Leadership is Political | Part 3: The White Man Archetype

In this episode, Chisom looks at the archetype most workplaces are designed for. The same behaviour, ambition, directness, dissent, refusal to conform, is coded differently depending on who performs it. One person’s vision is another person’s attitude problem, and the line between the two follows race, gender, class, and proximity to whatever the organisation treats as its default. Chisom examines why the coding is not a perception problem but a power problem, how it determines who is developed and who is disciplined, and what it means that the same pattern operates in society, where the same dissent makes one person a statesman and another a threat to stability.

Transcript

0:03

So two people say the same thing in a meeting. One of them is heard as strategic, ambitious and direct. And the other is heard as aggressive, difficult, not a team player. The words were the same, the tone may even have been the same. What was different was who said them and what they look like while they were saying them. This is not a new observation. Most people who read leadership books and content, and honestly, if you have survived a workplace or are still in a workplace, you have encountered some version of it. And it's usually framed in leadership speak as things like unconscious bias, a cognitive shortcut, a fixable error in perception. But I actually want to push back or push past. that's framing because what I am describing is not a perception problem. It is a power problem. The coding determines the outcome. It determines who is developed and who is managed. Who is given a second chance after a mistake and who is documented for the same one? Who is sponsored for promotion And who is described in the room where promotions are decided as not quite ready, not quite the right culture fit. Brilliant, but hard to work with. The coding does a lot of heavy lifting and it is not an error. It is a sorting mechanism and it sorts along the lines that were political long before anyone walked into that room or the building. So the first two episodes of this series argued that leadership is political because it distributes power and consequences, and that stated values do not survive pressure because they were built as positioning rather than as commitment. This episode names what the first two episodes in this series deliberately left as a gesture. The essentially the distribution of consequences is not random within any of the three tracks that I've been describing so far. So basically, the leader, the person in the middle, and the person without any formal power. It's important to note that these are not undifferentiated positions. Inside each tracks, identity shapes everything. How much cost you observe, how much grace you are extended, or even how much your behavior is read, And whether the words used to describe your leadership is visionary or difficult. So I want to name this plainly because the pattern does not necessarily need a study or ample research to confirm what millions of people already know from lived experience. If you are a black woman in a professional setting, you have almost certainly been called difficult or aggressive or intimidating for behavior that would have been called the sisive in someone else. You have almost certainly had your competence questioned in ways that your white or male colleague have not. You've also likely been asked to prove what others are assumed to have. You've been interrupted in meetings by people who've then restated your points and received credit for it. You have learned through repetition and consequence to manage not just your work but the room's comfort with your presence. You calibrate your tone, your directness, your visibility so that the people around you can receive what you are saying without feeling threatened by who is saying it. The calibration is label, it is unpaid, it is unrecognized, and it is constant. And it is extracted from you by a system that has no language for competence that arrives in your packaging. If you are indigenous, the coding carries a different history, but essentially the same design. Your knowledge is treated as a cultural contribution rather than professional expertise. Your presence is welcomed as representation and resisted as authority. You are included in the photograph and excluded from the decision. If you are queer, if you are trans, if you are disabled, If you are neurodivergent, if you are a migrant working in a language and a professional culture that was not built for you, the coding adjusts you to your specific identity, but the mechanism is essentially the same. The system has an archetype it recognizes as a leader. And the further you seek from the archetype, the more labor you perform to be legible as competent. The more energy you spend translating yourself into a version the room can process. And the less energy you have left for the work you are actually hired to do, and you do that work brilliantly anyway, leading to a sense of overwork and exhaustion and an emotional tax. you are expected to manage alone and certainly not mentioned to those who created it in the first place. The translation is not a personal challenge, it is a political tax levied on everyone who does not match the defaults. and it is levied most heavily on the people who are furthest away from it. And the weight compounds. A black queer woman is not navigating one axis of coding, she's navigating several simultaneously, each one extracting its own translation cost, each one producing its own version of difficult or too much are not quite the right fit. The system does not code along one line at a time, it codes along all of them at once. The people carrying the most intersections carry the most weights. What makes this political rather than merely unfair is that the coding determines material outcomes. The coding is not an error in perception that a training can fix. It is a certain mechanism built into the structure of professional life And it sorts along lines that we're political and has always been political. This is not a workplace phenomenon with a convenient societal parallel. It is the same mechanism operating at the scale of nations and history. Who gets called a visionary leader and who gets called a radical leader depends less on the content of their ideas than on who they are, what they look like, where they come from, and whether the system they are challenging has the power to name them. The same refusal to accept unjust conditions Makes one person a founding father and another an insurgent. The same organizing makes one person a civil rights hero in retrospect and a threat to national security at the time. A good example, Martin Luther King Jr. Or Nelson Mandela. For Martin Luther King Jr., he was under FBI surveillance for years, classified as a domestic security threat, while making arguments about justice and equality that the same state and nation now celebrate as foundational, even though it has a funny way of actually practicing it. In other words, it doesn't. Same with Nelson Mandela, who was considered for a very long time a terrorist. the same economic critique makes one person a thought leader and another a dangerous ideologue, depending on where they come from and whose interest