Leadership is Political | Part 1: What People Recover From

 People carry the cost of poor leadership long after the work is done: self-doubt, burnout, diminished confidence, the slow work of rebuilding trust in their own judgment. We call it personal struggle. It is not. It is the uncounted cost of a system that measures leadership by what it achieves and never by what it leaves behind.

In this episode, I ask why leadership was stripped of its political character, reduced to skills and competencies and communication styles, and who that reduction serves. I look at why a hundred-billion-dollar industry has never built a tool that measures what people have to recover from after being led. And I make the case that leadership is political, not because it involves parties or ideology, but because every leadership decision distributes power, consequence, and cost, and the refusal to see it that way is itself the most effective political act of all.

This episode is for the leader who has never been asked to account for what their decisions produce in people. For the person in the middle, absorbing pressure from above and administering it below, whose discretion has never been called power. And for the person without formal authority who has been told their recovery is their own project.

Leadership is Political is a new series on Overnight Wisdom. New episodes weekly. 

Transcript

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People recover from being led. Not always. And not from everyone who leads, but often enough and from enough leaders that we should stop treating it as an exception and start recognizing it as a pattern, a structural pattern. And yet most people do not even name it as a leadership problem. They name it as a personal problem. They say they burnt out. As though the burning came from inside them. They say they lost confidence as though confidence is something you misplace on your own. They say they are anxious now. They second guess themselves now. They find it harder to trust their own judgment now. And the word they reach for is not harm, it is struggle. In my work, I meet people who say, it's something I'm working through. And the working through can take years, sometimes longer than the job itself lasted. Which means that the leader has moved on, the organization has moved on, and you are still carrying the cost of decisions that were made about your life by someone who will never know, or who may never know, what those decisions produced in you. There are a myriad of leadership books and leadership conversations and leadership trainings, and we do not talk about this aspect of it nearly enough. And when we do, we talk about it the wrong way. We frame it as resilience. We frame it as self-care. We frame it as the individual's job to recover from conditions that should never have. Harmed them in the first place and conditions that should never have been created in the first place. And by framing it that way, we protect the system that produced the damage. Because once recovery is your responsibility, the person or the structure that made recovery necessary disappears from the account entirely. This is the first episode of a series about leadership. if you know my work, you know I'm all about systems. And I believe that leadership is a system. We're going to talk about leadership Not leadership as it is usually discussed. That is to say, the version that lives in competency frameworks and executive coaching and keynote speeches about vision. And I'm not stomping on those. I think those are important. But in the series, we're going to talk about leadership as it actually operates, which is to say politically. And by politically, I do not mean party politics. I do not mean left or right. I do not mean the version of the word that makes people cringe or stop listening. I mean something more fundamental. Leadership is the exercise of power over other people's lives. it distributes resources, recognition, risks, and consequence. It decides who is heard and who is managed and who is developed and who is disciplined, who is protected when things go wrong, and who is offered up as sacrifice. Every one of those decisions is a political act. Not because someone mentioned a manifesto, but because it converts a social arrangement into a material consequence in someone's life. and the refusal to see it that way is itself the most effective political move at work. I am Chisamudeze and this is Overnight Wisdom. So today, here's what I want you to see to it for a moment. we measure leadership almost entirely by what leaders achieve. We look at things like growth and revenue and performance and transformation and scale. These are metrics and they are useful metrics. These are also what the books celebrate, what the case studies Analyze what the business school teaches. And they are real. I am not dismissing or disputing them, but they are measured from one position only. The position of the person who led. And they count one category of outcome only, the outcome that was intended. What they do not often count is what those achievements required of other people, what the restructuring costs the person who was restructured, What the ambitious quarter cost the team that delivered it and then went home too depleted to be present with their own families. What the difficult but necessary decision cost the person who was on the wrong side of it, and who now carries that decision in their body as the thing they have to recover from. I believe deeply that leadership should also be measured by what people do not have to recover from after being led. Not instead of results, but alongside results. Because if your leadership produces growth and also produces people who spend years rebuilding their confidence, their trust in themselves, their sense of their own competence, then your leadership was not as successful as the numbers suggest. This is to say it was successful for you and it was costly for them. Now, someone might say, we do measure this. We have employee engagement surveys, we have retention dates, we have, you know, exit interviews. And those measurements and instruments exist. I'm not pretending they do not, but look at what they actually