The concepts and learning exercises in this programme are based on four premises:

The first is that in most  communities, men are perceived as dominant and women as subordinate. This assumption is complex  because concepts like dominance, power, and leadership do not have the same meaning across cultures  and communities. Even within communities individuals may value various human characteristics or  interactions differently. For instance, resolving a dispute between two neighbours with a well-placed punch  may seem to some to demonstrate weakness on the part of the person throwing the punch. To others, the  capacity to exercise physical power in a conflict may demonstrate strength.

The second premise is that not only women but all of society will gain politically, economically, and culturally  by levelling the power imbalance between men and women. Studies in disciplines as diverse as  anthropology and international development share the same conclusion: there is a direct causal  relationship between women’s involvement in social life and the strengthening of values, attitudes, and  behaviours that reflect free, fair, and tolerant social interaction. Achieving sustainable development in  developing countries, or in less developed areas within developed countries, is unlikely in the absence of  women’s leadership. Nevertheless, the processes by which power is measured, multiplied or divided, and  ultimately shared between men and women must necessarily be unique to each society, community, or  even family that undertakes them. There is no single right path to women’s advancement any more than  there is a single right path to economic advancement or political advancement. 

The third premise is that good leadership—leadership that serves both women and men, poor and rich, and  the powerless and powerful—is inclusive, participatory, and horizontal. This new intersectional leadership avoids the  presupposition that certain individuals or classes of individuals have the innate right or authority to make  decisions for others. Instead, leadership should be about capitalizing on the ideas and skills of as many  individuals as possible and appropriate in a given situation regardless of their identities – race, gender, religion, ethnicity, caste, sexual orientation and disability. Moreover, leadership skills cannot be separated  from relationship skills since the merit and productivity of a leader is dependent on the quality of her  interactions with her collaborators, supporters, or followers. Although there is no finite list of characteristics  or qualities that defines a good leader in all situations, she is generally an effective decision-maker who is  visionary and who works with others to ensure democratic and egalitarian objectives. A good leader is also  conscious that the processes—the means by which she carries out her objectives—are just as important as  the objectives themselves. 

The fourth premise is that inclusive, participatory, and horizontal leadership is founded on effective  communication. How citizens communicate with authorities, how parents communicate with their children,  how colleagues communicate with their peers—each of these is a leadership interaction in a microcosm. In  an age when information is one of the world’s most valuable commodities and those who have the greatest  ability to generate and distribute information have the greatest power, women’s leadership is very much  contingent on our capacity to communicate information, ideas, and perspectives among ourselves and to  the rest of the world. Communicating well, like good leadership, is about how we speak to one another, work together, and make decisions.

It is a leadership development approach that helps challenge all forms of discrimination based on gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, religion, place of origin, physical & mental dis/ability, colonial culture, or any other factors of power. Intersectional Feminist leadership is not simply about changing the behavioural traits of individual leaders. It also seeks to understand how these behaviours are shaped by the socio-economic, political and cultural context,  and  take actions accordingly with an inclusive approach.

Intersectionality helps to understand the barriers, as well as the opportunities, that arise when people work together, who are of different gender, gender identity, class, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, religion, place of origin, physical ability, colonial culture or any other factors of power​.  Privilege attached to gender based on ethnicity, class, race, disability, etc., is still present in our lives, including in the work we do.

Power must be shared, and power relations must be transformed at all levels, throughout all change processes. Feminist consciousness is raised, by making those around us feel empowered, and respected. It seeks shared power with others instead of having  power over others

IFL promotes leadership at all levels, with us all stepping up when something needs to be done, even when it is beyond our own remit, doing the right things that are not restricted by the organisational hierarchy position or power.

Women’s leadership, like women’s participation or women’s power, does not need to signify men’s loss  of leadership, participation, or power. True leadership leads to greater choices for everyone. 

Women have become far more active in the affairs of their societies over the past  several decades, but they are still far from where they should be both in the private and public spheres. Women’s participation in managerial and administrative posts is around 33 percent in the developed world, l5 percent in Africa, and 13 percent in Asia and the Pacific.¹ In Africa and Asia this percentage—small as it is—reflects a doubling of the numbers in the last twenty years. Women’s participation in higher levels of economic decision making remains minuscule, even in the West. Of the 1,000 most valuable publicly owned companies in the United States in the year 2000, only three have women CEOs.² In most places in the world, work is segregated by sex. Women tend to be in clerical, sales, and domestic services and men in manufacturing and transport. Women work—on average and across the world—more hours than men each week, but their work is often unpaid and unaccounted for. Where women do the same work as men, they are paid 30 to 40 percent less than men. In the United Nations system, women hold only nine percent of the top management jobs and  21 percent of senior management positions, but 48 percent of the junior professional civil service slots.³ Governments have so far been little inclined to accommodate women’s vocational needs.  

Most of us live in societies that are hierarchically organized and command-oriented. The locus of  command may be home, community, the political arena, or the economy. The structure of command  nurtures and is nurtured by a culture of obedience that at once sustains and camouflages a pecking  order by producing a system of authority. 

The role of authority is to legitimize command relations by creating consent. In the absence of authority,  everyone in the command relationship becomes a potential bully or wimp. This cannot be the ideal  relationship we seek. Rather, we look to a different kind of society where men and women turn to one  another not as objects in social functions, where one commands and the other obeys, but as genuine  communicating beings. We look at leadership in a learning society as a means of nurturing genuine  beings who look to one another for community and meaning.  

Yet in order to move toward a transformative leadership approach, we need to start from where we are. For most of us the  term leadership evokes energy, determination, and power used to achieve some worthy goal. One is a  leader if one convinces others to do one’s bidding. In this interpretation of the term individuals in  authority are in a better position to lead. However, this is not always the case. We know from experience  that many individuals who are in positions of authority, fathers, bosses, landowners, and professionals,  for example—are not leaders. On the other hand, many of us have come across individuals who are not  in any observable position of authority though we feel they are leaders because they influence their  environment. Is leadership then a personal quality? Is it a trait that some people possess while others  do not? 

One way to begin a discussion of leadership is to state what it is not. Let us begin with the obvious.  Most of us would agree that leadership is not the same as the capacity to employ force or coercion. It is  possible to force people to do what we want them to do by threatening them with some kind of  deprivation or punishment. A father threatens to punish his son because the son has failed in one of his  classes or neglected his chores around the house. A superior in the office threatens to withhold an  employee’s bonus unless the latter improves her performance. We may feel that these types of actions  are negative reactions to circumstances that need not have occurred if leadership had been exercised.  The father, for example, might not have needed to punish his son or the superior his subordinate if  effective communication had been used to reach a better understanding.

We know from our everyday experience that certain individuals have a kind of personality that commands respect and compliance. They influence others by their charisma. Charisma, however, is also not the same as leadership. Charisma is an innate quality, possessed by few, denied to most. Leadership, on the other hand, is a property of communication, potentially available to everyone. Many individuals who are not charismatic, nevertheless, prove to be great leaders. Leadership, then, is neither force nor traditional, legal, or charismatic authority, though each of these concepts may be present in the leadership process. Individuals in command positions may or may not be leaders. Leadership situations, therefore, should be conceptually differentiated from command situations or command structures.  

Leadership is therefore not just for the executives in the corner office as in traditional organisational set ups. It’s time we all stepped up and developed the mind of a leader. The new face of leadership is consensual and non-hierarchical and is transformational.