Leadership is Political | Part 4: Stop Surviving. Start Building Power.

What happens when we become exceptionally good at naming harm, but remain largely powerless to stop it?

In this episode, Chisom moves the conversation beyond resilience, recovery, and even systems change, towards something we often seem uncomfortable naming: power.

Because care after harm matters. Healing, and representation are important. But our ambition cannot be to make people exceptionally good at surviving systems that remain perfectly capable of harming them.

So what does it actually mean to build power? Individually, collectively, institutionally, economically, socially, and politically? What does leadership require? What must organisations change? And how do we build enough agency and optionality that we are not perpetually negotiating from the receiving end of someone else’s power?

This is a conversation about becoming harder to exploit, isolate, silence, and punish. Not because power makes us invulnerable. It does not. But because understanding how power works is only the beginning.
At some point, we have to build it.

This episode opens the door to building power, which subsequent episodes on Overnight Wisdom will focus on

Transcript

0:03

I have been thinking about what leadership demands when harm happens outside the walls of an organization, but lands heavily inside them anyway. Jason Arday has been on my mind. His family says he's endured a sustained campaign of abuse and misinformation. And I think as the public from the outside looking at everything that has unfolded, he has also endured a form of public lynching. Before his death, He said that the relentless accusations, speculations, and public commentary had taken a profound toll On him and those he loved. His death has since prompted tens of thousands of people to gather in London recently in growing calls for a reckoning with what has happened. and I keep thinking about all the people who watched what happened to him, including myself, and recognized something. Not because they knew him, but because they knew the pattern. The black employee who has watched an ordinary mistake become evidence of incompetence. The disabled employee who knows how quickly accommodation becomes suspicion. The Muslim employee watching Islamophobia become politically respectable. The quiet employee watching someone else's humanity become a public debate. The immigrant who understands that one person's wrongdoing can suddenly become an indictment of millions of people who vaguely resemble them. Harm does not have to happen to you personally to enter your body. Sometimes you recognize the architecture. So, what is the responsibility of leadership when something happening in society reverberates through the people you lead? Sure, you can send an email that says, We know this is difficult. And sure, in many ways, that may be kind. A listen-in session may be useful, a day off may be humane. But surely our imagination cannot end at helping people recover from systems that remain perfectly intact. I think this is where a lot of organizations and the conversations that they have about harm stop too early. We become very good at care after harm and remarkably timid about power before the next harm. We offer well-being support. we create safe spaces. We send statements. We hire consultants. We tell marginalized employees that we see them. Fine. So yes, we do. But what are we actually changing? Who has power? Who gets protected? Who gets believed? Who can make an ordinary mistake without having their entire competence placed on trial? Who has enough institutional backing that attacking them creates or carries a consequence? Who gets promoted into positions where they can change the rules Rather than continually petition the people who make them. Who owns something, anything? Who controls capital? Who sits on the board? Who commissions the narrative? Who can hire, fire, publish, protect, challenge, veto, build? Who can leave? Because there's only so much healing we can ask people to do while the machinery that keeps injuring them remains untouched. and I am increasingly interested in that machinery. I have spent years, decades of my life thinking and researching and working on systems change. I still deeply believe in that work, but what is hitting me in the past couple of weeks is that diagnosis is not liberation. Being able to explain precisely how racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, class, white terrorism, colonialism, or other systems of power operate does not by itself stop them from operating on you. So there is another conversation we need to have. There is another research I need to throw myself into. There is another action and collective I need to build. And I do mean power. Not empowerment workshops, not confidence, not another seminar teaching people experiencing structural inequality how to become more resilient to it. Actual power, economic power, institutional power, political power, social power, narrative power, collective power. The power that comes from money and ownership, expertise, network, solidarity, reputation, legal protection, organizing, institutional authority. Access to decision makers being the decision makers and having enough alternatives that walking away is genuinely available to you and to me. Because one of the most consequential forms of power is the ability to say no without it destroying your life. The ability to leave a toxic workplace because your residency, healthcare, or entire financial survival is not tied to remaining there. The ability to challenge someone powerful because you are not standing alone. The ability to hire lawyers who get you, who understand you, who have been in your shoes when an institution calculates that you will quietly disappear. The