Liberating Leadership Pt 1
The idea of leadership is woven into nearly every conversation we have at work, with friends, or in classes. Despite the frequency with which we think about leadership, the understanding of it is murkier than ever. It was made even murkier when two Equity Labs team members, Assistant Director Ashley Hill and Marketing Manager Kenna Andreas-Lee, participated in classes about leadership in the 2023-2024 academic school year. The classes, in two separate colleges on campus (University College and Daniels College of Business), intended to teach us about leadership. Throughout the courses, we came to work and debriefed what we were learning. As we did this, we shared increasingly appalling experiences.
Kenna’s Experience
In multiple classes, we covered leadership in some way, shape, or form in each 10 week-period. We discussed different theories, evaluated our beliefs around leadership, and shared examples of different leaders. Like Ashley, my examples were riddled with people such as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler (mentioned five different times). Another common thread was the lack of examples that included anyone outside of the white, cisgender, heterosexual man. There was one class where the professor included only ONE woman as an example of leader who happened to be Mother Teresa. And finally, one professor asked the class to share characteristics of leaders where many mentioned what some consider “soft skills” (e.g., empathy, clear communication). The professor went on to say that while these are important, you never met a leader who got stuff done by being empathetic. They got stuff done by being strict and knowing what they wanted. These teachings were meant to be foundational as we moved through more of our content surrounding organizational leadership and development.
Ashley’s Experience:
In my class, the professor was instructing us on traditional leadership theory which includes a type of leadership called charismatic leadership. When the class was asked for examples, someone brought up Adolf Hitler. The professor proceeded to show a video of Hitler giving a speech that was already cued up and included in the content for that day’s class. There was little discussion or debrief about this with an implicit “he’s bad but there’s something to learn here” message.
In that moment, I was rendered speechless. Normally, I am willing to raise my hand and name unethical, unprofessional, and antisemitic, behavior I see. I know this is a privilege of my cisgender, female, whiteness. I was so angry, though, that I did not say anything. This moment in my leadership class began an ongoing saga of oppressive classroom management and classroom content about leadership that is outdated, lacking in criticality, and leaving students without much needed leadership skills.
After comparing notes and classroom experiences, we began to question how leadership is portrayed and taught as professional, adult learners. What we know is that leadership in the workplace continuously changes, evolves, and requires nuanced approaches. That begs the question, why, in our classrooms or professional development trainings, are we still upholding a concept of leadership that perpetuates a homogenous mold or type to be seen as a “great” leader?
Some people may see the mentioned faculty’s behavior as “just the way it is” in classrooms or see us as more hyper-sensitive millennials who cannot “objectively” take in information. We argue this is not the case. The way we teach and learn about leadership aims to shape today and tomorrow’s leaders. Without criticality and expansive ideas on leadership, it is reasonable to expect that this and the next generation of leaders will continue to perpetuate harmful tropes, oppress people who already exist in the margins, and consolidate power where it currently lies.
In this Liberating Leadership series, Equity Labs seeks to offer criticality and expansive ideas on how we teach, learn, and enact leadership. We are utilizing Bobbie Haro’s Cycle of Liberation to guide our understanding of liberating leadership as we move through this piece.
We offer this guiding question which you will see repeated throughout the blog series:
How would you lead or want to be led in this world if you had a responsibility for the just and equitable wellbeing of all the people in your community and at work?
Liberating Ourselves from Oppressive Leadership
Before we can jump into strategies and tools for liberatory leadership practices, evaluating the relationship we hold to leadership as individuals is crucial. Leadership theory and practice has seen many iterations over time.
In the 1920’s the Great Man Theory served as the dominant way of thinking about leadership. Central to this idea was the inherent belief that some individuals are born with the characteristic traits that predispose them to being leaders (i.e., “you’re a natural born leader”). As the name suggests, this theory was largely directed at men leading to ongoing socialization to the idea that men are “more likely and willing to be in leadership”.
Charismatic Leadership Theory from the 1970’s looked at the personality traits of leaders that can be used to influence those that they lead through charm and persuasion to have followers believe what they do(i.e., “you are inspiring, I agree with you completely”).
More recent leadership models like Transformational Leadership Theory from about 10 years ago, leans into motivating people around leaders through collaborative vision making (i.e., “let’s focus on our shared mission”).
