Leadership educators often acknowledge the need to embrace and honor diverse lived experiences and different ways we acquire knowledge and demonstrate leadership. However, do our practices and expectations really reflect this? How do we ensure we are not perpetuating expectations and structures rooted in White supremacist culture? Through our co-inquiry team discussions about the impact of the multitudes of pandemics on the practice and education of leadership (see the previous articles in this issue), it became even clearer that leadership educators must urgently deconstruct whiteness in our personal and professional approaches and practices. Looking at what influence we had and what we could control, we recommitted ourselves to addressing embedded White dominant cultural norms in multiple contexts. The roots of White supremacy in leadership education, development, and training stabilize an ecosystem that includes our classrooms and programs, organizations, and overall field. This article explores the prevalence of dominant norms, their influence in defining who is a leader, and how we can disrupt the cycle of conformity.
THE ROOTS AND PREVALENCE OF DOMINANT NORMSThe initial call for a formalized approach to learning leadership started a field dominated by a focus on individual traits, behavior, the business context, hierarchy, and positions (Northouse, 2019). This traditional approach was reinforced by the increasingly prevalent notion that leadership programs helped prepare future employees that would create economic gain. Eventually, Burns (1978) introduced leadership as a process, adding focus to relationships between leaders and followers. However, foundational leadership theories and frameworks largely ignored race and gender, since the research was done using White people as the default norm (Hage, 2012). Without naming identity as differentiators, the leadership research findings are read as declarative and applicable to all people. This ultimately serves to perpetuate dominant group norms like individualism, perfectionism, position, and efficiency, while overlooking many other possible ways of being and leading such as through consensus, relationship, and collectivism.