measure. They measure whether people can tolerate the conditions. They ask how engaged you are, not what the engagement is costing you. track whether you stayed, not necessarily what staying has required you to observe. And they are designed to be actionable for the organization, not accountable to the person. And that distinction is not a detail, it is a part of the entire design. So how did we get here? How did leadership, which is the most direct exercise of power most people will ever experience in their lives, come to be understood as something a political, as a set of skills, as emotional intelligence, communication style, strategic thinking, as though these are neutral tools with no political content whatsoever? The answer is an industry, a very large and a very profitable one. The global leadership development market is worth over $100 billion each year. And virtually all of it is built on the same premise that leadership is a technical competence, something you can train for, something that can be isolated from the systems it operates inside, measured by instruments, developed through programs, and assessed against frameworks that. I never once asked who bore the cost of the leader's development. the three sixty review does not ask the person three levels down what they have to recover from. The competency model does not include a line for harm absorbed by the team. The emotional intelligence assessment does not measure whether the leader's composure was purchased by somebody else's distress. None of this is accidental. When you strip leadership of its political character, when you make it technical, You remove the one dimension that would hold leaders accountable not just for what they produce, but for what they produced in people. and that removal serves the leader. It serves the organization and it serves the industry that sells the tools. The only people it does not serve are the people who have been led by a not so great leader. This is what I mean when I say that leadership is political. I'm not saying that it should be political. I am saying that it already is political and that it has always been political. And the entire apparatus of leadership thinking has evolved to help you not see it. I do not think that anyone sat down in a room and decided to strip leadership of its political character. I think it's worse than that. It happened because it was profitable, because leaders prefer a version of their role that does not implicate them. And because the market rewards the product that makes the buyer feel competent over the product that makes the buyer feel accountable, the depoliticization was not designed per se, it was selected for, which is why it is hard to reverse. The language itself does a lot of work. We say restructuring, not displacement. We say performance management, not control. We say culture fit, not exclusion. We say tough decisions, not a decision that cost someone something real that they did not choose and cannot return. Every one of those phrases takes a political act, a decision about who absorbs the cost and who is shielded from it and reclassifies it as a procedural one. and once it is procedural, it is no longer contestable on moral grounds. It's just how things work. And this pattern does not stop at the office door or at the workplace or our specific workplaces. It cannot because it is not a workplace phenomenon. It is a design principle that operates at every scale. Governments do this identically. GDP measures what a country produces, not what it costs the population to produce it. Structural adjustment measures economic reforms, not the clinics that closed, the subsidies that disappeared, or the generation that grew up under austerity they did not vote for and could not actually contest. Austerity itself is measured by deficit reductions, not by what the people who depend on those services have to absorb after they vanish. So you can think of, for example, when there are cuts in healthcare and then that reduces what people can access as a result. The measurement architecture is the same at every scale. It asks you to count what the powerful builds, but not to count what those with less power had to recover from. And the language works the same way as well. We talk about fiscal responsibility, not cuts. We talk about development, not extraction. We talk about reform, not the redistribution of consequences downwards. These are not a failure of language. They are achievements of language. They do exactly what they are designed to do. Which is what makes a political decision sound like an administrative one. So that the people who bear the cost lose the vocabulary to name what happened to them. Those who know me know that I often say that the workplace and society are not separate systems. They are not even analogous, right? they are the same designs operating at different scales. The manager who restructures a team without ever being asked. What the restructuring costs the people inside it is doing something structurally identical to the minister who reforms the public service without ever being asked. What the reform costs the public it was meant to serve. Both are exercising power. And both are producing consequences in other people's lives. And both are given the vocabulary by an industry in one case and a political culture in the other that allows them to do it without ever having to account for what they left behind. So if leadership is political, if it distributes power and consequence, whether we name it or not, then what does that actually mean for the people inside the systems? And the answer depends entirely on where you sit, because the same structure looks differently from every position within it. And an honest account of leadership has to hold all of those positions without collapsing them into one. If you lead and if you hold formal authority, the invitation here is not guilt. As I like to say, guilt in contexts like this is cheap and changes nothing. The invitation is accuracy. Your decisions produce outcomes in people's lives that you will likely never see because the system is designed to shield you from the information. The person who was restructured rarely comes back to tell you what it