Leadership is Political | Part 4: Stop Surviving. Start Building Power.
In this episode, Chisom argues that understanding harm is not enough if we remain powerless to prevent it. She explores what it means to build power—individually, collectively, and institutionally—and why leadership, organisations, and society must move beyond helping people survive harmful systems to changing who holds power within them.
With Chisom Udeze, Solo
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Show Notes
What happens when we become exceptionally good at naming harm, but remain largely powerless to stop it?
In this episode, Chisom moves the conversation beyond resilience, recovery, and even systems change, towards something we often seem uncomfortable naming: power.
Because care after harm matters. Healing, and representation are important. But our ambition cannot be to make people exceptionally good at surviving systems that remain perfectly capable of harming them.
So what does it actually mean to build power? Individually, collectively, institutionally, economically, socially, and politically? What does leadership require? What must organisations change? And how do we build enough agency and optionality that we are not perpetually negotiating from the receiving end of someone else’s power?
This is a conversation about becoming harder to exploit, isolate, silence, and punish. Not because power makes us invulnerable. It does not. But because understanding how power works is only the beginning.
At some point, we have to build it.
This episode opens the door to building power, which subsequent episodes on Overnight Wisdom will focus on.