Violence is engrained in the everyday life of societies and organizations. While far-right politicians and sexually abusive executives have garnered increased media attention of late, violence is not confined to overt incidences and events. Rather, violence is inherent in our cultures, where oppressions along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, class and dis/ability intersect in our everyday lives.

Leadership is a vehicle through which this violence becomes not only normalized but romanticized. Hegemonic masculinity, as defined by the qualities of individualism, control and conquest that served to justify centuries of patriarchy, white supremacy and European colonialism, is instilled into our ideas and ideals about leadership. Leaders and aspiring leaders in turn contort their identities in line with the fantasies of leadership to convince others and themselves that they are ‘leaders’. As we saw with the media representations of Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg and Carolyn McCall, corporate executives are most readily recognized as ‘leaders’ when they conform to traditional white elite-class gender norms.

Anti-racist feminist thought and activism offer a wealth of knowledge in the resistance against interlocking oppressions in our organizations and society. Yet as leadership has been sculpted from the very ideologies of imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, we have historically failed to recognize it beyond narrow celebrations of heroic individualism. In our neoliberal era alongside the rise of capitalism, leadership has been further moulded in the image of professional success and material wealth. As such, the efforts of those from the margins who struggle towards social transformation are rarely permitted into the sacred definitional boundaries of leadership.

This book

Leadership, and its glorification in our cultures, is problematic. In the Global North, our ideas and ideals of leadership are set in the values of imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy. From the mid-20th century, leadership began its eventual rise to its sacred status with the conceptualization of charisma. The charismatic leader was sculpted from Enlightenment fantasies, standing as an independent and autonomous subject who exerts his spirit on the world through his decisive thought and energetic action. He is governed only by his inner conviction and repudiates the communal concern for others as a trait of the ‘weaker sex’. Such was the leader who sailed from Europe armed with weapons in the name of colonialism.