CEO's: Your People Need to Hear From You

Your people need to hear from you about the crisis in the Middle East. If you’ve already reached out. Good for you. If you haven’t, you should. Many have struggled to find the words.

This one somehow feels complicated.

Your counterparts leading elite universities are under a microscope today for how they’re leading their communities. And very few of them are getting high marks.

And while the press attention is on university presidents, the underlying issues they’re grappling with among their constituents are every bit as pressing for you among yours. The risks in managing them poorly could be even more costly for you than for them. Your people may not be staging protests, putting posters up or tearing others down, but they’re every bit as moved, as deeply affected, and as confused by the horrors they’ve been witnessing as the student activists that the press are covering on TV. As was the case in the 60’s, students tend to be more vocal faster than the rest of us, but they’re often just leading indicators of a broader angst that’s less openly or loudly expressed.

You’ve placed high priority emphasis, through your leadership, on creating an environment of inclusion, mutual respect, and belonging in your community. You’ve worked tirelessly to create a cohesive team around a shared purpose and vision for your enterprise. You’ve led from the front, putting your personal values, convictions, and vulnerabilities on full display to encourage an open exchange of ideas and an active embrace of differences toward the overall strengthening of your enterprise.

Having navigated more societal disruptions than you might ever have imagined having to contend with over the past couple of years (a “me too” reckoning, a global pandemic, a “black lives matter” movement, a Supreme Court reversal on reproductive rights, an endless series of mass shootings, an opioid epidemic, a rise in hate crimes, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc.), you’re no stranger to the vulnerabilities your people are feeling every day, and the toll that these disruptions can have on their sense of safety and mental/emotional well-being.

Yet for many leaders, the current crisis is proving even more challenging to address than those they’ve already tackled. Like the university presidents, you might find yourself struggling harder than you have before to find the right words, the right posture, the right actions to take in response to the tragedies unfolding before us in the Middle East, and with respect to the waves of public outrage washing over every corner of the world. Outrage over the horrific terrorist actions of Hamas, outrage over the barbaric brutality of massacre rape beheadings of innocent Jews, outrage over the tragic loss of civilian lives in Gaza, outrage over the taking and keeping of hostages, outrage over the apparent use of innocent Palestinians as human shields, outrage over whether the Israeli government’s policies and posture may have contributed to the rise of Hamas in the first place, outrage over the centuries-old persecution of Jews the world over, outrage over the conditions in which Palestinians have lived and the horrors they now face, outrage over our collective failure over decades to find peace and common ground, and even outrage with ourselves over our apparent inability to plainly express our outrage without caveat (why, when it comes to Jews, is there always a “but…”?).

Why? Why is this one harder? The other ones were pretty hard! They haven’t gone away, but somehow you found a way to summon the words and actions to lead your people through them with empathy, compassion, understanding, and resolve. You’ve become (regrettably perhaps) pretty good at this. But this one seems trickier. More confounding. You start drafting a memo or a speech and you stumble. You write more, take a pause, reread what you’ve written and tear it all up in frustration. You think to yourself, “maybe I should stay out of this one,” realizing even as you think this that it’s a cop-out. Surely you owe it to your people, to your enterprise, to say something. But what?

The answer will be different for you than for someone else. But here are a couple of principles to consider that might help:

1. Be guided first by your own, personal moral compass. Start with the part of you that’s separate from, and not defined by, your role as CEO.

2. Allow yourself to feel what you feel and focus, initially, on just capturing and articulating your feelings in a way that makes sense to you…without regard to how this articulation might sound to anyone else, or what impact it might have on others if shared.

3. Then think about how others might feel, placing special focus on those whose feelings may differ from yours. Try to understand, as best you can, where they may be coming from.

4. Now think about what common ground there may be. Likely this common ground will not be on policy matters. And likely (as in past challenges) it won’t be found in a common set of life experiences (let’s face it, your life experience is vastly different from that of most people you lead). But perhaps common ground can be found in a shared feeling of despair, of pain for lives lost, of frustration over circumstances outside of our control…there should be any number of potential intersecting points that connect even those with the most disparate views among your constituents.

5. Embrace your own conflicting thoughts and feelings and consider exposing your struggles. But take care, before exposing the totality of your struggle, not to conflate anticipated views of others with your own. There’s a big difference between simple moral clarity (which you likely have), and complex intellectual thought and contextualization (which you’re also quite adept at). Be mindful of the difference. And decide which aspect of you your people need to see. You needn’t share the totality of your thought process.

Your people need clarity.