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# What does it take to lead well?
- URL: https://leading-differently-perspectives-from-a-charity-sector-leader.ghost.io/what-does-it-take-to-lead-well/
- Published: 2026-10-23T13:17:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T13:17:03.000Z
- Author: Sufina Ahmad

I realise that the title of this blog is overly ambitious. Can a single blog really answer a question as big as the one I have posed? Who knows, perhaps it will. It’s more likely that it won’t, but I hope it offers some ideas and support. 

Leading well isn’t simple. It is hard. It is even harder in a context that changes this much. There is of course learning that we can apply in times like these. In leadership literature it tends to be under the banner of leadership in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) times. More recently, I have come across the new acronym of a NAVI (nonlinear, accelerated, volatile and interconnected) world, that I think goes alongside VUCA thinking, or supersedes it. 

This blog doesn’t concentrate on VUCA (or NAVI) as such. Instead, it shares the leadership qualities that I think are essential, non-negotiables even, as we lurch from one crisis to another, or react to the continuous news cycle, or become stuck in respond and reply mode based on what’s coming through on our various messaging and email platforms and in our in-person interactions. 

These ways of living and leading are not designed to bring out our best. That is why I have become much more interested in answering the question of what it takes to lead well. 

When I ask myself this question it helps me to move away from ‘react, react, react’ mode. It makes me think more deeply instead. That helps me to remember that I want to work in ways that have deep roots. Deep roots offer resilience; they help us to endure and grow. In trees, the deeper the roots are, the better they can withstand harm. As importantly, deep roots enable trees to support other parts of the ecosystem. That’s what we need now. It’s not enough for one of us to survive, thrive even. If we want to go further, then we have to go together. What other way is there? 

Since 2022, I have shared my ideas on what I think it takes to lead well in the form of a list of four interconnected leadership capabilities. For this blog, I thought it would be fun to try and figure out where this list of four capabilities came from. The general answer is that they are based on what I have gained from my own day to day work, including working with some truly brilliant colleagues over the years. 

The more specific answer is that they are informed by the research I did for my Executive MBA dissertation (submitted in March 2022), where I explored leadership, through long form interviews with 28 people who were leading, or working adjacent to, philanthropic grantmaking institutions in the UK. In my dissertation I ended up with a list of nine leadership concepts that I concentrated my research on. All four of these concepts are on that list. 

For three of them, one of the multiple citations I use is for an article from 2007 in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), titled ‘In praise of the incomplete leader’. Looking back, I expect that I was probably drawn to that particular article because of the word *incomplete* – it resonates with my sense that there is a real unknowability to the idea of leadership and that it is something that changes and evolves, making it hard to complete or tick off as being done. 

Earlier this year, I gave a speech where I shared this list of four capabilities. Following the speech, one of the audience members shared a really lovely LinkedIn post about the event, including my speech. In that post, she referenced Professor Deborah Ancona who teaches the four capabilities of leadership, and that’s when I learned that her list is exactly the same as the one I am about to share! This led me to Google Professor Ancona’s work, and I can see that she’s written a number of articles about these four capabilities and there are also YouTube videos about them too, dating back to the early 200s. I don’t recall reading these articles or seeing those videos while I was writing my dissertation, and I don’t have them cited in any of my assignments, but she was a co-author for that HBR article about the incomplete leader…so perhaps that’s how I ended up with this list. But before you head off to check our Professor Ancona’s work and analysis, please do read through my interpretation and reflections on them first, shared below. 

The first capability is ***sensemaking***. Sensemaking is an art and a science, which some (organisational) cultures are better at enabling than others. Sensemaking is a commitment to trying to understand organisational and systemic operating contexts, and to do so in ways that are humble and show a deep curiosity and interest in what we are trying to do. It is a continuous process where we will seek to develop deeper understandings through observations, data, experiences, conversations, creativity and analyses. It also requires us to iterate and to be open to applying different and new frameworks or models, as we try to evolve and improve our understanding. 

The second capability is ***relating***, which for me means building trusting relationships within and across organisations and networks. It means making an effort to understand fully the ways in which we are part of interdependent systems and sectors. It is a commitment to trying to connect honestly, so that we can try to understand other perspectives, ideally and wherever possible, with an open mind and without judgement. 

