutely. I'm currently amazed how many people cannot talk about those kinds of things. When I interview leaders, many of them can't articulate those. In this very last session that we were in, people were reporting about their guiding principles, and some really useful stuff came across. That principle in itself is a very strong foundation. We who work in the church experience all kinds of situations that create stress and anxiety and complications in relationships. So, in terms of how we deal with relationships in the systems in the church, speak to that area, just a minute.

Gilbert: In family systems theory, we think that a lot of this angst that we experience in our organizations and in our families goes back to anxiety. And when the anxiety level rises, as it is doing right now in our society because of many factors, relationships don't do well.

And it doesn't matter the source of the anxiety, it doesn't matter where it's coming from, but if there is anxiety present, we find that relationships start to break down in one of four different ways. People start to fight with each other. They start to distance. They start telling each other what to do, or acting hopeless, "Oh, please tell me what to do," or they start talking to other people behind the leader's back in a thing, a phenomenon we call triangling.

So, the leadership is largely, an opportunity to take up all these situations in all their different combinations and permutations, and figure out how I'm going to position myself with all this that's going on. So, yes, much of family systems theory is based on relationships and a new way of looking at them. The first book that I wrote, Extraordinary Relationships, is really all about that. I'll just mention that you can get that book on Amazon, and it's been going now for about 17 years, which is kind of a long track record for a book.

Ballou: That’s good! I'm going to put links to your books at the bottom of this interview, so people can link directly to Amazon, and find them. I find them to be very practical. There are not a whole lot of unnecessary words. It's the right kind of words to tell you what you need to know. I think it's a journey of self-discovery. So that anxiety piece you just spoke about. That's one of the most valuable things I have learned in managing that piece as a leader. And it is, like you had shared with us, it spreads in the community you lead so fast. And we do, as leaders, set the bar, and we communicate in a lot of ways that we're not aware of.

Gilbert: Leaders do have a lot of influence and they may not be aware of it, but they don't know what to do with all that quite often. And I think this family systems very really give us lots of guidelines about how to conduct ourselves, how to deal with the anxious people among us, how to deal with the anxious relationships that are breaking down all over the place.

SYSTEMS

Ballou: In our last seminar, there was a report paper that a pastor presented where somebody encountered him in the hall before worship, and wanted to try to create anxiety with a demand to that person. The paper was about how he dealt with that with the Bowen Family Systems. Systems is my third category. There's this system, there's that system, there's all kinds of systems. This is a very specific system to help people to think in terms of a system. So, why is it important to important in terms of system?

Gilbert: It is a thinking type of system, and it does describe what Bowen called the human emotional system, or the family. Everything he discovered, of course, was based on the human family, and, he called that a system and it is a system because everybody is interlocked and what one does effects everybody else ultimately.

And this is true to a large degree, not in exactly the same way, but almost the same way in an organization. So we can study the family, we can study our own families, and then we can learn a tremendous amount about what's going on in our organization. I don't know, does that answer your question a little bit, or address it somewhat?

Ballou: It does. I wish I had had this material many years ago. I spent 40 years in the church, and I ran into the wall, so to speak, many times by doing the wrong thing. And I'm sure I created problems by the way I reacted, rather than thinking, having some tools to think with in systems and knowing how to deal with it. I remember lots of conversations during this last session where we were talking about thinking systems. So, what's the biggest benefit of having the theory and having lived with it for a period of time and then, understanding how you, the leader thinks in terms of systems? Say a little more about systems. That's really helpful.

Gilbert: What we're involved in really is a theory. It hasn't been totally proven, although the proof is starting to roll in for it now. It really amounts to a way of thinking about the human phenomenon that includes really the totality of the human phenomenon. And makes so much of what's inscrutable, has been inscrutable to us for a long time, makes it understandable. So if I have a way to think about all these difficult situations that address me as a leader, I can plan my way out of it.

I don't know of any other theory that gives as wonderful, as simple, and yet as helpful a way to think about all these situations as Bowen Family Systems Theory. And, so this is very, very reassuring, and very calming to the leader.

As you mentioned, Hugh, once the leader gets calmed down, then this has an effect on the entire organization, or the entire group of people that are affected. So if the leader can begin, then, to calmly communicate to the rest of the people some logical thinking, it's just, it's sort of like magic and the whole thing begins to calm down. People then begin to think, people begin to give their best thinking, contribute their best thinking to the organization. Now the organization's in a position to really take off because it's gonna get creative, a lot of very exciting things start to happen at that point when the anxiety calms down and people start to think. It's very exciting to see what happens after that.

