What is Leadership? An Indigenous Feminist Perspective

Photo credit: Liza K. Williams

Dear friends on the path,       

If you were to sneak into my home office, you would find stacks and stacks of books – bent and underlined, filled with post-its, and marked up and creased. My collection is eclectic. If I do a quick scan of my bookshelf, the colorful spines of my books name authors such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Brene Brown, Joy Harjo, Pema Chodron, Angela Y. Davis, Julia Cameron, and so many others.  I find something deeply comforting about books, their ideas, the new worlds expressed through words, and the way those words open the imagination to new possibilities.

Books, like all stories (both fiction or non-fiction) are the root of how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. As human beings, we love stories – they define who we are. Stories help us understand our origins, locate us in a specific geography, in a particular time or era, and they help us orient ourselves so that we may better understand where we are going.

Stories are the bridge between our individuality and the collective. Stories hold the power to define how we show up in the world, how we lead, and how we serve others.  On the other hand, if we are constantly exposed to stories about people that don’t look like us, or who don’t live in places we live in, or that don’t represent our lived experiences, those stories become another way that hierarchy and oppression are left unchecked – becoming tools that stifle belonging.

We need stories to understand ourselves and one another. We need stories to find new definitions of leadership.

Over the last two years in my Regenerative Leadership course, I have led many women and folx through an exploratory process of understanding the relationship between their individual stories and leadership. We all have a story to tell, and in the context of our professional lives in a capitalist society, we are often encouraged to present a one-sided, glossy, edited version of ourselves that paints a picture of poise and perfection. While it is important to be professional, I believe that we urgently need more models of leadership that embrace the unknown, the messy middle, the heart-center, and the holistic.

I have witnessed people in my courses have huge insights around how their childhoods and leadership are connected in ways (both supportive and limiting) they never had put to words before.  The exploration allowed them to identify ways they – for survival reasons – had been hiding parts of themselves to fit into white, capitalist, patriarchal versions of leadership. In our safe space, they were able to voice how the disconnect between "true-self" and "visible-self" was holding them back from growing and having greater impact in their careers. I have witnessed that the antidote to that disconnection is to cultivate the bridge between our stories and our leadership.

In my own personal and professional journey, I too grapple with my own definition of leadership. What does it mean to lead? How is leadership different than management? Is leadership something only reserved for those with fancy titles or direct reports? How is leadership related to our efforts to dismantle oppressive systems, and create more equity and inclusion? Can leadership serve as a force for change?

As an indigenous Hawaiian woman and feminist, it’s been difficult to find definitions of leadership that challenge our ideas of leading from the top down with a singular person at the helm. I find that it’s much easier to rely on what’s familiar – hierarchical, patriarchal (even if the leader is a woman), and power-over relationships as a framework for organizational structure and leadership.

Because of this, I feel it is imperative for all of us on the margins to offer up new definitions of leadership that incorporate cultural knowledge, alternative forms of knowledge sharing, and shared leadership models where all leaders have an equitable voice at the table.

The following is my humble attempt at rethinking the relationships between leadership, power, systems, our individual and collective stories, and our service in the world. My definitions are meant as invitations to spark discussion of innovative forms of leadership. My definitions are not meant to be comprehensive, set in stone, or absolute. Rather, I see my initial thoughts as a doorway to help us reimagine new ways of being. In addition, the definitions I offer below are grounded in indigenous thinking, a feminist lens, and are a purposeful departure from corporate understandings of leadership. Here we go.

Let’s start with the first questions:

What does it mean to lead? And how is leadership different than management?

I see leading as our ability to steward ourselves and others with hearts forward, minds clear, and spirits grounded, to move our collective in the direction of a more beautiful and just world.

When we are leading versus managing, there is a qualitative difference in our relationships with others. As leaders we steward – we create openings, we guide and allow. As managers we direct – we execute, prescribe and make compliant, we may command or dictate.

Leadership is about many things, but these elements come to mind initially: the ability to tolerate and navigate discomfort and conflict, the humility to ask for help, the courage to say, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t understand,” the ability to steward others toward their most powerful selves, the ownership of visibility, the application of holding safe space, the ability to find, use, and cultivate our strengths, and the commitment to visioning new worlds.

