Linked together across the Ocean

I have spent the past three days participating in a Black women’s leadership summit hosted by an organization I love dearly. I entered the space with a clear purpose: to listen, to learn, and perhaps most importantly to unlearn in order to relearn. I wanted to pay attention not only to what was being taught, but to what was being assumed.

The summit offered a range of strong, practical workshops Leading Boldly, AI for Leaders, Inclusive Sisterhood, Executive Presence, among others. I will admit, I was especially eager for the Canva session. Yet as someone deeply attentive to leadership theory and praxis, I found myself listening beneath the surface of the content.

What I consistently heard were Western leadership frameworks in action. This is not surprising; it is the grammar of leadership most of us have been trained to speak through the long arc of progressive colonial formation (colonization)! Initially I was slightly irritated, but I realize that’s all we know and that’s the only model that has produced success as defined by western standards: income, lifestyle, retirement, college education all the things most of us want in life to live well and be heard. Within these sessions, Black women powerfully narrated their journeys of survival and success how they made it to the C-suite, how learning the rules of the system and conforming just enough allowed them to ascend within corporate America. This is a story I know intimately. Western leadership teaches us a lot about the “me” our stories as Black women teach us about the “we”.

And yet, listening through a Motherist lens, I heard something more layered unfolding beneath the language of “best practices” and “how-to’s.” Embedded within these testimonies were core elements of Motherist praxis: faith as a deep knowing that we can make a difference; service as a force that empowers and improves communities; the wisdom to distinguish between one’s title and one’s true purpose. One speaker described it as taking lemons and making lemonade; another spoke of a call to bring out “the best of us in the better.”

What struck me most is that Black women often articulate these truths without naming how profoundly Afrocentric their leadership values already are. We bring what I call the “secret sauce” into every space we enter not as an accessory, but as an embodied way of being. That secret sauce is about getting the work done, standing with dignity, practicing reflection in the midst of change, and holding both self and community together at the same time.

My dissertation made this clear, and the summit only reaffirmed it: Black women do not need permission. These instincts flow through Black women’s leadership traditions across the diaspora and across the ocean. Whether named or unnamed, they are ancestral, relational, and generative.

So, sisters, let us keep doing what we do. Not merely surviving systems, but quietly transforming them. We are not competitors in this work we are family.