Safi Jiroh
Class of 2008
Co-Executive Director
LeaderSpring Center
If you had to highlight one significant aspect of your LeaderSpring fellowship experience and/or wisdom gained in your leadership journey since your fellowship experience, what would it be?
Leader know thyself.
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
In 2007 at the start of my LeaderSpring fellowship as an Executive Director, I considered myself a “reluctant leader”. I confess that I was a bit smug about that. My idea of a leader was deeply entangled in a notion of ego-driven, self-centered, power-hungry, oppressive types in leadership positions, who abused their authority to satisfy (or protect) themselves and their crafted images. I know that sounds severe, but it had been my experience of many leaders in corporate America and local government. So, I was reluctant to be a leader with an expectation to be that type of leader. However, I found myself in leadership often, organizationally and civically over the course of my career life.
An important note: I also experienced genuine, competent, visionary, and kind people in leadership positions, but they were fewer in number, and weren’t esteemed; the self-centered or tyrant was. I had not purposefully pursued leadership positions as an adult because of this, but again, leadership called for me.
What I understood and was excited about as a LeaderSpring Fellow was having the amazing opportunity to have time to explore leadership in general and my own as a Black woman, specifically.
During the Fellowship experience I discovered my leadership disposition to be a combination of centering justice and servant-leadership both driven by core values of liberation, human dignity, and radical love and honesty. These have been my truths cultivated over a few decades.
As a servant-leader I was challenged during and after the Fellowship on how to transform organizational culture impacted by the traditional leadership model of “referent power” which posits power in the single heroic or visionary individual at the top of a hierarchy. Shortly after the Fellowship, I left the organization in which I was executive director and spent 7 years as a licensed Christian minister (which means servant). Ironically, there was a great deal of referent power modeled in leadership in those spaces. I realized, early on, that these would be the spaces in which I would by example, center the needs and gifts of people, not the “leaders.” I created space for others to exercise power through their gifts and talents, in service to the many.
As I look over my life, career, and ministry, I clearly see justice as a deep groove along the journey. As a justice-center leader I am unapologetic about the required dismantling of white body supremacist ideology, norms, and its oppressive systems and structures levied on targeted populations causing unbearable life conditions and inexcusable life outcomes for human beings, especially BIPOC and poor people.
I continue to explore leadership learning at the intersection of justice and liberation. I have been able to do so directly at LeaderSpring since January of 2017. It is deeply rewarding to support leaders in the social sector in defining their own leadership philosophy, values, and direction.
I am honored to lead in an organization that helped me to uncover and shape my own leadership.