Leadership

Leadership is not a title or a position. It’s a way of being in the world — a willingness to act when action is needed, to ask when others are silent, to share a possibility when others have lost heart. “Successful leaders,” the great management thinker Peter Drucker wrote, “don’t start out asking, ‘What do I want to do?’ They ask, ‘What needs to be done?’” That shift — from self to service — is where leadership begins.

Sometimes leadership takes the form of command. In a crisis or on the battlefield, clear direction and a chain of authority are what’s needed. But leadership also comes in quieter forms: the team member who speaks a hard truth in a meeting, the teacher who sees potential in a struggling student, the engineer troubled by an anomaly.

Leadership holds great psychic power within a group, and very often it carries formal power as well. Reinforced by deference, ceremony, and symbols of authority, it can dazzle with visible force. But at its heart, leadership is not power over — it is, as the 20th-century management pioneer Mary Parker Follett argued, power with. It is a relationship between people, sustained by the leader’s actions but even more by others’ perceptions of the impact of those actions. People, individually as well as collectively, grant authority and trust — but they are constantly recalibrating the degree of their support, demurral, or resistance. Leadership as a phenomenon is thus profoundly dynamic, rising and falling, strengthening through (the perception of) success, weakening through (the perception of) failure or frustration, and transformed in times of challenge and crisis into something vital and of immense power.

People look to leaders for more than inspiration. They expect skill: the ability to navigate tension, manage conflict, resolve confusion. The demands placed on leaders are immense. Some meet these demands — at least for a time — through charisma, performance, or bluff. But the most enduring leaders go deeper. They understand that the real work is not to win praise, but to help the group face its real problems, even when doing so is difficult or unsettling.

Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, exemplified this kind of visionary and courageous leadership. Urgently aware of Kenya’s environmental and human challenges — especially the lack of education, voice, and power that women experienced— she led not by commanding attention, but by organizing, teaching, and persisting. She became famous for teaching rural women to plant trees to combat deforestation. But her vision stretched further: “Our work,” she once said, “was not simply about planting trees. It was about inspiring people to take charge of their environment, the system that governed them, their lives, and the future.” Her leadership endured because it connected deeply with the lives of others, and was rooted in stewardship — care for people, for the land, and for generations to come.

This is the leadership we need — anchored in responsibility, sustained by trust, and directed toward the flourishing of the group.