But, how many organizations live in a state of constant turmoil, constant emotional anxiety, that they never really get there? They never really get where they want to go. And that's what we're in the business of helping people get there. We don't tell them what to think, or what their mission is, but we do give them a framework on which to manage self and all the people and what situations they're dealing with.

BALANCE

Ballou: Yeah. And that's a growth curve for all of us. That's been very helpful. The last area that I break leadership into for my model, is Balance - just trying to understand how balance works in life. And balance means different things to different people. In music, we're trying to keep the brass from being overpowering of the strings. Or the tenors from being too loud in the choir over the sopranos, that kind of thing, but there's other areas of balance, where we have multiple priorities, and we're learning and growing. So, it's not a specific area that I remember much conversation with in our work together. But, how would you reflect on maintaining some sense of balance in in one’s life - spiritual, mental, physical, work life, and home life. How do you suggest that leaders balance life?

Gilbert: There's actually there's a lot about balance in Bowen Family Systems Theory, and it has to do with the balance between individuality and togetherness. In all of our families and in all our organizations there's a pull towards togetherness. There's a pull towards the leadership to think the way I think, think the way we as a group think, be here for us, no matter if you have to get sick doing it, because they don't give you enough time to yourself. So, there's this togetherness pull that can do the leader in.

Bowen talked about this a great deal. We spent one whole year on it actually about individuality. How do I as a leader get some individuality? How do I think about who I am as a person, out of all this togetherness? Does togetherness pull? And so that's the balance that we find in this theory and then, in individuality, of course, there's a great deal of thinking about, what do I believe? How am I functioning? How much does the togetherness pull, dictate, and dominate my life? Versus me myself dominating it, and dictating what I want my life to be like, and look like, and how I'm going to relate to people. How much do my generations dictate the kind of person I am? Most people have never thought about that. How much their generations are really influencing them to this very day. And so these are all the fascinating things we look at in the seminar.

And then people start to sort out who they are, who they want to be and their functioning just automatically comes up. People should not come into the seminar if they don't want to work on themselves. It is not a quick fix. And it's not an easy ride, really. it's something very worth doing and everything worth doing is work and effort it takes time. And, it is like that. It takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of time. But people, every year, at the end of the year. People, especially in their second and third years, really have and I've sure you've heard this this year have very positive comments about the experience that they've had in this seminar.

Ballou: Yes, I have. Well I'm looking at the principles, but we have a short interview so I'm not going to get into those but it's the The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory. The balance piece you just spoke about is very different than anybody in this whole series has talked about and it's extremely valuable. I tend to have a favorite of all of these and am challenged in understanding how to use them all on my development. But I tend to favor something where I had no knowledge, or is really a challenge for me like the anxiety piece and the differentiation of self principle. Those are pieces that have been extremely valuable for me because those are the areas I struggle with the most and have little or no knowledge of.

Gilbert: Yes, I hear this all the time. And I think most of us have no idea about how much anxiety is just jerking our organization around all the time and robbing us leaders of our own time - anxious phenomena, anxious people, anxious relationships -and having no way of thinking about dealing with it.

Ballou:That's a gift to me. That's so helpful.

Gilbert: So that's what, one of the many things that I think the seminar provides for people is a way to think about those things and a way to meet them that's different than anything else out there. As far as I know.

WRAP UP

Ballou: It is quite different. It's been a stretch for me. You have probably looked into my eyes and known that. It's called the Extraordinary Leadership Seminar, and it's very useful stuff. So as we end this interview, is there just an overarching thought or tip that you'd like to leave with our readers?

Gilbert: Yes, I would like to have you go to our website for one thing, which is that you will find a lot of details about the books, the seminars, the people involved, the faculty, what is Bowen Theory, and how to get in touch with us. An overarching thought would be: just as our families are more of an organism than we ourselves, our families combine to make one whole organism. So does an organization. So, when we learn to think that way, it's really a bigger way of thinking than most of us have. And it does stretch our intelligence. It does stretch our minds, but well worth the stretch.

Ballou: And I can validate that. Roberta Gilbert, it's a gift to talk to you today. Thank you for the practical tips. We will look forward to seeing some of our friends in the next Extraordinary Leadership Seminar. Thank you so much.

Gilbert:Thank you Hugh, nice to be with you.

RESOURCES

The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory

Extraordinary Relationships: A New Way of Thinking About Human Interactions

Extraordinary Leadership: Thinking Systems, Making a Difference

The Cornerstone Concept: In Leadership, In Life