The leadership qualities we need today
Question from the Internet:
“What qualities must a leader have to be able to bring a divided group of people together?”
The best form of leadership is through positive, personally example. For example if I remember well the story, when Lee Iacocca went from Ford to revive the dying Chrysler corporation, he symbolically reduced his own salary to 1$ (though many accounts dispute this…). Anyway with different tools, tactics he managed to inspire the company, overturning their fortune within a short time.
A true leader needs to fulfill the notion of being a “public servant" to the letter, although in our time we don’t even know exactly what loyally, humbly serving the public actually means.
Moreover in our globally integrated, interdependent world personal, individual leadership is harmful, as only collective, mutually responsible, mutually complementing teamwork can find and implement solutions for collective, integral problems.
The Torah gives us a nice “comparison chart" on the different degrees of loyalty, sacrifice leaders would do to lead their people towards a positive goal.
When Noah was told to build the ark and rescue animals and his household, he didn’t inquire, concern himself about other people, he set out towards the goal and left without looking back, while everybody else perished.
Abraham already quarrelled, argued about the number of righteous, for whose sake Sodom should be spared, but later accepted the necessity of Sodom’s destruction when the agreed number of righteous wasn’t found in the city.
Moses pleaded for his people and at the end offered to sacrifice himself, asking to be “blotted out if the Book" in order to save his people from otherwise well-deserved punishment, destruction from God’s wrath.
Great sages also teach, that in order to become not only leaders, but to merit to become truly Human, we all need to reach the level of Moses…