their critiques threaten. The coding works in both directions and across time. People who were labeled dangerous during their lives are reclaimed as visionaries after their deaths once the threat they posed has been neutralized by history. And people who were labeled visionary during their lives are sometimes revealed after enough time and after enough honest accounting. To have been dangerous all along. The vision built on extraction, exploitation, or exclusion that was invisible to the people who benefited from it and obvious to the people who paid for it. The label is not description, it is a political instrument. It tells you who has the power to name, not who deserves the name. And this matters for when we talk about the workplace because the workplace does not exist outside of society and history. The archetypes that organizations were built for, basically the white male, middle to upper class, did not emerge from a neutral assessment of competence. It emerged from a political history that determined who had access to education, to capital. To professional networks, To the rooms where standards were set. The default was constructive and the construction was political. And the fact that it now feels natural that a leader who matches this archetype simply looks like a leader in a way that feels self-evident. Is the most effective form of political coding there is. It does not feel like a judgment, it feels like a recognition. And that is precisely what makes it so difficult to see and so resistant to change. when you ask a lot of people to think about a leader, they normally would think about a white man. So what does this mean for the three main positions we've been looking at so far in this series? if you lead, the question is not whether you personally have a prejudice. The question is whether the structure around your decisions corrects for the patterns you cannot see or it amplifies them. When you sit in a room deciding who gets promoted, Who gets high visibility projects? Who gets a second chance after a misstep? Ask whose names come to mind first and why. Not why in the conscious, rational sense, why in the structural sense? Who do you find easy to imagine in the role? And who requires you to make an argument for? If the people who come to mind easily share your background, your communication style, your idea of what leadership looks like, that is not neutral. That is a political act designed as instinct and gut feeling. The instinct was shaped by every system you have moved through. And unless you interrogate it, you will reproduce the same leadership profile that the system already rewards, Which means that you will continue to call vision in some people what you call difficulty in others without ever seeing the line between them. And there's also a specific leadership failure worth naming here. The leader who says they want diverse perspectives and then punishes the perspectives that are actually different. Not the safe kind of difference, not the difference that still matches the register and the cadence and the deference the leader expects, but the difference that challenges assumptions. That names what the room has agreed not to see, that refuses to deliver insights in packaging the culture treats as professional. That leader has not built a culture of diverse thoughts. They have built a culture of diverse faces, producing uniform thoughts, which is representation without power, a photograph rather than a change. If you sit in the middle, you are often the person who translates the leader's unlabeled preferences into operational decisions. You know which names get floated for opportunities and which do not. You see who gets coached through a mistake and who gets documented for the same one. You may not be the one making the initial judgment, but you are frequently the one administering it. And the discretion you exercise in how you administer it is also a real power. If the person above you has decided without saying so that a particular employee is difficult, You can either reinforce that reading by managing them accordingly, or you can intervene by reframing what you see. The first costs you nothing. The second may cost you credibility with the person above you. Which is precisely why it is a political act rather than an administrative one. and there's also something specific about the middle layer's role in the coding that is also worth naming. You are often the person who writes the performance review, who drafts the language that will follow somebody's name through the organization. The difference between she is direct and holds the team to a higher standard, and she can be abrasive and creates friction in the team. It's not a difference of fact. It is a difference of framing. And that framing has material consequences in pay, in promotion, in whether someone is seen as leadership material or management problem. You may not have chosen the coding, but you are the person who puts it in writing. And once it is in writing, it becomes the official record of who someone is inside the institution. Your willingness to reframe is a test of whether the values you hold are operational or decorative. And that test lands directly on the person whose career depends on how you describe them in the rooms that they are not in. If you are the person who has been called difficult or aggressive or not a culture fit or too much, I want to say something also plainly to you. The coding may have nothing to do with your behavior and everything to do with who you are and how you present. This is not a comfortable thing to sit with because it means the adjustments you have been making, the softening, the self-monitoring, The careful calibration of how you say things so the room can hear them without feeling threatened may not necessarily solve the problem because the problem was never your delivery. It was your identity inside a system that was designed for somebody else. This does not mean every negative assessment of you is biased. Sometimes the feedback is accurate And the work of discerning which is which is genuinely hard. But the default assumption, the one most workplaces train you to make, is that the problem is yours to fix. Identity clarity asks you to hold a different question first. Is this feedback about something I really did? Or is it about who I am in a system that was not built for me? If the answer is the second, no amount of adjustment will close the gap. Because the gap is structural and the adjustments are what the structures require in order to maintain itself. Grace here must hold that the weight is genuinely unequal. The leader who is reproducing a pattern they have never been asked to examine is not quite the same person whose career has been shaped by the consequences of that pattern. An implication is not equivalence. The leader deserves the honest information that their instinct is not neutral. the person in the middle deserves recognition, that the discretion they hold is political and that using it well carries real costs. And the person who has been coded as difficult deserves the recognition. That the coding is not their fault, and the honest acknowledgement that seeing this clearly does not make the daily experience of it any less exhausting. Grace is not, we are all in this together when