A leader is someone who influences a group of individuals to accomplish a common goal, whether that goal is to design a fuel efficient car respond to an international military crisis or find a new company Health Plan 
Now there are many different ideas out there about how to become an effective leader. Some suggest that leaders must have certain traits such as intelligence, or self-confidence sociability ,maybe even being tall. Others say it's about technique or skill that leaders can acquire.
But in A Failure of Nerve, the late Edwin Friedman goes against the grain of leadership studies and suggests that effective leadership is not about traits or skills as much as it is an emotional process of regulating one's own anxiety. He refers to this process as self differentiation, or knowing where one ends and another begins.
 This is a systems perspective on leadership rooted in cell biology. Take this healthy biological cell. It has a nucleus which controls the activity of the cell. It has these mitochondria floating around here, and it has a cell membrane which keeps the cell separate from other cells. 
When they hang out together to form biological tissue like this heart this heart cell is  differentiated it knows its purpose is to pump blood, despite what these uppity brain cells may think. 
Not only are we humans made up of these cells we function like them. We also form ourselves into groups, whether these are families, companies, or nations. Like an individual cell, a differentiated person can stay connected to others without losing his or her Identity, or without taking on the emotional anxiety of the group. A differentiated leader can take a well-defined stand--even when followers disagree--while remaining connected in a meaningful way with others 
Now here's the deal. Some people in these organizations are poorly differentiated and they act like viruses. Viruses do not have a nucleus or a core organizing principle, so they cannot exist on their own. Rather they look for other poorly differentiated cells that are easy to latch on to.
This may look like harmless workplace gossip, but what they are doing is infecting the organization with their anxiety. They cannot handle one-on-one conflict with another person so they attempt to rope in a third person thinking this will lessen the anxiety. This is what Friedman calls emotional triangles. And if you are the one being roped in--or triangled--it's so, so tempting to enmesh yourself with the drama. It's even flattering: Hey, you are being asked to help out in a situation, so this person must really trust you.
But don't do it! Don't get triangled! Because this only leads to getting stuck, and only results in more anxiety in the  system, and the infection spreads.
And worse, it's bad for you! Friedman said that the chief cause of stress and burnout is not overworking, like we all think, but getting stuck in other people's problems--or getting triangled
But the differentiated leader is like the emotional immune system of an organization by being a non-anxious presence. Differentiated leaders resist being triangled, which influences others to take responsibility for themselves.
This is very counterintuitive to those of us who are used to chronically anxious organizations but Friedman says that differentiated leaders are able to tolerate other people's discomfort because this encourages them to take personal responsibility. In the long run, the differentiated leader’s presence has the effect of diffusing the anxiety in the organization, allowing it to develop and function in a healthy way.
Now, about sabotage: Some organizational systems are chronically anxious. In other words, they have a lot of people who are poorly differentiated. Such an organization will be threatened by the presence of a differentiated leader because--in a way--this upsets the way things have always been, or the homeostasis of the organization. So the chronically anxious organization will inevitably turn on the differentiated leader. But according to Friedman, sabotage is a sign that the leader is doing the right thing, and it's the leader's non-anxious response to such sabotage that defines the differentiated leader. This he says is the key to the kingdom of effective leadership.
The beauty of this approach to leadership is that it applies to anyone at any leadership level, whether you are--as fredman says a parent or a
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president finally differentiated leadership is not a static condition none of us arrives completely at this
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place rather differentiated leadership is a direction in life a direction toward maturity and the only way we can
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get moving in that direction is to take care of our self or as Jesus of Nazareth
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said to love your neighbor as you love yourself