Selamat sore from Bali, Reader,

I just arrived last night, still a bit jet-lagged, but it’s good to be back! This newsletter arrives much later in your inbox due to travel and limited Wi-Fi at Chinese airports.
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In the coming weeks, I'm facilitating a course with “leadership” in the title, which is a little awkward for someone who spends a lot of time writing about power. Leadership in media is important, but the word itself can be narrow. It makes you think about control, hierarchy, CEO/ CFO/ CIO/ COO, and ego, right? Leadership can be done differently than what we’re used to. Read more below!

And if you're an editorial leader or working in a public-facing role that involves storytelling, come join an already amazing cohort of leaders from Uganda, France, India, Malaysia, Romania, and Turkey! Hit reply to sign up or click the button below.

Sanne

DEEP DIVE

How to decolonize leadership?

In most professional settings, “leadership” points to one person at the top of an organization, the one with the clearest voice in the room who makes the decisions. You might even think it’s a… man!

Many of us are taught to recognize leadership as a white man who is rational and decisive. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s research on leadership in media in 2025 concluded that:

Funders are also used to seeing a certain type of leader, which causes women founders (of media startups, for example) to get less funding than their male counterparts.
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There are many assumptions about what leadership looks like. In the run-up to the Leading for Transformation course, I shared (on LinkedIn) how I became a leader in media. It was a natural process because I had already picked up responsibility in the newsroom. It shows that it’s not always the loudest voices or the biggest egos who become managers.
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Having said that, I might have been the person with the behavior closest to what my boss already trusted. What’s important is that leadership is not a neutral thing. Competence is partly in the eye of the beholder.

The Western model as universal

Antonio Jimenez-Luque’s work on decolonial leadership points out how, in leadership studies, the Western model has become universal, whereas authority is more often organized locally and culturally. He is an associate professor in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego and talks about the colonial influence and the fact that the Western leadership framework was never built for women, Indigenous people, Black people, and anyone outside the dominant norm. The standard itself was built around one kind of person and then presented as if it described leadership in general.

Even if we talk about “transformational leadership” or “inclusive leadership,” it’s often about shifting language and not systemically changing the idea of what leadership is. This is where decolonial thinking becomes useful. It asks what makes authority legitimate in the first place. In most organizations, authority is attached to a role. If you have the title and mandate, you can decide and speak. Or if you have the visibility, you become the person who represents everyone else. A decolonial approach treats authority less as something you own and more as something you're accountable for.

Questions to ask

If you're a frequent reader of this newsletter, you know by now that decolonial thinking starts with more questions instead of clear answers. In the context of leadership in your organization, you could ask:

• Who can interrupt a bad decision?
• Who takes risks without a title?
• Who gets heard before the room decides?
• Who can refuse without consequences?

The answer will tell you more about leadership than an organizational chart can. A “flat” organization can still have an informal power structure, and then, these questions are equally important.

This is what makes the Portuguese investigative journalism podcast Fumaça a useful example. I visited their newsroom and interviewed Ricardo Esteves Ribeiro for SembraMedia last year. Ricardo explained that their organization is “flat” but also showed the thorough way their processes work internally. Funders supporting Fumaça require a director role, and so someone now has that title, but in practice, the label doesn’t mean anything. It’s how Fumaça navigates the institutional governance.

Leadership beyond the West

Western institutions often “discover” leadership practices that have existed elsewhere for generations. Also in the media, there is a lot of talk about collective leadership, shared and relational responsibility, and consensus.

Jimenez-Luque shows that communitarian forms of leadership have long existed outside Western leadership theory. It just wasn’t counted as real leadership. Indigenous leadership is not useful because it offers Western organizations a softer vocabulary. It disrupts the idea that authority only becomes legitimate through control and individual prestige.

Indigenous activist, author, and member of the Waorani Nation from the Amazonian Region of Ecuador, Nemonte Nenquimo, shows how leadership can be organized around an obligation to land and community. To survive, eventually. It’s not about her personal visibility and charisma, although that might play a role. The emphasis is on collaboration to save the planet.

Another example I thought of is former Uruguayan president José Mujica. I saw the documentary El Pepe A Supreme Life on Netflix, and as a former farmer, he interrupts the elite political style with his plain speech and little interest in performance.

Words matter

Decolonial language can easily cover up redistributing power. The talk can be progressive and decolonial, and the practice still the same. You start noticing that many decisions presented as obvious, strategic, or professional are often just old power instincts in a new language. It’s why I use “leadership” in the course title. It makes you recognize what the course focuses on, while also researching what leadership means in 2026.
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It should be a way of organising responsibility that does less harm. If it’s the editorial leader in the newsroom or the reporter “leading” on-the-ground coverage. That is the work: to recognize where the power sits, also within yourself, and what it takes to lead differently from the universal norm.

Last spots!

In Leading for Transformation, we’re going to explore the topic of leadership together, with a small cohort of now six people from around the world. If you’re keen on joining, hit reply and don’t miss the first session with guest speaker Aphrodite Salas tomorrow; it promises to be super interesting because she’ll share about her work with the Indigenous Inuit in Canada.

See you next week!

Sanne