Leading is how we show up in the world, in all our roles as human beings. I see leading and managing as two overlapping yet fundamentally different ways of creating change. Both leading and managing are about moving people and projects toward a shared goal. I see leading (at least the potential of a new kind of leadership) to be about actively empowering others to shape the way forward.

I see managing as a more direct endeavor toward a shared outcome. Neither leading or managing is better or worse, they are simply different. That said, I do believe that our familiar notions of leadership are more rooted in what we think of as management. If we can actively notice the differences in leadership and management, and bring this to the forefront of our awareness, I believe we can step more fully into our power as leaders.

Is leadership something only reserved for those with fancy titles or direct reports?

Absolutely not! One of the discussions I love to host in our Regenerative Leadership course are the myriad ways leadership shows up in our lives.

I believe that at its heart, a feminist and indigenous framework for leadership is circular, rooted in our personal origin stories, grounded in belonging, and open to humility, learning and change.

It is the shared experience of being in community while also holding space for deep contemplation and authentic expression. We don’t need to have a fancy title or even have direct reports to cultivate our leadership. For some of us, we are the leaders in our families, our community groups, in our religious or spiritual spaces.

I also believe every single one of us is the leader of our own lives. In patriarchal, capitalist, and white-supremacist cultures we are taught to see leadership in the form of institutions – the military industrial complex, government, education, and medicine to name a few. In oppressive systems, we are taught that power exists “outside” us and that people with the fancy titles and direct reports have dominion over our lives. And yes, this may be true to some extent.

Instead, I’d like us to rethink leadership as every human being’s innate birthright, as the most sovereign expression of our most powerful selves, and as the seed of potential within all of us.

When we begin at the starting point that every human being has an innate birthright to leadership, this sets the foundation for our projects, our collaborations, our decisions, and our productivity.

How is leadership related to our efforts to dismantle oppressive systems? How can it create more equity and inclusion? Can leadership serve as a force for change?

I believe that whole-hearted leadership is one of the most powerful tools that we have in our movements to dismantle oppressive systems. I believe that grounded leadership is a catalyst for change. When leadership is truly circular, shared and inclusive, leadership can serve as a transformative force for change by helping people feel valued, heard and seen. The most difficult part of circular leadership is having access to models of leadership that embody these qualities. It’s much easier to google “leadership,” and find corporate-sponsored articles on leadership that include familiar definitions, that echo notions of management, and that do not challenge the status quo.

Here's the thing – if we want to create a new, more beautiful and just world, we must begin with stewarding new forms of leadership into being. We need definitions of leadership that are truly diverse and that allow for humans to show up in their complexity, wisdom, experience, knowledge, and expertise. We need the scientists alongside the poets, we need the parents alongside the activists, we need the astronomers alongside the artists, we need the cultural practitioners alongside the soul-seekers.

Our collective power is directly correlated with our ability to hold dichotomy, to hold conflict, and to move through difference with grace and humility.

We must be able to hold the multitude of stories that make us human and weave those stories into new understandings of where we want to go as a planet. Do we want to serve as catalysts of healing? Do we want to help the planet heal? Or will we remain stuck in the familiar to avoid the discomfort of real transformation and the potential for change? Staying in our familiar ways of being only serves to give us a false sense of safety, perpetuating the illusion that if we stay small, we stay safe.

As leaders we must become a bridge that connects our individual selves to our collective vision of a more beautiful and just world. Every human has a role to play in this story.

We must as leaders, steward our stories by exploring them, sharing them and being brave enough to rewrite them in the name of transformative change. We must be willing to leave our comfort zones, to tolerate the discomfort, and anchor in the knowing that no matter what comes our way, we are resilient and strong enough to handle all the things - the difficult and the joyful.

I believe every human, every voice, and every experience has a place in this world. I believe that when we steward in a respect for the collective knowledge of our ancestors and our leaders, we will be more ready to steward in a thriving world for our descendants.

This is my hope and vision for this complicated world.

To learn more visit my website at: drlizakwilliams.com

In solidarity and love,

Liza