Reclaiming Leadership as a Human Birthright

We have been talking about “reimagining leadership” for years. The intent is good because it means moving away from a more traditional, old-school approach that focuses self, control and power over others. We have seen the push toward integration of so-called ‘softer skills’ that are meant to support more human-centric leadership. Yet, much remains the same. Do you ever wonder why that is?

One reason is that our concept of leadership still has remarkably deep roots in one particular story - a story shaped almost entirely by straight, white, cisgender men.

That’s not an opinion. It’s simply the reality of who held power historically in the West, who got to make the rules, and who was permitted to lead without risking punishment, exclusion, or worse. If you weren’t male, weren’t straight, weren’t white, or weren’t cis and chose to live and lead authentically, then leadership wasn’t something you could step into freely. To lead, you had to resist, steal, negotiate, mask to access, or pay for it. Sometimes, maybe often, you still do.

So, the early blueprint for “what a leader looks like” was drawn from a narrow slice of human experience. We have inherited a system that values a view of leadership conditioned by patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, colonialism, and the workplace structures they created.

What we inherited

From that lineage came a set of traits we still associate with leadership today, some of which you’ll recognise as:

• certainty

• control

• decisiveness

• authority

• individualism

• emotional restraint

• competitiveness

• hierarchical thinking

These traits aren’t inherently “bad,” nor are they exhaustive. They simply reflect the worldview and lived experience of those who were historically allowed to hold power.

The issue is that these traits were packaged as universal rather than contextual. They were presented as objective truths about leadership, not cultural artefacts born from one group’s worldview.

And we’re still living inside that inheritance.

Those left out shaped leadership too, but from the margins

Women, queer people, people of colour — anyone outside the dominant group — have always led. We have always influenced. We have always held communities together.
However, our forms of leadership were dismissed, unrecognised, or actively punished when they challenged power. The traits they brought — relational intelligence, emotional nuance, collaboration, adaptability, intuitive knowing, collective care — were labelled “soft,” “lesser,” or “unsuitable” for the real work of leading.

In fact, a huge piece of our human leadership story was pushed underground or actively erased.

We’re only beginning to acknowledge this wisdom now in a broader context, often labelling it as the next thing in leadership, as if these qualities are some radical new invention rather than part of the human story we’ve sidelined for centuries.

The tension we feel today

You can feel the discomfort in organisations right now. People say they want compassionate, human-centric leadership. They say we need empathy, belonging, and psychological safety. And on some level, we know our collective consciousness is shifting — or more accurately returning — to a deeper truth about what leadership actually requires: connection, courage, accountability, self-awareness, and care.

However, when the moment comes to rethink power, hierarchy, decision-making, or who gets to shape culture, the old blueprint rises again. We see it right now in geopolitics and feel it in our workplaces and communities. We experience this tension because changing leadership in practice requires confronting something we’re not always willing to look at directly: the relationship between power and identity and who is afraid of losing something if leadership evolves.

This is why we often see such strong resistance to change when so many are attached to a system and way of thinking that maintains power structures, even when the system actually serves so few.

Why naming the origins matters

If we name it, we can work with it. We can only evolve leadership for the world we live in now if we acknowledge the beliefs and practices that created what we experience now.

Importantly, naming the origins of the current situation isn’t about blame, but about honesty.

We must recognise that leadership, as we know it today, was shaped by a narrow set of experiences and that broadening it isn’t an attack on anyone. It’s simply a return to humanity, to wholeness, to something far more expansive than the limited model we inherited.

If leadership was primarily built from one story, then it can be rebuilt consciously, collectively from all our stories.

The invitation

This blog is an invitation to look at the assumptions we’ve absorbed, often without question or enough courage to challenge.

We need to ask where our ideas came from and who was missing when those ideas were formed. Importantly, we must pay attention to the discomfort that arises when power is mentioned directly, rather than politely avoided.

Most importantly, it’s an invitation to imagine leadership not as a set of inherited traits, but as a living practice shaped by the full spectrum of human experience.

The truth is that leadership is about humans within the context of our beautiful planet. Because of this truth, all people should be able to see themselves as leaders, not just the ones historically permitted.

The greater truth is that we all are leaders in some capacity. Our birthright as humans means we inherently hold what it takes to lead, whether that’s leading ourselves, a team, an organisation, a movement or a nation.