I have worked with “leaders” for twenty years. Here is what I have learned about leadership.
A leader has power (?)
I have always been fascinated by power. Who decides what gets prioritized and funded? The powerful. Who sets rules and redefines rights and responsibilities? Those in power. Who can sustain wars, end famines, and ensure that people do not needlessly die during a pandemic? Powerful people.
Throughout my career, I have had the privilege to see power in action. In my very first job in 2001, I engaged with former German Chancellor from the Cold War era, Helmut Schmidt. I have since worked with former Heads of State, several World Bank Presidents, and CEOs of multi-billion dollar foundations and international NGOs. I have seen from the inside and close-up how policy and funding decisions are made, or blocked.
When we think of leadership, we often think of the head of a country or organization. If you’ve seen the inner workings of governments and organizations, you’ll also know that there are what are called “veto players” (actors who have the ability to decline a choice being made). CEOs have board members and key investors. Heads of State have coalition partners, and in most countries, actors like military leadership or funders and lobbyists. It’s important to understand who really holds the reigns of power.
“Leaders”?
I have during my career learned that some leaders are duds (something that fails to work properly, taking up unnecessary space or leaving a void). Other leaders are marionettes (their actions are fully controlled by others). Many leaders I have seen try to lead through control – often toxic control – and thereby become duds, because very few people in practice follow. Or they act like dictators, most people fearing to dissent.
Five years ago, I pulled the emergency breaks in my work. I didn’t believe in what my organization’s leadership claimed it was doing, and felt (as a wonderful colleague of mine articulated years later) that “I was slowly dying inside from Monday to Friday”.
I began to question the leadership I kept seeing, which in my view was being wielded through arrogance, threats, and a motivation to control. It felt intellectually void, and most importantly, morally wrong. I felt that if I continued to work for such leaders, I would become someone I feared to be. Worse, I feared I was sustaining a system that was disrespectful, unfair, and toxic.
I began to look for a different type of leadership and literally asked colleagues and friends to provide me with the names of the people who inspired them. I began to look at colleagues and people around me with different eyes. Just because a person didn’t hold power – “controlling a group, country, or situation” (the definition of leadership above from the Cambridge Dictionary) – it didn’t mean they didn’t inspire me to learn and follow.
What is leadership?
Over the past five years, I have redefined what I believe leadership is. It’s not a title, control over budgets, or even the ability to make decisions that affect others. That’s pure, cold, power.
Leaders in the sector I currently work in (global health) are people like Loyce Pace (now holding power as Assistant Secretary in the Office of Global Affairs for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services), who when I first met her was a shining star in compassionate and inclusive engagement, elevating diverse and marginalized voices and their issues that were at the time fully neglected – even ridiculed – in our sector. A leader who has inspired me to follow and learn since I have met her is someone like Roopa Dhatt (founder of Women in Global Health), who is the only person I have ever seen inspire an authentic, global movement that is based on mutual respect and support, not the incentive of making someone’s ego and legacy shine. A leader is a person like Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and still hugely powerful and influential, who in my experience is one of the least arrogant yet most determined and value-based people I have met.
Leaders are people like Madhu Pai (recently made Inaugural Chair of the Department of Global & Public Health at McGill), who fearlessly called out inequities of our system during the pandemic, and who champions so many important causes that make people with vested interests uncomfortable. People like Seye Abimbola, who as BMJ Global Health’s editor-of-chief placed values above interests, and quoting Madhu Pai from a talk both held yesterday at McGill “created the only safe space in global health”. Or Ed Yong, one of the best journalists I have ever read, who left a prestigious job at The Atlantic, and inspires me every day with his posts on Bluesky on how you can take a different path and still move mountains in the world. Leadership for me is also the courage to use your voice publicly, and calling out people in a non-PC way as “dickheads” when others just flock towards the dollars (Kristof Decoster, Editor of the International Health Policies network newsletter, and who has more than anyone inspired and encouraged me to speak out and use my own voice).
All of the people listed here – and there are many more – share one trait: they explicitly call out and shine the light on other people, and people whose work and efforts they are building on, and who inspire them. These leaders may have egos too, but these egos are not front and center and in your face all the time.
Not controlling leadership, but inclusive leadership
Most people who wield power may be defined as “leaders”, but I am adding quotation marks for a reason. They do not in my experience really inspire, nor do they have authentic followership. Many people are blinded by their perceived power, or more often their dollars. If their leadership style is controlling or even toxic, they are closer to dictatorial and continue to wield power through threats and fear.
Even in our global health sector, we still have such “leadership” in some organizations and countries.
It’s high time to question and also push back against such leadership. More than ever – both in global health and also more broadly in the world – we need visionary, inclusive leaders who inspire and show that new ways of doing things are possible. Some people may call this “feminist leadership”, others compassionate or inclusive leadership. I’d simply call it leadership in its truest form.
Twenty years into my career, I know such leadership when I see it.
Katri Bertram 