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Eighty four years ago today, a polish priest and Franciscan friar was murdered by lethal injection in Auschwitz. His name was Maximilian Kolbe and he was incarcerated because his friary gave shelter to thousands of Jews. While he was imprisoned in Auschwitz, another prisoner escaped and its deputy commander picked ten men to be starved to death in reprisal. Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of those selected and after weeks of starvation he was killed with carbolic acid. In 1982, Pope John Paul II canonised Kolbe, calling him a ‘saint for our troubled age.’ Ahead of tomorrow’s summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Kolbe’s example of self-sacrifice has been much on my mind. At face value, the meeting could not be further removed from his story. Kolbe’s life unfolded at the micro level, among ordinary, unknown people, whereas Trump and Putin are world-famous, discussing huge geo-political matters. They exercise leadership far removed from someone like Maximilian Kolbe. Nonetheless, I wonder how their leadership might look if they took note of Kolbe’s self-sacrifice. In his well-known analysis of leadership, the psychologist Daniel Goldman suggested that people tend to deploy one of six classic styles. Authoritarian politicians, for example, tend to use the coercive leadership style which commands and directs subordinates to act in specific ways. While Goldman says there can be a time and place for such leadership, unless it is balanced with other approaches like coaching and participative leadership, it can have damaging effects. Maximilian Kolbe displayed sacrificial leadership. He set an example by offering his life for the sake of another prisoner. He drew on Jesus’s words, who when faced with his own death, said, ‘Greater love has no one than to lay down their life for their friends.’ Kolbe gave his life for a stranger. Through self-sacrifice he placed the interests of another ahead of his own. But one does not need to face death to show sacrificial leadership. In my own work I know how tempting it is to act in a way which promotes my own advantage. For the sake of the common good, however, sometimes we have to let that go. When Presidents Trump and Putin meet tomorrow, I cannot imagine that Maximilian Kolbe’s self-sacrifice will be on the agenda. Kolbe is reputed to have said, ‘Let us remember that love lives through sacrifice ... Without sacrifice there is no love.’ I know a resolution in Ukraine will take more than self-sacrifice, but I also sense that when we exercise leadership at any level it benefits from setting aside the temptation to burnish one’s own reputation or gain a selfish advantage and, instead, to focus on promoting and achieving the common good.