The Mother of All Leadership Challenges

Few leaders grapple with issues as challenging or with stakes as high as those U.S. President Barak Obama took on this week in a highly publicized trip to Egypt.  And fewer still would want to, for the morass of entangled relationships and millennia-old feuds that constitute the Middle East has defied the best efforts of the best diplomatic and political minds.  Part of the intractability is that when it comes to action in the Middle East, the extremes rule on all sides.  Leaders on both sides who have sought rapprochement and dialog--Rabin and Sadat--have met with violent ends at the hands of their own citizens.  

But, if there is ever to be a solution short of genocide by one side or the other, it requires the sort of leadership Obama demonstrated this week.  First, he made the trek to Cairo to deliver a speech aimed at the Islamic world.  Time will tell whether the speech had its intended effect, but one can say for certain that it would have been heard quite differently if given in Washington or Jerusalem.  Then, he visited the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, an emblem of the centuries of persecution that fomented to rebuilding of a Jewish state in Palestine.  A stop at the Holocaust Museum in Washington would have meant little.

Leaders in all organizations can learn from this week about the importance of grappling with the big, hairy issues that bedevil every enterprise, even when survival instincts might scream for avoidance.  Or about the absolutely critical nature of balancing concern for task (peace-making, reaching agreements on borders, dismantling settlements) with concern for people (validating the traumas of all sides, emphasizing a common humanity, aspiring to a better future).  Or about getting outside one’s office to underscore the importance of the issue in its own right, not just as a nuisance for the leader.

As Obama himself noted, real progress in the Middle East may require sustained effort beyond the tenure of any one American president.  But if we are to avoid replaying the tragedies of the past in that region, this is surely a way to start.

And that's the real leadership lesson: It has to start sometime with someone.  What's on your plate today?