How I'm leading while learning

Last night, I led my first official board meeting as President of the Junior League of Tallahassee.

I left feeling proud, a little exposed, and—as is often the case when you care deeply about something—tempted to replay every moment in my head.

Did I explain that clearly? Did I invite enough input? Did I create confusion while trying to create clarity? Was I decisive enough? Too directive? Not directive enough?

Leadership has a funny way of putting all your own tendencies on a very large projector screen.

But beneath those questions was a deeper thought I keep returning to: volunteer-led organizations matter enormously. And the way we lead inside them matters, too.

Nonprofits are one of the most powerful places people can practice citizen-led change. They bring people together around a shared belief that something in the world can be better—and that ordinary people, working together, can help make it so.

That is not a small thing. It is also not easy.

These organizations are often complex, self-governing, and powered by people who are offering their time because they care. They bring different experiences, different capacities, different communication styles, different ideas about what good leadership looks like, and a shared desire to make an impact.

As leaders, we are stewards of all of that. We are stewards of people’s time. Their capacity. Their willingness to raise their hand. The trust they place in the table when they join the conversation.

And I think that responsibility asks something different of us than urgency.

Understanding before urgency

I am trying to challenge my own relationship with urgency. Urgency can feel like leadership because it creates motion. It makes us feel productive. It can even make us feel responsible.

But urgency can also create scarcity: scarcity of time, patience, context, and care. It can cause us to skip over details that matter, make decisions before the right people have been heard, or mistake a fast answer for a thoughtful one.

Expedience is not always the same thing as effectiveness. Especially in volunteer-led spaces, leaders set the tone. If we communicate that everything is a fire, people eventually burn out—or stop believing us. If we reward speed over understanding, people learn that their perspective is less valuable than getting to the next agenda item.

There are certainly moments that require a decision. A deadline is real. A problem cannot always wait for the perfect conditions. But I want to build a leadership practice rooted in this question:

What would it look like to make room to think before we rush to react?

Participation is not the opposite of authority

I believe in participatory decision-making. I believe people do better work when they understand the why, have room to offer their perspective, and know where they have real authority to act. I also know that this can get messy.

Inviting feedback does not mean every decision belongs to everyone. Delegating authority does not mean disappearing. Creating space for people to contribute does not absolve a leader from the responsibility to provide direction.

The work is learning how to do both: invite people in and move the work forward. That is a skill I am still practicing.

Sometimes I will need to say, “I want your input before we decide.” Other times, I will need to say, “Here is the decision, here is why, and here is what happens next.” Sometimes the most supportive thing I can do is ask a better question. Sometimes it is to clarify ownership, name the next step, or admit that I need help thinking something through.

None of that makes a leader less capable. It makes her human.

The vulnerability of leading while learning

There is a particular kind of vulnerability that comes with leading a system you are also trying to understand—and, in some ways, rebuild.

I am introducing new ideas. I am challenging some inherited assumptions. I am trying to create clearer ways of working together. And sometimes that means I do not have a neat precedent to follow. That is scary.

It can be uncomfortable to ask for help digesting next steps. It can feel vulnerable to give direction when you are not completely certain how it will land. It can be hard to sit with the possibility that someone might be confused—and resist turning that discomfort into self-criticism.

But I am learning that leadership does not require me to be finished before I begin. It requires me to be honest, attentive, and willing to keep learning in public.

The goal is not to perform confidence so convincingly that no one can see the questions underneath. The goal is to develop the kind of grounded confidence that can hold both: I do not know everything yet, and I am capable of helping us find our way forward.

That is a different kind of confidence. I think it is the kind that lasts.

A culture where people can grow

The people around our tables are not resources to optimize. They are humans with capacity, limits, insight, and enormous potential. 

If we want organizations that create meaningful change, we need cultures where people can learn, ask questions, make mistakes, and become more capable over time.

That means treating people with respect even when the work is imperfect. It means clarifying expectations instead of silently resenting unmet ones. It means reinforcing authority so people know where they can lead. It means choosing curiosity over judgment when something gets tangled. And it means remembering that growth often looks like uncertainty before it looks like competence.

I do not want to lead from a place of fear that I might get something wrong. I want to lead with enough care to ask better questions, enough courage to make decisions, and enough humility to adjust when I learn something new.

That feels like the responsibility. Not perfection. Not urgency for urgency’s sake. Just the ongoing work of creating a table where people feel respected enough to think clearly, speak honestly, and help build something better together.