What Every Leader Needs to Understand About Power and Harm
by Adrian Brown, Masarat Daud, Kerry Graham, Liz Skelton, Cassio Aoqui, Salvador Lopez, Tien Ung, Yussuf Sane, Maria Lucia Mendez Lacorazza, John Kania, Jenny Hodgson and Magdalena Pochec
It was a humid afternoon in Antioquia, Colombia, when two worlds faced each other across a makeshift table. On one side sat the executives of a large mining corporation, polished and guarded, notebooks open, pens poised. On the other side were community members from a village scarred by conflict, faces etched with decades of mistrust. In the tense quiet, nobody seemed willing to speak first.
Then Milton, one of the community members, broke the silence. His voice was quiet but steady as he expressed his lack of trust in everything and everyone coming from the company. But he also said he trusted the possibility of change and the power of conversation.
Across from Milton, Jonathan, a company executive accustomed to boardrooms rather than village squares, listened carefully. He hadn’t expected vulnerability. He hadn’t expected openness. Above all, he hadn’t expected himself to feel moved, humbled even, by Milton’s honesty.
This meeting was the beginning of something remarkable. Guided by Maria Lucia Méndez and the Colombian non-profit Ideas para la Paz, the community and the mining company committed to a radical experiment: intentionally building trust across lines of historic harm. Their story offers us a powerful insight into the nature of power itself, revealing not only what power can destroy but also what it can build.
The hard truth about power
Power is never neutral. In systems shaped by harm, choosing not to use your power to heal — whether through ignorance, fear, or self-preservation — almost always ends up reinforcing the very harm we hope to dismantle.
This might feel uncomfortable, but discomfort is necessary if we want to genuinely examine how we are using the power we have. Our world is strained by climate crises, democratic erosion, rising inequality, violence and social fragmentation. Good intentions alone aren’t enough. Leaders must consciously ask themselves — how am I using my power? And ultimately, am I contributing to the harm I am trying to address?
Power, as philosopher Michel Foucault noted, isn’t simply restrictive, it is generative. It creates realities, shapes narratives, determines possibilities. Unless explicitly used to repair and reconnect, power unintentionally reinforces the injustices we seek to end.
This understanding is echoed — and deepened — by thinkers from the Global South who challenge us to see healing not as a metaphor, but as structural transformation. Achille Mbembe and María Lugones, in different but complementary ways, reveal how power in postcolonial realities is exercised through control over life itself and through the imposition of colonial categories such as gender. For both, healing must go beyond soothing pain — it must dismantle the systems that produce it.
From Asia, physician and activist Rupa Marya, co-author of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, argues that healing from colonial harm requires nothing less than the transformation of our social and economic systems. It is a systemic act that restores balance and centers collective well-being over domination and extraction (Marya & Patel, 2021).
Taken together, these voices remind us that healing is not passive. It is a courageous, collective reimagining of power — an embodied practice of repair, reconnection and radical change at the root.
We, a global community of practice convened by the Collective Change Lab, have spent the last year exploring collective power: power rooted not just in hierarchy or position, but in relationships, empathy, care, accountability, and shared purpose. We learned through experience that collective power is not held; it is practised. In this article we share the voices and learnings of community members.
Learning #1: Power is relational and fluid
Milton and Jonathan did not begin as allies. They began as individuals trapped in narratives of suspicion and division. What bridged their worlds wasn’t authority or control, it was the courageous decision to enter into a genuine relationship.
Collective power is rooted in relationships. It grows through trust, shared purpose, and mutual care — and while it resists rigid hierarchies, it relies on intentional connection to deepen, grow and move with clarity and strength. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, community networker Salvador Lopez experienced a similar revelation. Real change came when traditional leaders stepped aside, placing residents with lived experience of homelessness at decision-making tables. Salvador reflected: “Having lived-experience leaders at every table accelerated our progress. They fostered respect even when conversations were difficult.”
In both Antioquia and Grand Rapids, power emerged relationally, shifting continuously with dialogue, empathy, care, connection and accountability. Power, at its most effective, flows through relationships, rather than resting in roles or hierarchies.
Learning #2: The transformative power of storytelling
Stories hold enormous power. Dominant narratives shape what we see as possible, often entrenching harmful norms. But reclaiming narrative can also become a profound act of liberation.
