Leading Below the Surface

Surface leadership gets you sued. Surface leadership creates apathetic employees. Surface leadership ruins trust in an organization. Employees don’t leave organizations; they leave surface leadership.

But at the nucleus of any below the surface leader is their keen ability to connect with people, especially those who are different from them. This

About 99% of the books in that library were written by white men. In the short time I spent in that room, I came across only a few books written by women, and white women at that. The only books written by Black people dealt with slavery themes. The very few contributions from other cultures were also by male authors.

Survival of the Fittest: AKA, it’s your fault if you don’t make it.

Being surface is normalized, and there are few consequences, if any, to being a surface leader. People want to get better but, as with anti-racism movements in companies, people performatively commit but have a hard time truly changing.

they leave a disproportionately large imprint on our lives.

Reflecting on these situations as an adult, I realized that these kids weren’t intentionally being mean. The group was influenced by human bias, and I didn’t truly understand what that meant until I entered the workplace. I have worked with several “Sallys,” and they were operating on natural human instinct. You see, human bias wires us for samenes

Let’s Reflect

First off, she led with passion and resilience. She had a very strong “why.”