Leadership is not for the lily-livered. It's not just the casualties that you need to be able to stomach. Dwight Eisenhower didn't become president because of his skills as a general, he became a general because of his skills as a politician. I'm not endorsing playing dirty. I'm just telling you that you can't pretend that the game won't get rough and that you can stay above the fray and still be an effective leader.
Leaders make meaning.
A leader's job isn't just to make decisions and to make products or services. A leader's job is also to make meaning. Because in times like these, people depend on their leaders to absorb all of the chaos, all of the information, all of the change, and to find some meaningful pattern and compelling purpose in the midst of all of the splatter. You exhaust your intellectual capital. Before you became a leader, you accumulated that capital by going to conferences and taking notes.