Great Leadership Got Our Country Through Its Most Challenging Times. We Need It Again.

For many years I worked for a coach who once summed up leadership and coaching to his team this way:

“Years from now you guys are gonna get together and at some point you’re gonna talk about the old coach. And what you’re never gonna say is ‘You know, Coach was a good guy. But he never knew how good we wanted to be. He never made us work hard enough; he never asked us to do the hard things we needed to do. WE COULD HAVE BEEN GREAT, but he didn’t push us.’”

One of the other maxims we shared with our players was this: “I hope I don’t lose your friendship because I tell you the truth.”

For five minutes put aside personalities and political allegiance. It’s time for some truth about leadership. 

As COVID-19 cases explode, as the death toll mounts, look back about 11 months and ask yourself if we were led to greatness by the leadership from our federal government.

Leadership requires asking people to do hard things. In January, our president was warned about the coming pandemic. Senators and others were briefed. What did they do?

In years past, presidents facing a national crisis have rallied the nation by leveling with us. They’d tell us that while the perfect way forward may be unknowable in the short term, the best-known path forward would require shared sacrifice. We made sacrifices and took steps to overcome the challenges for the good of all. Consensus was built to provide support for the most vulnerable among us in times of national crises.

In 1861, Lincoln mobilized the nation. In the 1918 pandemic, people wore masks to try to contain the Spanish Flu. In 1941, FDR asked the country to mobilize. In 1963, JFK addressed a nation on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviets. Time and time again we put forth a common effort in war, in science, in whatever we were asked to do.

Why?

We had leaders who knew that Americans always rise to the challenges put before us. 

This year our president confided to a journalist on tape that he understood the threat but downplayed it to keep from panicking the nation. We’re Americans. We don’t panic.

But to be fair, we’ve gotten the leadership we deserve. 

We’ve bought into a mythology that we were once a place where our president snapped his finger, told the rest of the world what we wanted and then everyone jumped to it. Our memory makes it look so easy.

Yes, Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!”

But it was a moment that was years of hard work in the making, and that wall did not come down for over two more years. 

The first Gulf War was a rapid success. But months of tireless work by President George H.W. Bush and his administration built an international coalition for action. 

Looking back to World War II, let’s not forget mobilization on the home front. 

Rationing limited people and their ability to buy necessities like meat, sugar, dairy and gas. Women were asked to collect fat and grease in their kitchens and take it to collection centers. Women left the home to work in factories. Black out curtains were part of home décor.

And the nation rallied because it was asked by its leadership to do the heavy lifting in the cause of victory.

Now, facing a global pandemic, we reside in a nation where we politicize professional medical recommendations. We cherry-pick information from the internet, cast everything else as a conspiracy and use that to divide ourselves. 

In our current struggle, are doctors 100% right? Absolute certainty is unknowable in the fog of war. But it is more probable than not that masks, distancing and hand-washing give us a chance. Doing those things won’t hurt our health.

Think about it: we’re simply being asked to wear a mask. Many refuse to do so. 

And yet our history includes men on battlefields wearing gas masks. Wearing a mask in public seems like a small price to pay by comparison.

Make no mistake, we are in a fight. Even the president at times correctly likened this to being a “wartime” president. Yet he hasn’t asked us to do our part.

Leadership should require us to do all we can for the soldiers fighting COVID on the front lines every day. Exploding case numbers are filling hospitals, further taxing nurses, doctors and other frontline workers that feed patients and clean the hallways and rooms of those hospitals. A refusal to do our part is putting those COVID soldiers at further risk. 

Facing the challenge of our time, what have we shown the world about American greatness? The world that is used to American leadership is stunned. The world sees a bitterly divided, easily distracted nation lacking a leader who will call on our common resolve to do that which is not easy. They see American vulnerability.

And that is a reflection of leadership.