How Has Your Perception of Leadership Changed or Needed to Change?
Overview
The Leadership in Action series showcases how organizations can create transformative change in communities by disrupting standard research practices. This blog is one way we pursue our aim, inviting changemakers from multiple sectors to engage in impactful—and sometimes difficult—reflective conversations. This collective practice illuminates how and why we engage in this work and creates space for us to get curious about other practices and potential tools we might use to further the work of equity in action.
At RIA, we use the Equity in Action (EIA) model to disrupt the transactional politics of traditional research and move toward a reciprocal model that values actionable research, community-led processes, and racial justice. This model requires a great deal of self-awareness, nimbleness and attention to our interpersonal growth. We often say at RIA that there is the plan, and then there is what happens.
Some of the questions we use to spark these conversations on the blog include:
What are those yet-to-be-known research practices most effective in achieving our community’s radical dreams?
Do your values align with your strategies?
What makes it difficult to live out your values in daily life?
How do you manage inhospitable and uninviting environments that do not align with your values?
Living your values in your leadership
How do you unlearn harmful leadership strategies and lead with social justice at the center?
If we are imagining a new world that is more just then we must also imagine what types of leadership would be needed to cultivate and sustain that world. We would need to unlearn harmful ways of building and sustaining relationships. What does it mean that our society and its institutions do not teach us how to be “ethical” “socially conscious” leaders? How does one become a researcher who is transparent and accountable to everyone, not just to themselves?
Sharing our stories of coming to a new style of leadership is our way of inviting others to reflect on the following:
What do you need to unlearn about leadership and why?
How is the environment you are living or working in impacting how you show up as a leader? How much is that you, or the organizational culture?
If you were truly living and leading in your values what do you imagine would be different about your research, your work at large, or your worldview?
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Leadership isn’t about who speaks the loudest—it’s about the people you mentor and the legacy you leave. It’s not about using your words as weapons but listening deeply and standing firm in your values with compassion. Leadership is about repairing harm to build coalitions, not to cast blame or shame. It’s as much about personal growth as it is about creating material change.
But very few people are taught these views on leadership.In my formative years, I was taught to stay quiet and suppress my opinions as well as my feelings and just keep moving. I wasn’t taught to value the knowledge gained through lived experiences, or to think about how those experiences might make me a good leader. When I entered adulthood and the university system, I found myself in an inhospitable environment where leaders insisted on maintaining hierarchy, ignored the wisdom of people in community, and wielded their power to belittle others and advance their personal careers. For a while, their leadership undermined my natural leadership abilities and made me question my own power.
Thankfully, I found refuge and inspiration in the voices of scholar-activists like Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and bell hooks. Their fight for freedom was rooted in leadership that addresses real, material harm through Black feminist ethics and care that value communal meaning-making and problem solving. Yet, despite my access to this wisdom, my path to leadership was marked by pain. One overlooked truth about leadership is that unaddressed pain influences how we lead.
My passion to make a better society for Black women and girls stems from periods in my life when I didn’t feel valued, heard, or worthy. I didn’t have strong role models to guide me through the hardest parts of my youth. While I now understand that the adults around me were carrying burdens I couldn’t comprehend, I needed someone to advocate for me, to model love, healing, and leadership. That didn’t happen, I entered adulthood without a strong foundation for compassion and repair.
Some of those harmful leadership qualities I loathed in academia showed up in my early years as a student and community activist. I was often abrasive and combative, but that’s not how you build coalitions or bridges. As I navigated the toxic culture of academia I neglected my health and happiness. It wasn’t until I held myself accountable to my values and left the spaces causing me harm that I could begin to embrace the leader I was meant to become.
Too many of us carry trauma that distorts our leadership rather than deepens it. We get in our own way, create unnecessary barriers, alienate potential allies, and limit our impact. The truth is: healing is essential to leadership. To be a better leader, we must heal the parts of us that cling to pain and instead choose to move with love.
I haven’t arrived, but I am becoming. I am becoming a leader who leads by example, committed to my own healing, and in doing so, helping others heal too.
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In academia, “leadership” meant serving on a faculty committee or emulating administrators. But most faculty learn to distrust administrators, who have been slashing budgets in the name of efficiency rather than thinking about what makes a good learning or research environment. The university refined my “Spidey senses” for bad leadership, but didn’t support a vision of good leadership.
See 2021: the head of my department at my last campus asked us (ok, voluntold us) to listen to a podcast featuring our highest administrator. I followed orders and listened as this white woman described teaching Alaska Native youth in a “village school in the bush of Alaska.” She emphasized how one of the young men in her charge “had never been that close to a blue-eyed person before.”
What leadership skills could I—a young brown, queer academic, passionate and slightly jaded— gain from a lesson about leadership wrapped in reminiscences akin to 19th century white missionaries’ travel diaries? I sought leadership and mentoring from my tenured colleagues after that debacle, only to be met with silence. They had nothing to say about the way new faculty were told to learn leadership via colonialist nonsense.
I am not the first to say that academia isn’t a great place for leaders who use their heart to find mentoring or be nurtured. I needed to get out to find more liberatory understandings of leadership. Coming to RIA has been a way for me to experience (while stumbling) what leadership with heart and passion can look like. I experience, with the team and the community, the range of possibilities of research when we decolonize leadership and lean into vulnerability and transparency. I won't say it's easy. Still, I know that showing my vulnerability is not a sign of weak leadership, but rather a demonstration of being willing to learn new skills to become a good leader. My willingness to say, “I do not know, but this is what I think it means,” illuminates new lessons for those I wish to guide and for myself. Leadership is about showing the strength of the individual to take a position of humility to change the world.
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I didn’t always see myself as a leader—especially not during graduate school. My focus was on personal growth and academic achievement, not on guiding or influencing others. The idea of myself as a leader—especially as defined in western, masculine, terms—felt foreign. I thought leaders had to be loud, charismatic, and domineering. To me, leadership meant control, confidence, and power, none of which I felt I naturally embodied.
As I grew older and surrounded myself with a diverse circle of Black and Brown women, that definition of leadership began to unravel. I encountered women who led with empathy, humility, and vulnerability—traits I once saw as weaknesses. These women commanded respect not through force, but through authenticity and compassion. They didn’t strive to control others; they created space for others to grow. I came to understand leadership as an act of service—something you become through giving, not by asserting dominance. That’s why the term “servant leader” resonates so deeply with me now.
What once seemed like contradictions—vulnerability and leadership—have become central to how I show up in the world. I used to believe that leaders had to be flawless, above reproach, untouched by failure. But I’ve come to understand that real leadership is found in the willingness to be seen fully—in strength and in struggle. Vulnerable leaders connect with others in meaningful ways. They give people permission to be imperfect, to grow, and to lead from wherever they are.
My leadership isn’t defined by having all the answers or standing at the front of the room. It’s about resilience—getting up after setbacks, learning from my own missteps, and continuing even when it’s hard. I’ve had moments where I didn’t feel worthy, times when I failed or made choices that didn’t align with my values. Those experiences taught me that leadership isn’t about perfection—it’s about persistence, reflection, and the willingness to evolve.
Today, I see leadership as walking alongside people, helping them see what’s possible, and reminding them that they’re not alone. If I had clung to my old understanding of leadership, I would have never recognized my own potential. Now I know leadership comes in many forms, and we each have the power to define it on our own terms. We can lead, we can be led, and we can keep learning from one another every step of the way.