costs. The person whose confidence you intentionally or unintentionally diminished with a pattern of small consistent signals, never traumatic enough to be named, but never absent enough to be doubted, does not send you a report on the years it took them to rebuild said confidence. You may never know, you may never find out. And that not knowing is comfortable, but it is not neutral. It is a privilege that comes with the position, the privilege of never having to see the full cost of your own power. So the question is not whether you are a good person, The question is whether your leadership can be honestly assessed by the people who experienced it, not just the people who benefited from it. And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, the discomfort is not a problem, it's data. It is the beginning of a more honest account of what you have built or what you are building and what it has cost or what it is costing. if you sit in the middle, and many people do, you hold a position that is political in both directions and acknowledged in neither. You did not design the policy, but you administer it. You did not make the decisions, but you deliver its consequences to the people below you. You are frequently blamed for the choices made above you that you had no power to prevent, and you are rarely credited for the discretionary kindness you exercise in how you pass those choices down. Because you do have discretion. The way you interpret a directive, the way you frame a difficult message, the way you choose to protect or not protect the person sitting across from you. These are not administrative acts. They are exercises of power, small ones, sometimes the only ones available to you. But they are real. and when leadership is framed as a political, it is costly to you as it is to anyone else because it tells you that you were just implementing, just managing, just doing your job. And that framing lets you avoid the weight of the power you do hold while also denying you any recognition for the way you use its well. You deserve a more honest description of your position than the one you've been given. And the honest description includes both the real constraints you operate under and the real power you exercise within them. If you are the person without formal authority, if you are being led rather than leading, and if you have been harmed under bad leadership, the argument of this episode is that the recovery you are doing, the rebuilding of your confidence, the processing of environments that cost you more than they should have. The slow work of learning to trust your own judgments again after years in a system that trained you not to, that recovery is not a personal failing. It is the unaccounted cost of a system that measures leadership by what it produces and never by what it leaves behind. What I want to offer you here is language. It's not going to necessarily comfort you and it is not a five-step plan. But the accurate name for what happened. What happened is that the cost of that power landed on you. And it was called your attitude, your resilience, or your capacity to cope. And what happened is that the vocabulary available to you, the vocabulary of professional development and the workplace wellness and emotional regulation, was built to measure whether you can cope within the conditions, not whether the conditions should exist. Resilience training has an evidence base. I am not dismissing it. But notice what it evaluates your capacity to tolerate, to adapt, and continue functioning. It does not evaluate what made the tolerance necessary in the first place. That is not an accident of research design. it is a political choice about whose experience counts as the problem, and consistently the answer is yours. Having the word political for what you experience is not a solution, but it is a start because you cannot contest what you cannot name. Grace also matters here, and it matters in every direction, not only toward the person with the least power, the leader who has never been asked to account for what your decisions cost is not necessarily cruel. They may be operating inside the same depoliticized framework everyone else was taught, genuinely believing that leadership is a competence and that good intentions are sufficient. Never having been given the tools to see what their power actually produces. Oftentimes leaders are not supported. They are given this enormous responsibility of taking care of others and no one really takes care of them. This is also something I meet quite frequently in my work. How little grace and support and resources are available to leaders. And this is of course something that I also plan to explore in this series. Now for the person in the middle who's caught between decisions they did not make and the consequences they must deliver, they deserve an honest account of their position, not the fiction that they are neutral and not the accusation that they are complicit. the person with little to no power deserves recognition that their recovery is more of an evidence of a system's failure rather than a personal one. And they also deserve honest acknowledgments that where they do hold power. in say how they treat their colleagues or in how they move sideways or laterally inside a system even when they cannot move upwards. That power is also political and it also carries consequence. No one is outside of this. That is what political means. It does not mean someone else is guilty. It means everyone to some degree is implicated differently and equally, but none of us is standing outside the system looking in. And I want to be precise here because everyone is implicated, can sound like everyone is equally responsible. And that is not what I am saying. The leader who built the system and the employee who survived it are not carrying the same weight. And saying that boats are inside the system is not the same thing as saying boats are equally answerable for what that system produces. Implication does not mean equivalence. And there is also something this positional framing alone does not capture. The cost of poor leadership does not land evenly, even among people who hold the same title. Your gender, your race, your