Confronting the Challenges of Political Leadership in International Organizations

Abstract

Comparing a variety of international organization heads over an extended period of time evidences the unusual challenges they have to overcome to expand the tasks of their organizations, to be agenda setters, to serve as major change agents, and to be norm entrepreneurs. These challenges are legal, institutional, ethical, moral, systemic, and connected to questions of legitimacy. Increasingly, they also involve the investigatory media. The strategies pursued to meet these challenges by various leaders of different organizations and the same organizations under different systemic conditions are also highly variable. It will also be shown that the most successful leaders need to be visionary, but not Utopian; able and willing to take the opportunities afforded to them by their organizations’ constitutive documents, oftentimes by creatively interpreting them; to understand the constraints of the bureaucratic and systemic contexts in which they are operating; to articulate an appropriate organizational ideology for those contexts; and be true to one’s morals and ethics.