Some of the latest theorizing on leadership considers the functions and systems that move people or an agenda without putting a leader at the center of it all (i.e., self-managing teams, distributive leadership models, dynamic leadership models).
These theories have been used over time to explain, identify, and encourage leadership in workplaces. As our workplaces have changed, so has our understanding of what leadership can look like.
Even though the thinking on leadership has evolved so much since the advent of The Great Man Theory why is it that we don’t see this reflected in our workplaces or our professional development classes? The classes Ashley and I participated in are meant to be educational for the current and next generation of leaders. But, more often than not, we continue to learn about outdated, patriarchal, capitalist-focused, and oppressive leadership models.
Cycle of Liberation
There is no hard and fast rule on what our liberation journeys might look like or how long it takes, only that it starts. Bobbie Harro provides the Cycle of Liberation, a framework in which, as individuals, we can lean into to support our individual liberation. The cycle consists of seven phases: (1) waking up, (2) getting ready, (3) reaching out, (4) building community, (5) coalescing, (6) creating change, and (7) maintaining. Moving toward liberation takes practice and time and will require iterations of this cycle. It is important to know liberation emerges across intersectional identities in different ways. For example, in the workplace, Black women’s liberation is not the same as white women’s liberation, primarily because of the ongoing misogynoir and racialized treatment of Black women in the workplace.
Waking Up and Getting Ready
The Cycle of Liberation begins with a change. A change at our core, something that changes our worldview, or something that shifts our perspective. In the workplace this may be realizing a direct manager has never taken suggestions from you or your team. Once we experience this shift, we must make time to dismantle previous assumptions and rebuild or adapt aspects of ourselves. The integral aspects to waking up and getting ready to liberate ourselves from oppressive leadership, as outlined by Harro, include:
Introspection/Reflection: This might look like asking questions; how have I previously defined effective leadership? When are times I felt truly supported by leadership? When are times I or others around me have been silenced or ignored?
Education: Actively learn about different types of leadership and relationship building to find what resonates with you and your new world view from leaders, co-workers, or mentors. Some examples include:
Consciousness Raising: Engage in critically analyzing your workplace and how individuals, groups, or systems uphold or perpetuate the oppressive actions of others. How does this critical analysis connect to your new assumptions about leadership? What biases or goals are attached to the old oppressive leadership practices?
Reaching Out and Building Community
As soon as we begin to recognize and process the shift in our core assumptions, it is a natural next step to want to talk to the people you trust. Reaching out supports us in building the language of our new worldview, understanding how others receive and comprehend it, and receiving feedback through dialogue. Reaching out can mean discussions with close friends, other industry connections, or family members. When we have the chance to reconstruct our lens with support, pushback, and dialogue it helps shape our leadership practices. Reaching out morphs into the interpersonal phase of building community. This is when the act of dialoging with people becomes crucial, both with folks we trust and folks who have different experiences. As we move toward liberating ourselves from oppressive leadership structures, we can identify those structures in our workplaces. Equipped with this knowledge, we can begin to practice liberatory leadership.
“Individual liberation becomes a communal revolution when more people participate in the liberatory practice. ”
Liberatory Leadership
Our workplaces are ideal sites to carry out and practice liberatory leadership. Though it may feel counterintuitive, evaluating what practices are moving us toward liberation and away from oppression is powerful. It can certainly be difficult to imagine workplaces without, for example, hierarchy. If there is no hierarchy, who will the most important decisions fall to? Who will be “on the hook” if something goes wrong? How will we structure pay and promotions if there’s no upward mobility? Each of these questions are rooted in leadership theories centering patriarchy and capitalism. The questions imply business, or operations can only function IF a patriarchal and capitalist system is in place. These questions imply that without leadership, workplaces and communities will devolve into chaos. This logic is the same logic we see used when there are calls to defund the police. Throughout this blog series, we will interrogate these ideas further and challenge this logic, working to root out white supremacy and lean into liberation.
