For most of my career, I was taught — explicitly and implicitly — that leadership meant authority. It meant decisiveness, confidence, a certain kind of controlled emotional presentation. It meant being the person in the room who spoke most, who deferred least, who projected certainty even when uncertainty was the only honest response.
I was taught, in other words, to lead like a particular kind of man.
And I tried. I really tried. I learned the language. I wore the suits. I sat at the tables I had fought to get to and I performed the version of leadership that was expected of me. And I was good at it, in the ways that could be measured. But I was exhausted in ways that could not.
Because I was leading with a mask on. And leadership with a mask on is not leadership. It is theatre.
The most powerful leadership I have ever witnessed looked nothing like what I was taught. It looked like a woman who walked into a room full of grief and did not try to fix it — who simply sat with people in their pain until they felt seen enough to begin moving. It looked like a CEO who told her team, honestly, that she did not know the answer and that they were going to figure it out together. It looked like a community organiser who led not from the front but from the centre, holding the circle so that everyone inside it could find their own strength.
This is the leadership that women have been practising for centuries, in homes and communities and informal networks, without ever being given the title or the credit. It is relational leadership. Embodied leadership. Leadership that is rooted in presence rather than performance.
Here is what I know about this kind of leadership:
It requires you to know yourself. You cannot lead from a place of authenticity if you do not know what you actually believe, value, and stand for. The inner work is not separate from the leadership work. It is the foundation of it.
It requires you to be willing to be wrong. The most effective leaders I know are not the ones who are never wrong. They are the ones who can acknowledge when they are wrong, learn from it, and move forward without shame.
It requires you to invest in the people around you. Not as a strategy, but as a genuine expression of your belief in their capacity. When you lead from a place of real investment in others' growth, you create something that outlasts you.
Women are not deficient leaders who need to learn to lead like men. We are a largely untapped source of exactly the kind of leadership the world needs right now. Leadership that heals as it builds. Leadership that includes as it advances. Leadership that is honest enough to say: I do not have all the answers, but I am committed to finding them with you.
That is the leadership I am committed to developing — in myself and in every woman I work with.
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About the Author
Kabinga C Mazaba
International speaker, BOOKFEST Award-winning author, and transformational coach. Kabinga guides individuals from silence to voice, from surviving to thriving, through the C.O.N.F.R.O.N.T framework.
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