class, your accent, your sexual orientation, your proximity to whatever the organization treats as its default, these things shape how much of the cost you absorb and how much grace you are extended while absorbing it. people can sit in the same role under the same manager inside the same broken culture. And one of them will be recovering from something the other was never asked to carry. This is not a footnote to the arguments. It is a core part of the argument. Leadership is political because it distributes consequence and the distribution follows lines that were political long before anyone walked into the building. We often talk about work as though it exists in a clean category that is separate from society, politics, and personal life. But walk into almost any workplace and look around you and see what is actually there. People come from different backgrounds, different cultures, different generations, and they are required to communicate, trust, disagree, and produce something meaningful together. They arrive carrying different histories and languages and bodies and beliefs, care responsibilities, financial pressures, and different relationships to authority. They meet inside arrangements that decide who has a contract, who controls the schedule, who works from home, who is believed, and who advances and who can be removed. For many people, participation in work is not really optional, even when they have some choice among employers. People enter spaces at work with different savings, unequal savings, different legal protections, labor market options, care obligations, and abilities to leave. The workplace is therefore one of the places where society intersects. Through a sustained encounter under hierarchy and economic dependence, it is not a meeting of equals. I am of the firm belief that while each and every one of us on earth are equal in value, we are not equal in experiences and in life situations. So, as this is the start of this series, I want to leave you with something that you can hopefully carry into the week. Not as a tool, not as a framework, but as a way of thinking and a way of questioning. And the question works regardless of where you sit. When a decision is presented to you as technical, procedural, rotune, or neutral, ask who absorbs the cost of this decision? And did they have a say in it? Ask in the meeting if you can where the restructuring is announced. Ask in the policy briefing where the budget is cut. Ask in the conversations where someone's performance is being framed as a problem. If the cost falls disproportionately on people who were not in the room when the decision was made, you are looking at a political decision that has been designed as an administrative one. And now you have a language for it. there is a way of thinking that underpins much of my work. And everything I have said so far. And I'm gonna name it now. And I think in many ways, people are already using it without knowing it. When I ask you to look at who you are inside these systems, whether you are the leader who has never been asked to account for the cost, or whether you are the person in the middle absorbing pressure from both directions, or the person without any title or formal power who has been told that their recovery is their own project, that is identity clarity. Not who your role says you are, who you actually are, what you stand for, and what you have been compromising in order to survive the structure you are inside. When I asked you to see that the leadership industry stripped power out of its own products, that engagement surveys measure tolerance rather than the cost, that the language of restructuring and culture fit does a lot of political work while presenting itself as neutral, that was context clarity. So reading the terrain you are standing on, including the parts that were designed so you could not read them. And when I asked you to notice that the leader does not see the cost because the system shields them from it. That the person in the middle, so let's say a middle manager has discretion that they have been told is just implementation, that the person without formal power holds agency, the vocabulary was never built to name, that was power clarity. The honest reckoning with what is genuinely yours to move and what is not. So you stop wasting effort on what you cannot change and stop surrendering what you actually can. Together they make up the three clarities: identity, context, and power. And they make up the foundation of my work, and I will apply them across every episode and every subject in this series, not as a checklist or as a self-improvement tool or program, but as a diagnostic and as a way of thinking and seeing the world and Rationalizing whatever it is that you have in front of you. Everything this episode named, the recovery that gets called personal, the measurements that counts achievements and ignores costs. the language that makes political decisions sound administrative. The unequal distribution that follows race and gender and class into every room and every space. Every one of those is a clarity failure. And every episode in the series will take a different failure at work, in society, and Run these three framing and questions against it until the design becomes visible. Leadership is political. It has always been. The question is whether you will see it clearly or whether you will keep accepting the version that was designed to make sure you did not have to. This is where I will leave this introduction to the series. Thank you for listening to Overnight Wisdom. If this episode has given you language for something you have experienced, or if it's helped you see a familiar leadership conversation differently, Please subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen and share it with someone who would find it useful. I also write a weekly newsletter called The Weekly Clarity, where I explore how identity, context, and power shape work, society, and personal life. You can find all the links in the show notes. I'm Chisomudezing, and again, this is Overnight's Wisdom. I am so glad that you're here. The next episode will ask a very important question about leadership and power. See you next week.