Introduction
The case study oscillates around a decision by the then Israel prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to undertake a disengagement of Israelites from Palestine in December 2003. The project would involve evacuating Jews from the Gaza strip, a project that would entail a combination of skills and the use of force at some point to force the evacuatees out of the Gaza. Colonel Yaron was requested to volunteer as the project manager, and his main job was to find suitable troops and offer them adequate training so as to carry out the project successfully. Particularly, he was supposed to familiarize the soldiers and the commanders with the situation on the ground, by ensuring that they understood the importance of the project to the state as well as its effect on the people being evacuated. He had to balance expectations in a project that lacked trust between the government and the people, given the fact that the Prime Minister’s proposal was rejected during the project onset. By the end of the day, Yaron succeeded in creating a team that focused on the competency of troop leaders, noting that the leader of each troop played the role of a project manager, as they were required to make independent decisions for every house they visited. Soldiers were given training on how they were supposed to treat some incidences; like evacuating a family with a mother who just had a newborn baby or a family that was having supper. Also, they were required to understand how to handle violent evacuatees, especially those families that held firm believe and emotional attachment to the Gaza strip. In the end, Yaron employed different approaches, including a small wins strategy that ensured that the soldiers moved from easy to difficult cases, in that order (Salem, 2015).
Discussion
Colonel Yaron leadership approach inclined to the side of transformational leadership. He has strong communication skills, motivation and pragmatic approaches to small tasks. He understood that the success of the project depended on his team, and the construction of that team was a very important step. He retained very little control, to the level that he only acted as a logistics manager, ensuring that all tasks were planned for very carefully. For instance, instead of adopting the IDF recommendations, created by the team of psychologists, Yaron noted that the approach did not capture solutions for real problems on the ground, and he decided to embark on an inclusive strategy that made the use of all the parties in the project. To have a real life experience on the reaction evacuatees, Yaron visited the strip, where he met a man called Arik, the security coordinator who refused to shake his hand terming him as the enemy. When protests broke out, Yaron succeeded in having his soldiers to form a human wall using 20,000 soldiers for three days, something the soldiers were not prepared for, given that their training was mainly in combat, and they did not know to respond human issues. In all the three situations, Yaron came across as a very dynamic leader who used evidence-based decision-making approach to ensure that hard evidence supported all decisions. The decision to drop the recommendations by the IDF psychologists team proved very crucial, because the recommendations were purely theoretical, overlooking the situation on the ground. It helped in constructing a completely new formula for the evacuations that made use of collaborative efforts from the soldiers, commanders, and the evacuatees. However, his approach to management of situations was slow and democratic, in a military situation that used top-down order command style (Kelly, 2006).
Colonel Daniel was a path-goal kind of a leader; he was keen on ensuring that all government procedures were followed during the disengagement process while keeping the loss very minimal (House, 1996). He was concerned with the ultimate success of the project, and he tried to use empirical evidence to show how evacuations should be carried out, in vain. He made documents that were distributed to military leaders outlining the challenges that the evacuators would face. The path-to goal style of leadership gives a concentration on the level of capability, and it is usually effective when the leaders have high levels of intelligence. Examples of this style to Colonel Daniel include the recommendation that the state concentrated a large number of soldiers to send a warning of military strength to the residents of Gaza Strip so as to deter them from demonstrating. That psychological warfare approach could be effective in achieving forced evacuations, but it would also spell doom to the project in the event that the whole project turns into chaos between the IDF and the people of Gaza. His recommendation that the soldiers doing evacuation should be unarmed went in tandem with the requirements of the situation, given that the people needed to trust the state on matters of engagement. However, it overlooked the possibility of facing armed evacuatees who could injure the soldiers using their guns. On the issue of using female soldiers to evacuate women, Colonel Daniel was thinking regarding protecting the privacy of the evacuatees, and, though this is a strong-willed approach, it overlooked the possibility that an unarmed man would strike an agreement with a woman faster than a fellow woman. The oversight of such a possibility was a result of reading from a psychological handbook influenced by ideas on sexuality, as opposed to a real case scenario that involved distressed women who were unsure of what awaited them.
