Long-read: From leaders to leadership

Why this article has no author's name on it, and what that has to do with burnout, funding, and the kind of organisations that actually change anything.

You'll notice there's no single name at the top of this piece. That's deliberate, and by the end we hope it will make complete sense. What follows is an argument that the way we usually do leadership (finding one impressive person, putting them out front, telling the world "they did this") and compensating them generously for the pressure and overwork - is not only unjust but actively fragile. We want to make the case for a shift we've come to think of as moving from leaders to leadership: from a role occupied by an individual to a quality held across a whole community. That shift takes us through some uncomfortable territory: where knowledge actually comes from, why those pushing for change burn out, the strange theatre of organisations competing for funding, and finally a question almost nobody in the spaces we found ourselves in says out loud: what happens to any of us when the safety nets give way. We don't have all the answers. But we've come to believe the conversation itself is the work.

Leadership is a quality, not a person

As an organisation we learned this distinction from someone worth naming: Fons van der Veldern. We name him precisely because he has no need to be named. He didn't teach us this to get his name known, he taught us because he cares about it. What he gave us, in a single sentence, is this: leadership is a quality, not a person. And no one person can hold that quality in its entirety. It has to be held within an enabling community that fosters individual qualities into collective leadership. So the thing we are actually looking for is an organisation that values leadership, not an organisation that serves a leader.

That difference can not exist inside a hierarchy, in spite of the HR department (yes, it is about "management of human resources" at the end of the day) using similar language of leadership skills being valued. This is in part because one way in which white supremacy shows up in organisational culture is that “ideas of leadership are rooted in a culture of 'leader worship,' conceiving of leaders as saviours and/or heroes”. We argue that, even when this dominant idea is challenged, a hierarchy creates a culture of personalisation: middle or top managers will be expected to appear as accountable for decisions taken by ‘the organisation’ to other members of staff, and ‘the organisation’ takes a life of its own. On the other hand, the culture created is one that equates growing into leadership with climbing the ladder and ‘managing people’. All of this quietly denies everyone else but top management (and at time middle management) the time and room to grow into leadership themselves. Ultimately, it narrows the range of skills, knowledge and experience your organisation can draw on. 

A note on power: flattening an organisation, i.e. getting rid of institutional hierarchical forms of power, does not mean getting rid of power altogether! We wish… Informal power dynamics, how to make them visible and address them are questions running through many movements, experiences and experiments of horizontal governance. We are mindful of it as we set-up our journey, and hope to share our experience about it as we identify different paths and stumble along. 

The case that isn't really about values

Here's something we've learned the hard way: trying to win people over on values alone is difficult. Most people will nod along and agree with every word, and still not change how they work. Values are not the strongest argument. The strongest argument is simply that the single-leader model doesn't work very well - as values can only live in the relational space of an organisation, not in that single person. In this relational holding of values we can communicate, understand and shift our personal positions and those held by others and collectively. 

When you profile one leader, you silence everyone else's potential. People stop stepping up, because there's no real space to. So you get a slow drain: the people who should be leading either dim themselves down and settle into the rhythm of not contributing, or they leave and take their leadership somewhere else. And then one day the lone leader falls over, whether through burnout, retirement, departure or death, and the organisation discovers, too late, that it has lost or sidelined exactly the people who could have carried it. A collective that genuinely invites people to shape its strategy, its operations, its values and its story is, very simply, more resilient. It's worth noticing that many hard-nosed commercial organisations already understand this and have moved away from the single-figurehead model. They do so not for ethical reasons, but because betting everything on one person is brittle. We know other justice focused organisations big and small have tried, succeeded or failed in this type of structuring - and we write this to learn together.

There's a cost to the leader, too. One person ends up having to hold the entire living organism of the organisation, and the usual "solution" when they start to crack is to give them more servants: assistants, deputies, support staff, all of them orbiting the one figure who has to carry the whole vision. It's exhausting and it's unfair. 