ability to tell your own story when somebody else attempts to write it for you. The ability to create institutions rather than forever asking existing ones to admit you. The ability to open a door and critically keep it open behind you. And this cannot become another new liberal instructions to marginalize people to save themselves. that would simply relocate responsibility again. The work has to happen simultaneously. Institutions must change the conditions. Audit who holds power, not merely who is represented in photographs. Examine pay, promotions, protection, complaints, procurement, succession sponsorship, and whose mistakes become career ending. Stop protecting harmful people because they are commercially useful. politically connected or inconvenient to confront, build processes capable of protecting people before a crisis, not merely documenting what happened afterwards. Leaders must spend their power. Not simply announce their values. They have to spend political capital. Challenge the powerful colleague. Protect the person being targeted. Put budget behind the commitment. Share access. Sponsor people when they are not in the room. Take the reputational hit. Make the decision that is right, even when it's inconvenient. If your values never cost you anything, I am increasingly unconvinced that they are values. collectively people have to organize. One isolated person is much easier to punish than 20 people refusing together. So we need to build coalitions, we need to build professional networks, we need to build employee groups with actual leverage. We need to build unions, communities of practice, legal defense funds, institutional networks, media platforms, institutions and businesses. Political organizations, gosh, we need more. Whatever is appropriate for the context. Solidarity that exists only as sentiment is fragile. Solidarity becomes much harder to ignore when it acquires infrastructure. And individually, where we can, we have to build optionality. we have to build Expertise that nobody can easily take away from you. We have to build relationships beyond one employer. We have to build financial resources where circumstances allow. And even if they don't allow right now, how do we start building pathways that allow them to become possible? We have to build a reputation that does not belong entirely to the institution whose name appears beside ours or yours. Know your rights. Document what happens. Understand the formal and informal power around you. Find the people who will tell the truth with you. Create enough of a life outside one room that being rejected by that room does not become the end of your world. None of these things make anyone invulnerable. Power does not guarantee safety. Black people with extraordinary wealth, status, and influence still experience racism. Women with enormous power still experience misogyny. Quer people with platforms still experience homophobia. No amount of individual success dismantles a system. that is precisely why the work must be simultaneous. Change the systems, build the institutions, organize collectively, redistribute resources, hold leaders accountable, protect one another, and build as much individual and collective power as circumstances allow. I am also mindful that collectives are not necessarily built by collectives. It begins with one or few individuals who begin. And then they build something stronger around them. And I really believe we have to think strongly, steadily, and put action, measurable action towards. Building power, financial power, economic power, institutional power, publishing power, media power, everywhere where power applies. We need to build it. We need to own it. Because we cannot keep remaining at the receiving end of nonsense. And because I don't know about you, but I am incredibly tired of conversations in which the ambition is merely to make marginalized people better equipped to survive their next injury. Survival is important. Healing is important. Care absolutely matters enormously so. But surely the horizon has to be larger than becoming exceptionally good at recovering. I want us to become harder to exploit, Harder to isolate, harder to silence, harder to economically punish. Harder to make an example of, harder to convince that we should be grateful simply to have been admitted into somebody else's institution. I want us to be increasingly capable of building institutions and capital and networks and structures of our own. Perhaps that is the conversation I'm most interested in right now. Not only how do we dismantle systems of harm, but also how do we bewut while we are dismantling them? Because being able to diagnose your oppression with extraordinary precision while remaining permanently at its mercy is its own kind of powerlessness. The work cannot only be about understanding power. It has to be about building power. And I'm going to be focusing a lot of my attention on what it takes to do that, both in sharing what I find, but also in actionably in little ways that grow. Build power. Not just more for myself, but for all of us as a collective who deserve better. So, what do I want you to take away from today's episode? That diagnosis is not liberation. Critical awareness alone does not produce any kind of structural or personal change. So we need to work simultaneously across institutional change, leadership spending power. Collective organizing. and individual optionality building. Power has to become material. It can no longer be aspirational. It has to be something we focus on and work towards everywhere we can get it. We have to build our own. So this is where I'll leave this one. I have a lot to think about in sit with Thank you for being here. My name is Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom. I'll see you next week.