Are You an Inclusive Leader?

Leadership rooted in sharing power creates lasting progress toward health equity.

I’ve spent more than three decades advocating for policies that help people live healthier lives with love, family, and community.

This kind of deep change requires sustained organizing and leadership, and many, many, leaders working together. Current hierarchical leadership models tend to push power and decision-making upward, and away from the people who have the most experience with these issues. We need an expansive array of leadership for a just and equitable society for all of us.

When I was in leadership roles, I felt isolated and disconnected from my team and the communities I served. As a Gen X latchkey kid, I learned to be hyper-independent and solve problems on my own. This influenced the way I led as an executive director. I believed that leading meant having all the answers, shouldering the burden, and pushing through, even when the cost was loneliness, burnout, and limited impact. The higher I rose in leadership, the more disconnected I felt from my team, colleagues, community, and purpose.

After decades of struggle, I stepped away from leadership, not because I stopped caring, but because I needed space to imagine leading differently. I wanted to explore approaches to leadership without burning out or compromising my values.

New Ways of Leading

In collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I recently explored how different leadership models could address systems-level problems.

In my research for Beyond the Leadership Binary: Toward More Collective Forms of Leading, I studied organizations that were addressing structural racism by embracing collective "leader-full" approaches. These organizations treated all staff as leaders capable of contributing meaningfully to the mission and vision and as essential for enacting the deep change needed for health equity.

Instead of relying on a few individuals at the top, they included the perspectives, leadership, ideas, and decision-making throughout the organization. In these leader-full organizations, I found more promising forms of just and equitable leadership that maximized impact and minimized burnout.

Organizations that I have studied implemented three key strategies to achieve this.

1. Trust Your People

Collective leadership is less about specific configurations, and more about intention, practices, and values. It is an organizational commitment grounded in trust, valuing everybody’s contributions and perspectives, and sharing decision-making across organizational hierarchies.

The Women-Inspired Neighborhood (WIN) Network in Detroit, led by Henry Ford Health is a great example of collective leadership where several large healthcare organizations, public health experts, universities, and community organizations came together to address Detroit’s high infant mortality rate.

They trained community members to become Community Health Workers (CHWs), who serve as trusted links between healthcare providers and local families and patients. CHWs partnered with midwives, clinicians, and prenatal care teams to improve health outcomes for moms and their newborns. By building relationships with their patients and in their communities, they solved problems that doctors and nurses couldn’t fix on their own. Ultimately, over 200 organizations worked together, sharing decision-making, to design a program that truly met family needs.

Now, Henry Ford Health directly employs CHWs and has expanded their work into diabetes and cancer care. This shows how real progress toward health equity can emerge from small changes, especially when leadership, responsibility, and decision-making are shared broadly.

2. Identify and Support Intrapreneurs

I also found employees that challenge the status quo within their organizations beyond their job descriptions and without waiting for permission. These bottom-up change-makers, known as intrapreneurs, lead some of the most powerful shifts within their organizations.

A group of Black women and leaders of color at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) advanced racial equity and transformation by stepping into intrapreneurial roles. They created a Racial Equity Committee to drive more values-alignment within the organization and made space for all staff to participate in the responsibility and decision-making for racial equity with organizational operations and programs.

These leaders didn’t wait for permission; they led from where they were, and they led together. The CEO and board valued and protected their risk-taking, supporting them and the Racial Equity Committee with time and resources to advance change.

3. Build Bridges Across Hierarchies

While intrapreneurs lead from within an organization, another important role in collective leadership I found was bridge leadership. These leaders used their higher organizational positions to support, encourage, and recognize collective input and decision-making. They bridged the gaps between hierarchical and collective leadership, and close gaps between community needs and institutional practices.

That is what happened at Oweesta, a national Native Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) intermediary. Oweesta heard from its Native CDFI members and community members that homeownership was nearly impossible on tribal lands, largely due to lack of capital and mortgage providers unfamiliar with tribal systems.

Over a decade, Oweesta brought together community leaders, tribal councils, federal agencies, and financial experts to co-create a solution. They designed, tested, and implemented a culturally rooted mortgage product for tribal lands and a $28 million expansion of its mortgage lending pool.

Oweesta helped shift practices at institutions like the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Fannie Mae to better serve Native communities. Crucially, they did this collectively. They worked together through a Housing Advisory Council, centered tribal sovereignty and community needs, and collectively advanced new ways to meet the needs of Native communities.

Transforming the Future Through Shared Leadership

In looking for more expansive leadership models, I found leadership that was more inclusive, equitable, and capable of driving deep systems change.

Given the complexity of the entrenched inequities in healthcare, it is not surprising that none of us can do it alone.

In my research, I find everyday people and everyday leaders rising to the challenge. They don’t hold high-ranking titles or have perfect plans. But they lead with courage, trust, and a deep commitment to working together.

The kind of future I dream about will take us all to build it—not solo heroes. Together we will share responsibility and recognition and make this future possible.

About the Author

Sujatha Jesudason, Ph.D., is a professor of management and strategic design at The New School. She has worked as an activist, organizer, and scholar for over 30 years in a range of social justice movements. She is a leading voice on new practices in movement building, social design, equity, and gender and racial inclusion.