A note on money: The single leader is also typically very well paid, which is part of why leaders find it so hard to let go: leadership shared across a team is rarely rewarded in the same way that being The Leader is. At realife Learning we pay a flat rate across everyone in our core team and all who work across our grant project work (while still employing consultants and consultant rates at times), precisely because what we want is for everyone to be a leader inside an organisation and our projects that values leadership, rather than one person holding it all and deciding, on everyone's behalf, what leadership means.

Where the work actually happens

All of this connects to a bigger question: where does knowledge actually come from? Our answer is that knowledge is generated in relation, and only in relation. No organisation, however brilliant, does its work alone. The work is done in the relationship between the organisation and the people and communities it works with. So when an organisation announces "we did this", it is, strictly speaking, saying something untrue. Even claiming a piece of work under an organisation's name, never mind an individual's, is already a small falsehood, because that work simply wasn't possible without the web of relationships that produced it.

In a world that understood "I did this" to mean "I did this with others," names wouldn't be a problem. But that isn't the world we live in. Our world turns leaders into figures to be worshipped, and (we'd argue) turns organisations themselves into something structurally narcissistic. We don't mean the people are narcissists; we mean we build narcissistic organisations, and narcissistic relationships with those we work with. That's why writing under the collective is, for us, a deliberate and slightly stubborn act of refusal. The one exception is when someone from outside realife contributes: then we do name them, because the whole point is to honour a relationship we value. We will of course at times need to continue to translate the relational into the individual for funders and reporting - but let’s make this translation visible and honest.

It's worth being clear that this is not about erasing people. Inside the collective we very much want to know names, and what each person brings. That conversation, the one where we say this is us, this is our story, this is my contribution, these are my skills and experience, is exactly how a movement, an organisation, a collective takes shape. The freedom we're after is a kind of looseness in the story, loose enough that many people can push it in different directions. The danger is only when the story hardens into a brand or a single face that everyone ends up serving.

The funding theatre

The reason all of this matters beyond our own walls is money. Organisations are taught to win credit and funding by marketing themselves like a product, on the logic of mine is better than yours, and they usually do it by claiming the work under the organisation's or the leader's name. The result is competition between organisations that are, supposedly, all trying to undo exactly this dynamic. It's also hero-worship of individuals whose success quietly rests on people paid very little: executive directors on global-north salaries pointing to the work of community members earning below a living wage, often on per diems, sometimes doing activism for free, and then framing that work as organisational success in order to raise more money to pay more salaries. It is a system of deep injustice. None of this is new: people have written about the "NGO-ification" of movements, the slow slide from collective power into hierarchical extraction, for a very long time. It stays an open conversation only because it's so awkward to have.

That same logic distorts how organisations relate to each other. In a single-leader outfit, partnerships are formed, held and signed off by the leader, which keeps everything on the terrain of brand and competition. Funders notice the lack of collaboration, throw money at "collaboration" (although we would argue, way too rarely!), and then watch it get captured by the same jockeying for position. But when relationships are allowed to be held across an organisation, by the staff who already carry years of relationships from previous and multiple experiences, the work genuinely connects across communities, geographies and disciplines. Organisations start to look less like rival brands and more like different mechanisms for delivering toward shared outcomes. And communities stop being a door that yet another NGO knocks on, offering the latest thing.

We should be honest about the limits here and where we speak from. Not every organisation can do this yet. Some work inside a knowledge economy, such as academic research, where the system ties reputation and quality to a named individual rather than a collective. Until they've built that reputation, going collective is a genuine risk. A few of us are now in this situation and we are determined (did I hear “slightly stubborn” earlier…?) to build realife to be robust enough to sustain this practice. So our encouragement is gentle: once you have the standing, consider publishing as a collective rather than as an individual, even in research settings. This can mean naming everyone, or naming just the collective - and what that means in terms of structural power dynamics should be clearly understood by all.

