Global stateswoman and humanitarian Mrs Graça Machel recently reminded us that “Leadership is about service, not position.” This simple but demanding truth captures the posture this moment of global polarisation requires – action rooted in responsibility, courage embodied with care, and leadership measured not by authority, but by service and positive impact. In this context, leadership can no longer be deferred, symbolic, or performative. It must be exercised in the present tense: grounded, ethical, relational, and collective.
In a live conversation with The Mandela Rhodes Foundation Podcast (available across major platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube), Mrs Machel offered a deeply human lens on this moment in world history. She reminded us that much of today’s leadership discourse has drifted away from people and toward power, markets, and control. When societies begin to view populations as “markets” rather than communities, leadership loses its moral centre. Development becomes detached from dignity, and policy becomes disconnected from lived reality. Her insistence on a people-first worldview reframes leadership not just as influence over systems, but equally as responsibility to human lives.
This rethinking of leadership is not merely philosophical; it has structural implications. To insist on a more humane, service oriented leadership challenges how institutions define success, how governments design policy, how economies measure growth, and how leaders understand their role in society. When leadership is divorced from lived realities, systems lose legitimacy. Decision-making becomes abstract, and accountability weakens. Mrs Machel’s reflections expose a defining tension of our time: the widening gap between leadership structures and the everyday experiences of the people those structures are meant to serve. In polarised contexts, this gap becomes fertile ground for mistrust, resentment, and instability.
These insights from Mrs Machel align closely with the white paper recently published and presented by the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Council on Leadership during WEF’s Annual Meeting at Davos. Titled Next Generation Leadership for a World in Transformation: Driving Dialogue and Action, the council’s research and reflections argue that leadership for the future must be relational rather than hierarchical, collective rather than individualised, and anchored in long-term stewardship rather than short-term dominance. This work moves leadership discourse beyond personality and power toward shared responsibility, ethical coherence, and collective agency.
Mrs Machel’s lived experience gives human form to this idea. From liberation movements to nation-building, from education reform to civil society leadership, her story is not one of individual heroism, but of collective responsibility. Over and again in the conversation, she returned to the principle of “we” over “I” – a leadership ethic rooted in shared agency, communal accountability, and collective courage. Decisions, she humbly argued, should be made together. Responsibility must be carried together. Futures must be built together.
This understanding of leadership as collective action is not idealism – it is necessity. In a world defined by intersecting crises, no single institution, sector, or generation can lead alone. The WEF GFC on Leadership white paper underscores this reality, calling for leadership models that prioritise collaboration across sectors and generations, shared governance, and distributed responsibility. Leadership becomes less about command, and more about coordination. Less about control, and more about coherence.
Central to both Mrs Machel’s message and the GFC on Leadership framework is a decisive shift in how leadership across generations is understood. Mrs Machel challenges the language of “next generation leadership” itself, insisting instead on generations of leaders – leaders of today and tomorrow learning alongside one another, sharing responsibility rather than deferring it. Leadership, in this model, is not hoarded; it is circulated. Not protected; it is shared. Not inherited; it is entrusted. This reframing moves leadership away from linear succession and toward intergenerational partnership, where mentorship becomes mutual learning and legacy is defined not by what is preserved, but by what is consciously co-created for the benefit of people today and tomorrow.
This aligns with another core insight from both Mrs Machel’s reflections and the WEF GFC on Leadership framework: that leadership must be human-centred before it is system-centred. Structures matter. Policies matter. Institutions matter. But none of them endure without human trust, human dignity, and human legitimacy. Leadership that fails to centre people ultimately loses moral authority, even if it retains formal power.
In polarised contexts, this becomes even more critical. Polarisation thrives where people feel unseen, unheard, and unvalued. It feeds on exclusion, inequality, and disconnection. Leadership that responds with control rather than care, dominance rather than dialogue, and certainty rather than humility deepens these fractures rather than healing them.
Mrs Machel’s voice offers an alternative ethic: leadership as presence, leadership as listening, leadership as relationship. Ubuntu (the African philosophy of being human through and with others) is not presented as a slogan, but as a lived practice – a way of being in the world that recognises interdependence, shared humanity, and collective responsibility.
This is the leadership challenge of our time: not just to lead well, but to lead in a way that inspires a more humane embodiment of leadership. Not to accumulate influence, but rather to expand agency. And instead of dominating systems, to humanise them.
In times of deep division, leadership is a title that must not be paraded carelessly. It is a responsibility we choose, which we must embrace with deep respect and humility for the honour to serve others. It is a practice we cultivate. It is a lifelong learning process even at the highest level in our professions. It is a leadership that believes in a better future for all people. And it is a leadership that insists we build that future together across generations – with our common humanity always at the forefront.
Judy Sikuza is the CEO of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation, a Nelson Mandela legacy organisation dedicated to building exceptional leadership in Africa. She is also Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Leadership.
