President Michel Suleiman,
Presidential Palace,
Baabda, Lebanon June 5, 2008
Dear Mr. President,
Congratulations on assuming a presidential responsibility. It is always an honor to serve society, especially in removing its unnecessary pains. You have just shouldered a heavy burden that will demand every possible support, because in the context of the conflict in Lebanon, your success would mean saving lives and your failure would result in further devastation of your country and in more wars.
Allow me first to thank you for your email and kind remarks on my earlier article titled “President Suleiman is not the savior”. As a scholar of leadership, it is fitting to share with you some perspectives on the leadership lessons that emerged from the recent chain of crises in Lebanon. With your permission, I would suggest to you the following:
EXPECTATIONS
- Accept the difficult reality that Lebanon’s core problems can only be managed, not cured. Lebanon is a country with huge structural challenges that are the making of the growing baggage of many centuries of history.
- Do not promise yourself to deal with all the problems of Lebanon during your next six years as president. Furthermore, do not allow your enthusiasm about serving your country make you commit to unrealistic promises to your people that would eventually lead to disappointments and loss of the credibility of your presidential term. While it is your duty to always provide your people with hope for a better future, leadership demands that you be realistic in your interpretation and presentation of your country’s problems. It asks that you, and the nation, be fair in the expectations from the role that you, or any president, can play given the complexity of the situation and the lack of sufficient preparedness of the people to truly participate in building a functional country.
- Reject propositions to assess your performance based on the like of the First-100-Days record model. Lebanon’s grave dysfunctional condition and your lack of appropriate formal and informal authority will limit your capacity to create on your own and in the short term a major fundamental change.
- Your next six-year term, like that of your predecessors, will be mostly about leading in times of consecutive and multiple crises. This is due to the nature of the country, the Middle East and the current world order. Your presidential term should be considered a leadership success if you managed to stabilize the country and help it put in place just some, not many, solutions to its core structural problems so that it would not recreate its cycles of destructive conflicts. Unfortunately, Lebanon is an example of the sad chapters of history that repeat themselves because people fail to learn. Encourage your people to learn.
RESPONSIBILITY
- Consistently help the Lebanese understand that rescuing their country is primarily their collective responsibility and not just yours or anybody else’s. Tell them to stop the blame game and that the laws of life state that they will reap what they plant. Actively engage them in the duty of healing the wounds that they have inflicted upon each other. Beware now that you are the top authority figure of Lebanon, troubled Lebanese will pin high hopes on you as their new “hero” who will make their dream of a peaceful and prosperous Lebanon come true while they go on with their dysfunctional patterns of behaviors. They will use tricks of seduction, plea, blackmail and threat to pull you into this role, or shall I say trap. While this is a natural social behavior, it remains a classic avoidance mechanism that society uses to relieve itself from responsibility for its actions that contributed to its problems. Society will also seek to free itself from accepting its obligation to change its values and adopt a new mindset that is required to successfully deal with its issues. Leadership in such a case implies that people are frequently reminded that their salvation is in their own hands and that progress demands that every citizen and entity, whether religious, civic, public, economic or political, play its active role in creating a common good. (I see in the Lebanese press that people have already started asking you to perform the miracles of cleaning decades of their mess. I suggest that you reply to such demands with the words of President John Kennedy who interestingly quoted Lebanon’s Gibran Khalil Gibran: Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country).
- Avoid the mistakes of your predecessors who thought that they could change the political nature of Lebanon during their presidential terms just because they had some authority. Lebanon has been, still is and will remain for the long foreseeable future a sectarian country. In fact, Lebanon was created to fulfill sectarian purposes by preserving the relative existence and freedom of some religions minorities in one of the most religiously tensed regions of the world. Failing to accept this reality or even the fact that your own presidential position is part of a delicately balanced process of distribution of power between these sects will paralyze your role and add to the problems of the country.
- While you have pledged to protect and enforce the written laws of your country, keep in mind that protecting the unwritten rules, norms and traditions is equally important for the stability of any society.
- Differentiate between technical problems and their technical solutions on one hand and between core problems and their core solutions on the other hand. It is common that problems are misdiagnosed and technical solutions are applied to core problems that require deep change of public values, patterns of behavior, mindset and loyalties. The plight of Lebanon has continued since the creation of the country mainly because most of the internal agreements that were made, including the recent one in Qatar, were short term technical fixes that failed to deal with the structural problems of the system.
- Recreate the role for the presidency of Lebanon based on the costly lessons that emerged during the past few years in the country, the Middle East and the world.
- Restore the image and the reputation of the office of the presidency that has been damaged over the past few years. While it is a personal virtue to be humble, stability requires that society feels that it has a true “presidential palace” with the glory it represents. The better power is projected the more it is effective and the less it is used.
- Shield yourself from the psychological dangers that come with being a symbol of authority. History is full of examples of good people whose judgment and sense of reality was disrupted by the trap of power. Take your role, not yourself, seriously. You will now have many more “friends” and receive more “compliments” than humbleness can tolerate. Remember that most compliments are meant to serve as any entry visas to the world of resources that your new role controls. They are not about you. The same applied with enemies and criticism. Guard your inner self by remembering that all the positive and negative dynamics with you are related to your role as president and not as Michel Suleiman the person.
- You will not be able to carry your burden alone. Surround yourself with people of the highest intellectual and moral standing (no political or financial agenda) and do what your mind, heart and conscious say is right.
- Take good care of yourself and of your inner goodness.
Sincerely yours,
Michael Kouly
Beirut, Lebanon
(Michael.Kouly@post.Harvard.edu)
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