The conversation nobody wants to have

Eventually this all leads to the most uncomfortable place of all: our own salaries. The solidarity economy, international solidarity spaces, and the so called “international development” sector have their own infrastructure (funders, NGOs, civil society organisations, informal collectives, etc.) and own form of trickle-down economics. Money pools in consultancy, management and research, and only a fraction reaches the community-based organisations and frontline workers actually delivering and solving problems. If we are serious about justice, we have to look at where our own internal resources go. Not everyone on earth can earn a CEO NGO salary. We are talking the median CEO salary of the largest 100 UK NGOs being of 197 000 GBP in 2025 (more than 4 million rands) and 55 000 GBP (over 1 million rands) for the smallest ones.  But we are also talking about a median UK NGO salary of 36 000 GBP (R782,772) in 2026, with a significant proportion of entry-level and junior roles being paid below the living wage, or the average community organisation worker gross salary in South Africa being of R327,708 (15,071 GBP). This raises a blunt question: can we justify earning more than the living wage in the communities we are a part of and/or work in and alongside?

We are aiming to pay ourselves salaries, i.e. providing some security overtime and decent working conditions for and with each other, which freelancing does not allow by design. Our own salaries are relatively low, deliberately, and working through equity and fairness across our different individual backgrounds and needs, across existing personal financial standing, and across countries and taxation systems is not easy (probably something for us to write more about in the coming months…). We'd argue for a floor and a ceiling that sit close together, pegged to an equivalent local benchmark, the decent living wage of the community one actually works in and is a part of. While our flat-rate salary at realife will be higher than many of the places we work - the same flat-rate is provided to all those we work with regardless of role and we look to remove ourselves over time leaving increased local employment at decent rates. This is not an argument against a decent, dignified wage; everyone deserves that. It's an argument that doing justice work while extracting an outsized personal benefit from it is a contradiction, one that quietly undermines the ability for an organisation to enable justice. 

These conversations are so hard because they aren't really about organisational charts at all. They reach straight into people's lives: their security, their old age, their small pleasures.The social contract with the state is broken, and so, increasingly, is the communal contract we once had with one another. Who looks after you when you can no longer work? No organisation can honestly promise to step in for the state or the community. But naming that fear out loud, and looking squarely at what it means financially, is itself part of the justice work, even when there's no tidy answer.

There's even a quieter question buried in here, about joy. If you're among the minority who can afford a holiday, it's worth gently asking at whose cost. Not because we shouldn't have joy (of course we should, all of us) but because some of it might be found in being together, in community, rather than in the more expensive ways we numb ourselves to the state of the world. Individual luxury for the many is something which is either going to be rapidly decreasing, or something which was never achievable in the first place. Through developing the relational we can perhaps refind the commons of luxury - of family, friends, storytelling, nature, growing, reading, creating art and being human.

Two conditions

Two practical commitments hold all of this together. The first is transparency: we can only work in a genuinely reciprocal way with organisations willing to be open about their internal finances. Not necessarily to adopt our model, but to say plainly what people are paid and where the budget goes. Without that openness, the trust this whole way of working depends on simply cannot exist. With it we can start to open up non-competitive ways of working across organisations, movements and funders towards collective aims.

The second is patience. Some people will be able to make this shift towards shared transparent leadership, and some won't, and that's all right. If you invest in growing leadership and adequately resourcing the people at the front line of the issues, they tend to be the ones with the most at stake, the most knowledge, the best relationships and the most reason to carry it forward. Others may prefer a different path, and that's fine too.

Can we make this future together?

We won't pretend the world we're describing is here yet. The state is failing. The funding picture is contracting sharply this year, and the forecasts for next year are worse. But imagine starting from a different place: from allyship, solidarity and shared leadership; from a shared understanding that knowledge and value are created between us, across the organisations we partner with and the communities and frontline movements we stand alongside, and are a part of. In those relationships, in the networks, the friendships, the collectives, the ways of growing and sustaining and surviving together, might lie the very safety net we keep hoping the state, or a private pension, will somehow provide.

That is the future we think is worth building, together. And it's why we'll end the way we try to live:

Resilience is relational, not financial.

Written by the realife Learning collective