Liberatory Leadership: how to lead without authority
What business leaders can learn from activists about leadership without authority
A personal note: This is my 1 year anniversary on Substack! I am so grateful to you all for being on this journey with me. Thank you so much for following along.
The majority of leadership happens without formal authority.
You’re leading when you’re running a cross-functional project with no direct reports. You’re leading when you’re trying to influence your peers, or even managing up to shift your boss’s perspective. You’re leading when you’re building a movement within your organization, like pushing for a new initiative, championing a cultural shift, or mobilizing people around a shared vision.
In all these scenarios, you have no positional power. You can’t command. You can’t control resources. You can’t impose change through hierarchy.
So, how do you lead?
Traditional leadership development offers a lot of valuable tools: emotional intelligence, communication frameworks, strategic thinking, goal-setting methodologies, etc. These are important. But they are built on a fundamental assumption: once people have the right skills and mindset, they can execute.
What if that assumption is incomplete? What if you don’t always have the authority to execute in the way you’ve been trained?
This is the question activists have been grappling with for generations. When you are organizing for social change, you have no formal authority. No budget. No org chart. Just people, commitment, and the imperative to mobilize others toward transformation.
Traditional Leadership Development
I’m not here to throw traditional leadership development under the bus. With formal authority, these frameworks work. Situational leadership helps leaders adapt their approach based on context. The GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) provides structure for developmental conversations. Training in active listening, feedback, and emotional intelligence builds critical capabilities.
These tools have value. They have helped countless leaders become effective.
But, they share a common limitation: they focus on developing people to be better performers within existing constraints. They assume the playing field is relatively level, that the main thing standing between someone and their potential is knowledge, skill, or confidence.
They don’t address the invisible obstacles that prevent people from accessing their full power.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
The foundations of liberatory leadership trace back to Paulo Freire’s 1968 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire was a Brazilian educator who taught peasants to read. And for this, the military dictatorship imprisoned him and forced him into 16 years of exile.
What made Freire dangerous wasn’t literacy itself. It was his method. Freire rejected what he called the “banking model” of education: the idea that the teacher deposits knowledge into the passive student, like putting money in a piggy bank. This model, he argued, reinforces oppression by treating people like empty vessels to be filled by those with authority.
Instead, Freire proposed dialogical education: a process where teacher and student learn together. Both are active subjects discovering and transforming reality. The goal wasn’t just to teach people to read words, but to help them develop conscientização—critical consciousness about the forces shaping their lives.
His claim was: Liberation cannot be given by benevolent authorities. It must be achieved by people themselves.
You cannot liberate someone for them. You can only create conditions where they can liberate themselves.
This principle turns out to be essential for leadership. And it’s what activists have operationalized through decades of organizing without formal power.
Comments are open. If you’ve got something to say or want to share what stood out to you, I’d love to hear it.
Modern Liberatory Frameworks
Modern liberatory frameworks, like those developed by Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation (CHJL), build on Freire’s foundation with explicit attention to:
Somatic awareness: understanding how oppression and constraint live in the body
Ancestral wisdom: reconnecting people to sources of knowledge and power outside dominant systems
Decolonization: identifying and challenging internalized narratives from systems of oppression.
Collective power: building networks and relationships, not just individual capacity.
The Liberatory Leadership framework identifies three core dimensions:
Cultivating visionary mindset and self-anchoring: This means helping people connect to their own sense of purpose, worth, and vision, independent of external validation or permission. It’s about grounding in “who I am” and “what I’m here to do” in ways that can’t be granted or revoked by authority figures.
Fostering relational and collective power: Liberation is not individual. It requires building trust, networks, and mutual support. This dimension focuses on creating the conditions for people to access power through relationship and community, not despite the absence of formal authority.
Driving transformative impact and wellbeing: This is about sustainable change that doesn’t require people to sacrifice themselves. It’s the recognition that you can’t lead others to liberation if you’re burning out in the process.
These aren’t just nice-to-haves. For activists leading without authority, these are matters of survival. They’re what makes the difference between movements that fizzle and movements that shape the future.
Why this matters for business leadership
The concept of “leading from behind” has gained traction in business circles, often linked to “servant leadership.” Robert Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” in 1970 (the same year Freire’s work was translated to English), describing leaders who prioritize the growth and wellbeing of those they serve.
Nelson Mandela captured this beautifully in his autobiography: “A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
Servant leadership offers an important reframe: the leader’s job is to serve the team’s success, not to be served by them. Greenleaf’s test for servant leadership was: “Do those served grow as persons?”
But the liberatory lens takes this even further.
