BY Dana Zhang, Samia Habli
Feminist collectives and NGOs inherit a number of beliefs about leadership that are, too often, touted as whole truths. These beliefs influence how we explain our values and make decisions about what feels fair, responsible, or feminist to us. Repeated often enough, they start to resemble mantras, uttered until they have settled comfortably in the mind as self-evident ideas around which we must then organize our work.
We return to them because they do appear to make sense. All the same, a belief can be both true and incomplete. In fact, that may be precisely what makes it so persuasive. The truth within it gives us reason to accept it; the parts it leaves unexamined are far easier to overlook.
At the center of this reflection are five common beliefs that are, in many ways, half-true. Each contains an important insight while leaving something important unsaid. So, we begin this conversation in that space between what we believe and what we experience: between the values we name and the realities that emerge when we try to put them into practice.
Rather than dismissing these beliefs, we want to ask what they might still teach us if we resist letting them settle as hard truths.
“Saying ‘horizontal’ means power has been solved.”
Few of us entered collective work to recreate the very hierarchies we set out to challenge. So, we flattened the structure, believing that if no one sits above anyone else, power would naturally distribute itself more fairly across the collective.
Removing hierarchy does change where power is expected to reside, but it tells us much less about where influence accumulates in the absence of established hierarchy. Once formal titles are removed, influence has to be called out in other ways or it can easily pass for consensus. For instance, the person who speaks first may end up shaping the entire direction of a discussion. The person whose judgment has earned the group’s trust may carry more weight without that person having ever intended this outcome. Confidence, experience, availability, or long-standing relationships influence whose ideas take hold and whose pass almost unnoticed.
Jo Freeman recognized this exact pattern more than fifty years ago. A group that refuses formal structure, she argued, does not abolish hierarchy; it just becomes less adept at recognizing the hierarchies emerging within them. Seen this way, horizontality is less an achievement than a practice of continual attention. Without that attention, yesterday’s hierarchy returns wearing a different outfit.
This raises an uncomfortable possibility. Have we sometimes treated horizontality as an endpoint rather than an ongoing responsibility? If power can reorganize itself, then perhaps the work is not only to dismantle hierarchy once, but to keep asking where influence has collected since.
“Collective leadership means everyone does everything.”
We have learned to approach roles with caution. Many of us have seen how quickly roles become attached to hierarchy: how a title goes on to determine whose voice holds authority over others’. As we try moving away from those patterns, we have sometimes leaned toward the idea that sharing leadership means sharing the work equally. That, if leadership belongs to everyone, then surely everyone should be involved in everything.
Looking back at this assumption, we do see the care behind this instinct. We wanted to make sure that no person became the one who consistently carried the authority of the collective. The irony is that, in trying to make leadership more collective, we may still be defining it through a narrow lens. Often, even the word leadership seems to be reserved for only a small slice of the work: the closer a responsibility sits to visibility, decision-making, or representation, the more readily it earns that name. Meanwhile, much of what keeps a collective thriving (thinking, organizing, writing, relationship-building, facilitation, administrative stewardship) remains outside that definition, even though the collective depends on it no less.
Our suspicion of roles may therefore deserve the same attention we have given to hierarchy itself. Roles have often been used to concentrate authority and make some forms of knowledge appear more valuable than others, their absence only serves to create greater confusion. The responsibilities a collective relies on still require recognition, and naming them gives the collective a way to value the forms of contribution that have often remained in the background and to understand how they sustain the work as a whole.
The question is not simply whether roles should exist but whether responsibilities are held as personal power or understood as part of the collective’s shared leadership.
“The person people see is the leader.”
People outside a collective often come to know its work through one person. Whoever answers the email, or accepts the invitation to speak can become, in the minds of others, the whole of what the collective is. Even when leadership is shared internally, the outside world often searches for the person who appears to represent it. Before long, visibility begins to stand in for leadership.
The problem is not with visibility. Every collective needs the people who can carry its ideas into public spaces. What we think deserves closer attention is how easily recognition sticks wherever it first lands and how, gradually, familiarity acquires the appearance of authority. In other words, the visible person is often the one invited back, remembered first, and approached again. However, that person is not always the one the collective has entrusted with the most responsibility.
Visibility also follows existing lines of access and opportunity. Fluency in a funder’s language, the freedom to travel, institutional credibility, or simply fitting expectations of what a leader looks like all increase the likelihood of being seen.
When visibility continues circling around the same people, we have to ask: what else accompanies it? Influence? Opportunity? Authority? And how might a collective make visible the less recognized labor that allowed those moments of recognition to exist in the first place?
“Donors are outside the power dynamics.”
This is an easy belief to accept because it contains a straightforward truth. A donor is not usually present when strategy is being debated or when a collective is deciding what it can realistically take on. The money arrives, and the decisions still appear to belong to the people doing the work. Yet, it has to be said that power does not begin only where decisions are made. It actually begins much earlier, in the conditions surrounding those decisions: the resources available, the timelines attached, and the expectations a collective has to navigate. So while it’s true that a donor may not directly determine the direction of the work, funding conditions influence the path a collective is able to take.
Few collectives have the freedom to walk away from funding whenever its conditions sit uneasily with the work. The grant is accepted because the work matters, and because refusing it often carries consequences of its own. From that point onward, the strain shifts to the people inside the collective. A grant timeline becomes the timeline of the work itself. Suddenly, a collective is expected to demonstrate progress according to a schedule that may not reflect the pace of change within a community. The collective then has to reconcile two different realities: the time required to do meaningful work and the time required to prove that the work has happened.
Donors, then, are not entirely outside the power dynamics. Their influence may be less visible than a vote around the meeting table, but it is no less consequential. Its effects appear in conversations about capacity, in disagreements over priorities, and amid the suspicion that the collective itself has somehow fallen short. If that is true, how many leadership problems are, at least in part, responses to conditions the collective never had the power to set?
“Care means being nice.”
Care has become closely associated with a particular kind of language in our work. The word appears everywhere: in meetings, proposals, and conversations about how we want to work together. We use it as a way of expressing that people’s wellbeing matters. Yet, after the conversation ends, the workload often remains unchanged.
Rest is a good example. We agree that it matters, and yet, the deadlines stay fixed. We speak about balance while continuing to organize work in ways that leave little room for it. There is a particular discomfort in noticing how easily care can exist as a shared value without becoming a condition people actually experience.
Kindness is one expression of care, but it is not the whole of it. When care is understood mainly through reassurance and gentleness, the forms of care that require greater honesty become harder to enact. Sometimes care means asking why a burden has fallen where it has, or whether an expectation placed on people is one they can realistically carry. Sure enough, these conversations may cause friction, but friction does not necessarily make care uncaring. In some cases, it is exactly what allows a collective to address issues that have remained unresolved for too long.
Care cannot be measured by the tone of our interactions alone. The ways in which a collective distributes time, recognizes labor, and shares responsibility all reveal the depth of its commitment to practicing care.
What we should be asking is: if the same people continue carrying the same burdens under the same conditions, then what, exactly, has our care made possible?