Dual Loyalty
Leading global teams when their governments are in conflict.
On October 7, 2023, I was leading communications for an intergovernmental organization whose governing board included member states. Within hours, two distinct pressures emerged. The board needed a statement every member could support. The staff needed something more.
We issued a call for de-escalation. It was the position the board could unify around as it was diplomatically measured and, by the standards of multilateral organizations, the appropriate one. Yet within a day, two groups of colleagues approached me separately. Jewish staff members, many of whom had spent years fostering Muslim-Jewish dialogue across Europe, asked for a private meeting. They felt the statement had not named what had happened to them. Our Muslim colleagues in the Middle East, witnessing the events unfolding in Gaza, felt it had not named what was happening to their communities. Both were right.
The statement had been crafted for external audiences, without sufficient consideration for the staff caught personally in the geopolitical crosshairs.
A global organization is, by design, a structure that recruits talent across borders, depends on the richness of those varied perspectives to deliver its mission, and functions within a geopolitical reality that it has no control over. When conflict breaks out between states, the internal rupture does not appear suddenly. It was already present within the organizational design.
The statement we released in those first hours was not poorly written. It fulfilled its purpose: aligning a multilateral board across varying positions under intense time pressure. But leaders who treat the public statement as the organization’s complete response invite unnecessary ambiguity among staff and, often, with donors and partners further down the line.
Employees want their leaders, and the organizations they work for, to see them in the fullness of their identity. When geopolitical events make that identity feel heavier, that need to be truly seen and included cannot be set aside.
What I learned during that period applies to any leader of a global organization:
The statement is the beginning of the response, but not the whole of it. During geopolitical tensions, the public statement is necessary but insufficient. How the statement is positioned internally before it is released determines whether organizations emerge with its staff strengthened or diminished.
External alignment and internal cohesion demand different strategies. A board statement must withstand external scrutiny among stakeholders, the media and also governments. An internal communication must reach individuals who are personally living the events the statement describes. Treating the two as the same task ensures that at least one will fall short.
By the time staff request a meeting, the gap between leadership perspective and staff experience has already widened. The work of building internal cohesion is much more effective when it happens before it is asked for. Treat the perspectives of your staff with at least the same care you extend to the board.
Multilateral diplomacy demands precision in the management of member states. That same precision is too often absent in how we engage with our own people.
Organizations that navigate geopolitical tensions most effectively do not always have the most polished statements; however, their leaders did the harder, less visible work to ensure that staff concerns were heard before the statement was released, either through individual and group meetings, all hands meetings or briefings.
The world is generating more of these situations, not fewer. Global organizations, by their very nature, employ people from countries and communities that will at times be in conflict. What it requires of leaders is the willingness to do two distinct pieces of work simultaneously: the diplomatic task of addressing the issue, and the human task of holding the workforce together. Both are essential.
If your organization is moving through a geopolitical moment and you sense the gap between your organization’s position and staff cohesion growing, the more important question to ask yourself is whether your staff feel heard and represented in the positioning of your organization’s identity as an ongoing process and in times of crisis. If not, shoring up knowledge of your brand and its positioning with new and existing staff should become part of the organization’s culture.