Comparing Yaron and Daniel styles of leaderships, it is important to note how the two men concentrated on the problem at hand, and the humanitarian risk of the project. From the onset, Daniel was very wary of the psychological tensions that the project would create, and he was keen on ensuring that the execution of the plan did not expose the evacuatees and evacuators to extra distress. The same thought was shared by Yaron, who insisted on protecting the human side of the problem, so much so, that he went on a pilot study tour to Gaza Strip to gauge the levels of support (and lack of it) to the project by Gaza residents. However, the two main were different in that Daniel was a bookie, and his recommendations were mainly based on academic literature and research, while Yaron was a pragmatic whose approaches centered on the need to have a collective force that understood the problem from a human problem. For instance, the concentration of military soldiers recommendation by Colonel Daniel would prove unsuccessful, as it was seen when 40,000 demonstrators held three-day protests despite the visible presence of 20,000 military men. Furthermore, the reaction of the military in an event of protecting was not clear from the word go, and Daniel had recommended the use of force only if force was used on the soldiers. This could have endangered the project completely because a retaliation (as opposed to the formation of the 20,000 soldiers wall, that was used to combat the protests) would have blown away the balance of the entire project. It suffices, therefore, to say that Yaron was a better project manager than Daniel, because, as a leader, he gave extra emphasis on the end goal – success – as opposed to the process. He was interested in the peaceful evacuation as opposed to a warfare victory that feted the government against the Jews of Gaza.
An assessment of the leadership styles of Colonel Daniel and Yaron using the Carl Jung theory and four personality traits, it is clear that an interrelationship between the two men would create landmark success in many situations. First, Daniel had a ‘thinking judgment’, an aspect of his behavior that made him respect the use of research and date in making decisions, while Yaron was very intuitive, a characteristic that had developed over a long period of military operations (Hiltner, 1961). Yaron’s judgment was skewed towards what mattered to the different parties, while Daniel was focused on how the project could succeed within the boundaries of government principles. Following government policies in a tricky operation like the disengagement can lead to oppressive decisions that would destroy the relationship between the people and the government. For Yaron, having a clear sense of responsibility helped him to construct opinions that helped the people of Gaza and the soldiers to collaborate in the process, contributing to the success of the project. Particularly, Yaron’s fascination with behavioral predictions and his modest approach to success made it possible to create trust between the evacuators and the people. His situation-based approach made him postpone the project for two days, to allow the government to make a request to the people of Gaza to move to the new location. The recognition of the necessity of accommodating the voices of the evacuatees helped Yaron in avoiding an outburst that would have frustrated the project and hampered the chances of success. Comparing with the strong opinions of Daniel, focused on the paper target of disengagement of the Jews in Gaza, Yaron’s approach was more humanistic and effective.
Conclusion
Leadership comes handy in project management. Most of the times, projects run from one crisis to another, and the inevitability of the problems requires transformational leaders. Yaron did not claim to know the solutions to the problems faced by the evacuation, but, rather, he believed in the importance of strong team set-up and sectional leadership in the project. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel came from a different school of thought, and his fascination with keeping to the goals of the project provided a strong backdrop on which the project could be drawn.
References
Hiltner, S. (1961). Carl Gustav Jung. Pastoral Psychology, 12(7), 7–9. doi:10.1007/bf01761988
House, R. J. (1996). Path-goal theory of leadership: Lessons, legacy, and a reformulated theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 7(3), 323–352. doi:10.1016/s1048-9843(96)90024-7
Kelly, S. (2006). Leadership Refrains: Patterns of leadership. Leadership, 2(2), 181–201. doi:10.1177/1742715006062934
Salem, H. (2015, August 15). The soldier, the settler, and the journalist: Remembering Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza | VICE News. Retrieved July 29, 2016, from https://news.vice.com/article/the-soldier-the-settler-and-the-journalist-remembering- israels-withdrawal-from-gaza