In Rajasthan, Masarat Daud organised a TEDx event where rural women, typically silenced by patriarchal norms, told their own stories publicly for the first time. This act disrupted existing narratives and inspired new ones. Masarat explained: “Stories repeated often become truths. If we want to shift power, we must deliberately amplify unheard voices.”
Returning to Colombia, storytelling became similarly crucial. Maria Lucia observed that without the stories of villagers like Milton being openly heard, trust could not flourish. It was through storytelling that was authentic and vulnerable that entrenched suspicion gave way to tentative openness and, eventually, trust.
Learning #3: Trust and empathy are foundational
Trust cannot be forced, it must be patiently cultivated through deliberate acts of vulnerability and care, and rooted in truth, repair, and healing. It requires seeing the full humanity in others, especially those historically positioned as adversaries, and acknowledging the harm that made that positioning possible in the first place.
Maria Lucia and her colleagues realised trust had to be more than theoretical — it had to become accountable. They helped both community members and corporate executives track their progress in trust-building, openly sharing these results. Trust wasn’t a vague aspiration; it became an intentional, deliberate practice.
Learning #4: Healing is part of leadership
The experience in Antioquia taught Jonathan something vital about leadership. He initially believed his role as an executive was purely managerial, about results and compliance. But as conversations unfolded, he discovered leadership involved addressing harm directly, past injustices couldn’t be ignored or dismissed as historical. Leadership meant confronting wounds honestly, openly and compassionately. While the larger histories and systems of harm remain, the act of creating an open space for mutual listening and understanding helped to build different relationships and trust between the community and company was healing in itself.
In Poland, feminist activist Magda Pochec described a similar experience of facing internal harm within movements for social justice: “True collective power means constantly examining who benefits from existing structures. It requires accountability at every turn.”
Both Magda and Jonathan illustrate that when we are working to shift power, healing is not a luxury. It is a core component of leadership that requires us to confront our own roles within harmful systems, acknowledging our complicity and committing to change.
Learning #5: Democratising power: from hierarchy to shared leadership
In Antioquia, a shift in power soon became clear. Through relational practice — meeting, dialoguing, listening to each other — and shared action — projects for the benefit of the community and the region — traditional power was progressively challenged. Community members and executives alike had to step back from familiar hierarchies, embracing a leadership style that listened and responded rather than commanded and controlled.
This shift is also vividly illustrated in Senegal, through the Tostan programme, which encourages communities to lead from within. Local leader Yussuf Sane described how community-driven change created a new model for leadership: collaborative, relational and respectful.
Across these contexts, leadership moved from something one person held to something communities shared: distributed, democratised and relationally powerful.
Learning # 6: The necessity of patience
Perhaps most challenging about collective power is that it moves slowly. Relationships take time. Trust takes time. Milton and Jonathan met repeatedly, each conversation gradually shifting suspicion into cautious respect, and eventually genuine partnership.
Similarly, Alison Grubbs, a community-builder in the U.S., emphasised patience, noting: “Building with collective power requires ongoing attention — you don’t “arrive” at a state of democratized power and are suddenly done with it. You have to keep working at it — one interaction, one invitation at a time.”
Each example shows that sustainable transformation is always slow and precisely because of its slow pace, it becomes powerful and lasting.
A change in the air in Antioquia
Months later, back in Antioquia, Milton and Jonathan stood again before their community. This time, the air was different. Trust wasn’t yet complete… and might never be.. but it was real. Jonathan no longer carried notebooks or pens. Instead, he carried stories — stories of conversations that changed him, stories of how their shared trust had begun to heal decades-old wounds.
Milton, standing beside him, smiled gently. The journey was not over, he reminded everyone present, but the direction was clear. Power here was no longer wielded; it was built together, relational, fluid. It had become collective power.
Jonathan and Milton’s story is an invitation to each of us. The power we hold, no matter our role or our reach, shapes the lives of others. This reality places a profound choice before us, a choice we cannot avoid:
#1 Question: Will we use our power to heal?
We invite you to choose consciously, courageously, compassionately. Like Milton and Jonathan, you have the ability to shift from power as control, to power as connection rooted in trust, truth, healing and shared humanity. The future we build together will depend not on domination but on the courage to listen, to trust, repair, and ultimately, to heal forward.
It is time to choose. This choice is ours and it shapes everything.
