Leadership changes shape, when volatility becomes routine.
Lebanon’s long-running economic and social collapse has turned int one of the hardest leadership laboratories in the region. According to the World Bank (2023), the country’s economy has shrunk by approximately 39.9%, one of the deepest depressions globally. Infrastructure failures, inflation, and daily uncertainty have forced organizations to reinvent how they operate over and over again.
And yet, somehow, many teams still show up, deliver, and meet deadlines. The difference isn’t luck or heroism; it’s the way they are built. Lebanese business leaders have learned to turn reaction into structure, transforming crisis management from improvisation into a repeatable system.
Crisis as a Classroom
In Lebanon, leadership doesn’t always follow a quarterly plan; it follows the pulse of disruption. Power cuts, supply shortage and delay, and unpredictable policies became the backdrop for everyday operations. But out of these conditions emerged a distinct habit: turning every crisis into a lesson.
Teams started keeping short logs of what worked who acted first, what decision saved time, which resource failed last. Those notes became reference guides the next time something went wrong. Over time, this built a learning loop: observe, record, reuse.
This shift was fundamental, crisis stopped being an interruption and became the classroom where new systems can be built.
Presence Over Policy
People often look to behavior before they look to policy, when formal systems collapse. In certain Lebanese organizations, employees’ sense of safety came from how the leadership team behaved under pressure and not from written rules. The leaders who stayed visible, consistent, and calm became the structure on which others could rely.
Leadership presence in showing up, communicating, and making decisions visibly became the informal infrastructure of order. In an unstable environment, it demonstrated that behavior travelled faster than written rules.
Empathy as Continuity
Empathy in crisis isn’t sentiment; it’s continuity.
When leaders chose to protect people first i.e keeping teams safe, communicating transparently, and most importantly not laying off people, they did not preserve morale; they in fact preserved function. Trust acted as the operating system that kept work moving when everything else slowed down.
Empathy was built into decisions such as sharing constraints honestly, inviting staff input before cuts, explaining trade-offs early.Therefore, organizations need to design empathy into process. It sustains performance when resources collapse.
Listening as Data
In systems where official reports often arrive late, listening became a more reliable form of intelligence.
These Lebanese managers learned to treat everyday conversations as early-warning sensors, paying attention to tone, silence, fatigue, and side comments. These human signals often revealed stress points long before spreadsheets did. The organizations that survived the crisis built a steady cadence of “listening loops”. Five-minute check-ins replaced long meetings, and feedback travelled directly to decision-makers. This kept awareness alive, even when resources weren’t.
Redefining Stability
For Lebanese organizations stability means reliability and no longer meant predictability. When nothing else holds, consistency becomes capital. Teams that deliver on time, suppliers who answer calls, and leaders who communicate honestly form the invisible grid that keeps operations alive.
According to McKinsey & Company (2021), organizations that invest in resilience capabilities such as operational consistency and transparent communication can improve long-term performance by 30%-40% compared to less adaptive peers. Lebanon’s experience offers the human explanation behind that finding: reliability isn’t a structure, it’s a practiced behavior that sustains continuity and uncertainty.
The Regional Lesson
Lebanon may be a difficult teacher, but its lessons apply across the region. MENA organizations face their own volatility regulatory shifts, climate risks, digital transitions yet the fundamentals of resilience remain the same.
Crisis reveals which systems can reform themselves. The Lebanese experience shows that leadership today isn’t about commanding stability; it’s about building continuity inside disorder.
That continuity of presence, empathy, listening, and repeatability is what turns survival into progress, and progress into reform.
References
World Bank. (2023, May 16). Lebanon Economic Monitor, Spring 2023: The normalization of crisis is no road to stabilization. World Bank Group.
McKinsey & Company. (2021, June 1). Resilience: The whole-company fitness challenge.