the costs are distributed unevenly. Grace is naming the difference honestly and still insisting that everyone inside the system has something they can move. here's something for each position this week. If you lead, think of the last person you described as difficult or not ready or not quite the right fit. Now ask yourself whether someone who matched the organizational defaults more closely, exhibiting the same behavior, would have received the same description. If the answer is not a clear yes, you have found the line and the line is political. The next step is not guilt, it is revision. Go back to the assessment and rewrite it based on what the person actually did, stripped of the coding. If the substance holds, the feedback stands. If it does not survive the removal of identity laden language or culture fit language, It was never about their performance. And while you're doing this, hold one more thing. The person who does not match the default and is genuinely excellent at what they do problem. competence is real. What is also real is that your competence was recognized faster, contested less. And supported more readily than the same competence, arriving in a different package. The structural advantage is not that the people outside the defaults are giving recognition they have not earned, is that the people who match the defaults are giving recognition at a speed and scale that was never available to anyone else. If you sit in the middle, think of a time you could put forward an opportunity but you have not put forward yet. Ask yourself why. If the reason has anything to do with how they will be perceived rather than what they can do, the perception is the system working and your intervention is a form of power you hold that no one has named for you. I want to be honest about the cost because it is not evenly distributed as well. The middle layer person who intervenes while matching the organizational default pays a different price. From the middle layer person who intervenes while being a woman of color. The first may lose some credibility with the person above. The second risk being coded as difficult themselves, which means the act of reframing someone else's coding can trigger the same coding mechanisms against you. Whether the cost is worth paying depends on your own security, your relationship with the person above you, and your honest read of the terrain. But the power is real regardless of the cost, and pretending it is not there is itself a choice with consequences for the persons whose name you did not put forward. If you are the person who has been coded as difficult, you do not owe the system a softer version of yourself. You may choose to offer one strategically because you understand the terrain and you're making a calculated decision about what to spend your energy on. But that is a strategic choice, not a moral obligation. And the difference is important to note. You are not difficult, you are operating inside a system that was built for somebody else. And the system has no language for competence that arrives in somebody who looks like you. I want to hold that alongside something that I think is also quite important, and I briefly mentioned earlier, because both things are true at once. Not every negative assessment is coding. Sometimes the feedback is accurate, and the work of discerning which is which is genuinely not going to be easy. But the default assumption should not be that the problem is yours. The default question should be whether the feedback would exist if you matched the archetype. This is not your problem to solve, it is the systems. And seeing it clearly is the first thing that lets you decide what to do about it. my three clarities framework identity, context, and power is also at work here. And in this particular episode, and in the case it's put forward, all three failures compound in the same person at the same time. The person that is coded as difficult has an identity problem imposed on them from the outside. the system that has told them who they are. So difficult, aggressive, too much, and they have absorbed that identity in place of their own. They have also a context clarity problem because the system's coding mechanism is invisible from the inside. You cannot see the line between visionary and difficult when you are standing on the wrong side of it. And everyone around you insists that the line is not there. and they also have a power clarity problem because the energy is spent adjusting, softening, and self-monitoring is power redirected away from the work they were hired to do. towards the performance of acceptability and palatability that the system demands. All three failures are operating simultaneously, and they were produced by the same structural condition. A system that was designed for an archetype and has never been rebuked for the people who do not match it. For the leader, all three clarities at work. You read the room through a lens shaped by who you are and what you value And you may not see that the lens itself is an identity position, not a neutral vantage point. this is an identity clarity failure. You cannot see the coding mechanism because from where you see it, it looks like sound judgment Rather than challenging it. and then there's also a context clarity failure because you use the power of your position to give opportunities to promote, to sponsor, to develop based on instincts shaped by the unchecked identity and the misread context, which means your power reproduces the archetype rather than disrupting it. That is a power clarity failure. All three operate together, and they operate most effectively when the leader believes they are already aware of. For the person in the middle, all three are present too. You can see the coding more clearly than the leader above you because you sit closest to where it lands. And that visibility carries responsibility, not just sympathy. That is context. The role has shaped how you see yourself, and the question of whether you are someone who reproduces the pattern or interrupts it is an identity question you may not have asked yet. And you hold more discretion than you've been told in how you write the review, whose name you put forward, and how you frame what you see. That is power. the asymmetry is deliberate because the person coded as difficult experiences the most compounded effect because they are the person the system acts upon most directly. But every position essentially carries more than one clarity failures that if addressed we change. what the system produces. If you have the same behavior, different coding, you get different outcomes. The coding is not error, it is design, and until the design is named, the people inside it will continue to mistake a political system for a meritocratic one. And the people harmed by it will continue to be told that the problem is theirs. So this is where I'll leave this one. As usual, argue with it, push back. I'd love to learn from you and hear if you think differently about this. if you like this kind of thinking, I also run a weekly newsletter called The Weekly Clarity, which will be available in the show notes. I am Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom. Thank you for being here. I'm really thrilled to have you with me and see you next week.