Knowing this, here are a few examples of what oppressive leadership structures in our workplaces might look like in practice:
Important decisions about business practices are only made by a select few people in power. This might be as overt as a white, wealthy, cisgender male (a la Elon Musk) making decisions (e.g., his return-to-work policies after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic) which are out of touch with the workforce. But it might also be as quiet or implicit as a well-intended, racially and gender diverse board of directors making decisions on behalf of the staff of a nonprofit. The consolidation of power can lead away from collective liberation.
Human resources structures are limited to punitive, surface-level, or legal action. While sometimes necessary, human resources are another area of consolidated power. A lack of transparency or clarity in how issues in the workplace are solved may discourage employees from engaging in problem solving or leave people feeling isolated. This might look like depersonalizing individual or interpersonal issues by requiring overly formal processes that ignore nuance and complexity. Forcing a hierarchical structure on problem solving can lead away from collective liberation.
Success is only valued if it is “earned”. Bootstrapping is a long-standing myth – if someone works hard enough, they will succeed. This myth ensnared generations and ensured personal value would be tied to the ability to obtain and maintain a “steady” job. This might look like devaluation of some professions and divides along (to name just a few) racial and gender lines in industries and those in power. Monolithic definitions of success can lead away from collective liberation.
Certainty and predictability are valued over flexibility and emergence. When it comes to certainty in the workplace, there is usually acceptance around it, employees rely on certainty for paychecks, schedules, and opportunities for time off. There are moments where the need for certainty means there is little to no transparency about important decisions or changes. For example, laying off swaths of people without preparing the working community and without recognizing the emergent needs and worries of a fearful work culture.
Moving toward liberatory leadership practices in the workplace will be iterative and emergent. There is not one correct pathway to liberation, and it should look different for each person, team, and work environment. Some ways to move toward liberatory leadership include:
Choosing metrics for success and productivity outside of money (e.g., quality of a product or depth of relationship, social impact). This can look like working as a team to decide you want to use the quality of relationships within the team and with clients to recognize your success. It may also look like being intentional and selective with where funding for programming comes from by researching funders and organizations to understand their politics and priorities.
Moving away from binaries (e.g., this is leadership, and this is not, expansively approaching governance structures). Expanding ideas about how and where work is completed can help step back from binaries. For example, honoring working styles and timeframes, allowing work from home and other flexible work structures, and honoring the amount of time your team wants to spend in meetings or in community versus individual work.
Committing to change and equitable practices (e.g., preparing for emergent challenges, distributing responsibility for leadership during change, reviewing and adjusting workplace practices and policies). Regardless of your industry, crises and challenges will occur. Being prepared in advance can help everyone navigate these times. Communications planning is an excellent place to start, how do you want to respond internally and externally in the case of an emergency? How will your team classify an emergency? Does your organization have the capacity to support team members and the community through direct action, financial support, or volunteering?
Imagining what is possible through multiple modalities (conversation, writing, reading, shared experiences). Normative communication methods like email, text, or video calls can be limiting when working to imagine a more equitable workplace. Building enough trust to explore and dream as a team will take time, but using different modalities can help. Consider reading content relevant to your field and talking about it or participating in shared experiences. Opportunities like these can create time and space dedicated to learning and growth and distribute power and knowledge equitably.
Build Your Leadership Ethos Pt. 1
At the end of each part of the Liberating Leadership series, we are going to provide a prompt to guide you in building your own Leadership Ethos. The Leadership Ethos is an outgrowth of the Equity Ethos, authored by our Executive Director, Chenthu Jayton. The leadership ethos poses the following guiding question which you saw in the introduction:
How would you lead or want to be led in this world if you had a responsibility for the just and equitable wellbeing of all the people in your community and at work?
Section 1: Starting Assumptions About Leadership
We start by examining the assumptions we hold around leadership both as leaders and those being led. Assumptions are an indelible part of the way we make sense of the world. Just as the first two phases of the cycle of liberation start the process, examining the assumptions you currently hold and how new information changes them can help you move toward liberation in your leadership.
Reflect on your starting assumptions by considering these questions:
How do I define leadership, both in myself and those around me? Are all leaders the same? To what do I attribute the qualities of different leaders?
Should leaders be responsible for the wellbeing of not just themselves, but their employees? What about clients? What about community members?
How do I define the “success” or “failure” of leadership? How can I adjust my perspective to be more expansive and to move away from a binary perception of success?
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