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content/blog/2024-01-06-anxiety.md

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+---
+title: Anxiety and Leadership
+date: 2024-01-06T15:35:13-05:00
+permalink: /anxiety-and-leadership/
+tags:
+  - leadership
+  - pondering
+---
+I've just finished reading Jeffrey Miller's *[The Anxious Organization](https://archive.org/details/anxiousorganizat00mill)* (spoiler alert: all organizations are anxious, because they have people in them). Among his arguments, Miller notes that anxiety is contagious, and that it can become chronic and destructive within an organization when roles and expectations are unclear. This makes a great deal of sense, needless to say; no one responds well when they're given mixed messages about what's required of them or they are uncertain about how they're being evaluated. But I'm trying to square this with my own conviction that organizations need to become less hierarchical and more collaborative -- more leaderful -- in order to produce an environment in which everyone can thrive. 
+
+I don't disagree with the picture that Miller paints of the anxious organization -- in fact, at moments it feels as though he's been eavesdropping on some of my meetings, and his exploration of the ways that positional leaders can inadvertently create or contribute to an anxiety chain reaction left me feeling *seen*, shall we say. The question for me then becomes how the folks who lead collaborative teams can defuse the anxiety circulating in them while simultaneously pursuing open, values-enacted, anti-oppressive, minimally hierarchical and maximally connected ways of working. What kinds of formal structures -- roles, processes, policies -- are necessary in order to make it possible for a team to become less anxious without replicating the hierarchies that our cultural (read: capitalist) norms have created?