Relating in ways that matter and help make progress is also about creating spaces where diverse views and ideas can be explored, and consensus and a shared understanding can be formed. Sometimes relating allows us to challenge our own biases and blind spots, as well as being thoughtful about those we perceive and experience in others. Relating is not about achieving agreement and civility all the time either; it is also about how you can disagree and engage in conflict, but to do so in a way that is productive. 

The third capability is about ***visioning*** and this means creating a compelling, irresistible, hopeful even, story of the future. To do this we need to be less linear in our thinking and acknowledge more fully the complexity we are working within. 

We can’t invent, build or realise a vision (and the accompanying strategies for achieving it) alone. To develop shared visions, then we need to work within and across our own organisations and networks and sectors creatively, expansively. We need to enable diverse views and ideas to be shared. We need to realise and accept that the visions we invent and commit to building will be based on multiple working hypotheses, from the UK and well beyond, and that some will work better than others. We might even find that some of our ideas and hypotheses will be diametrically opposed to each other. But you take what is and isn’t working, and what you are learning, in order to generate new ideas and new ways forward.

The fourth and final capability is about ***making judgements and decisions*** as leaders. This means moving to a place of confidence in the reasoning and judgements we make, and being committed to working in ways that prioritise learning and feedback loops. 

Throughout organisational management research, there are many different tools to support decision-making and making judgements. One that you might have heard of is Kotter’s eight-step approach to change published in the early 2000s. It’s often depicted in a linear and step-by-step way. However, I am sure we all realise that real life decision making is often, if not always, non-linear. Instead, we are having to manage multiple judgement-based processes and activities concurrently, and to do that we need to apply a lot of different tools to achieve the desired results.

Usually, the decisions and judgements we are thinking through, mean that we are having to generate a range of different options and solutions based on different scenarios and variables. There are also arguments around the idea that decision-making requires two-system thinking, with system one operating more instinctively, and system two operating more slowly, logically and deliberately – the latter often relying on more participatory, consultative and evaluation-based methodologies.

So, there it is. That’s my list of the four leadership capabilities I think we need to prioritise in order to lead well. 

I should add that I normally preface these four capabilities with something that it took me a long time to notice or realise within the various bits of leadership content I was consuming. 

Leadership is full of paradoxes. 

And paradoxes are everywhere within our work – in the good times and the bad. 

They can arise in small ways. We want our leaders to be steady and stable, for example, but we also expect and need them to be spontaneous and creative. 

They can also exist in much more complicated ways too. As someone who runs an endowed charitable grantmaker, then I have to deal with paradoxes like my organisation existing at all in the first place. Our work does good, we make grants and social investments, and other forms of financial and non-financial investments, into work that supports civil society, and creates and embeds significant positive societal, economic and environmental change. However, there are other perspectives on philanthropy that we as leaders now and in the future need to grapple with, such as the origins of our wealth, how our money was and is made, the way in which wealth accumulation and disparities exacerbate many of the inequities and injustices we seek to address through our grantmaking and various others. 

How do we grapple with this ultimate paradox then – that all of us as leaders, regardless of our industry or sector, can be both part of the problem and part of the solution? The simplest answer I can give is that we have to build the capabilities I have described in this blog. I think that’s what helps us to be proactive in identifying the ways in which we uphold problematic structures and systems, and that’s what helps us to find ways to improve them. We might go even further and dismantle them too, in order to build something much better in their place. 

Ultimately though, I really believe that making any progress right now, be it in relation to paradoxes or responding to the multi-faceted issues we face, whether it is fleeting or lasting, small or significant, feels triumphant. It is important to pay attention to and share with others the leadership capabilities that enable this, whether it is the four listed above, or others. 

**Coming up next...**

 The next part of this blog is going to be a mini-series where I am going to explore concepts that I find difficult, deplorable even. Although to be provocative I am describing them as things I hate! I feel I need to speak out against them because of the damage I think that they cause, and lack of nuance they evangelise. The first concept on this list is authenticity. I am sure for some this will sound a bit ridiculous – what’s not to like about authenticity. Well, you’ll just have to read the next blog for that!