It’s not enough to serve people. It’s not enough even to help them grow within the constraints they face.
The liberatory leader’s job is to help people identify and remove the obstacles to their own power.
Leading, through a liberatory lens, means:
Helping people see what constrains them, not just supporting them within those constraints.
Building their capacity to transform conditions, not just adapt to them.
Increasing their agency and authority, not just their performance or skills
Creating the conditions for self-liberation, not providing liberation as a gift.
When you solve someone’s problem for them, you’re actually reinforcing their dependence on external authority. Even if your intentions are good, you’re sending the message: “You needed me to fix this. Change comes from people with more power/knowledge/resources than you.”
Dependency is the opposite of liberation. When you “help” someone by solving their problems for them, by giving them the answer, by using your authority to remove obstacles on their behalf, you may get short term results, but you reinforce the belief that change comes from external saviors.
Liberation requires that people develop the capacity to free themselves.
And here’s why this is especially critical when you lead without formal authority:
You literally cannot command people to follow you. Your only source of power is their liberated power.
When you mobilize people by helping them overcome internal and external constraints, by connecting them to their own agency and to collective power, you create something that doesn’t depend on you.
You create a movement, not a following. You build capacity that outlasts your involvement.
Want to share your thoughts? I’d genuinely love to hear them. This space is a conversation, not just a monologue. Hit ‘reply’ or send me a message below.
The leadership transformation
Here’s the shift the liberation perspective asks of leaders:
From: developing people to be better performers within the system
To: liberating people to transform themselves and the systems around them
From: leader as expert who diagnoses and prescribes
To: leader as partner in discovering and removing obstacles
From: individual skill-building
To: individual liberation & collective power-building
From: helping people adapt to reality
To: helping people transform their relationship to reality
When you lead without formal authority, this transformation is essential because:
You can’t command, you must inspire. And people are inspired by leaders who help them access their own power, not by leaders who demonstrate superior power over them.
You can’t control resources, you must build networks. Liberation inherently focuses on collective power, on weaving webs of mutual support and shared resources.
You can’t impose change, you must mobilize. You need people to want to move, to feel their own agency in creating change, not to comply with your directives.
Your power comes from liberating others’ power. When you help people overcome constraints and access their full capabilities, they become allies and co-creators. They lead beside you, not behind you.
Through this lens, the leader’s job isn’t to be the most capable person in the room. It’s to multiply capability throughout the room.
Key practices for liberatory leadership
If you’re leading without formal authority (or even if you have authority but want to lead more effectively) here are several key practices drawn from liberation coaching:
Ask obstacle-focused questions
“what’s preventing you from doing what you already know you should do?”
“what would have to change, internally or externally, for this to feel possible?”
“what obstacles are you navigating that aren’t visible to me?”
Listen somatically. Pay attention not just to what people say, but to what their bodies are telling you. Where does the constraint live? What happens physiologically when they talk about the challenge?
Contextualize, don’t pathologize. Help people see their struggles as intelligent responses to real conditions, not as personal failings. “It makes sense that you’d feel that way, given…” is more powerful than, “you just need to…”
Build collective power. Connect people to others facing similar constraints. Create spaces for mutual support. Facilitate resource-sharing and coalition building. Liberation is never just individual.
Trust their wisdom. Resist the urge to be the expert with the answer. The person you’re coaching knows their constraints, their context, their capabilities better than you ever will. Your job is to create conditions for them to access that knowledge.
Focus on conditions, not just content. Don’t just help people solve the immediate problem. Help them transform the conditions that created the problem.
Experiment and iterate. Liberation isn’t linear. It’s about trying things, noticing what happens, adjusting. Create safe spaces for experimentation where failure is learning, not punishment.
Traditional leadership development gives us essential tools. We need emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, communication skills. But we also need the principles and practices that activists have honed through decades of organizing for change without formal power:
The recognition that people are constrained by forces both internal and external
The commitment to helping people develop critical consciousness about those constraints
The patience to let liberation come from people themselves, not from benevolent authorities
The focus on collective power, not just individual capability
The trust that people have the wisdom to free themselves if we create the right conditions
When business leaders embrace liberatory leadership alongside traditional leadership, we create organizations where:
More people can lead, because leadership isn’t tied to position
Change is sustainable, because it comes from empowered people, not dependent followers
Innovation flourishes, because we’ve unlocked the collective genius that no single leader possesses
People actually want to be there, because they’re growing as humans, not just as resources
When we create conditions for people to overcome the obstacles to their own power, rather than just helping them perform better within existing constraints, we tap into something far more powerful than any formal authority could provide.
FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net
Further reading:
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With love, Bri Chapman