The Circle Is the New Strategy: A More Contextual Model of Leadership
What is circular leadership—and why might organizations need it now?
Circular leadership treats leadership as a shared, relational practice rather than something exercised only from the top of a hierarchy.
It does not eliminate roles, authority, or accountability. Instead, it asks organizations to reconsider how insight, influence, and responsibility move through a system.
Many traditional leadership environments still operate like gated rooms. Access is earned by performing the part, mimicking the language, and learning rules that are rarely made explicit.
You may be invited in, but only if you do not take up too much space. Only if your edges are smooth enough. Only if you have done enough to prove that you belong.
At Untapped Leaders, we call this gate-based leadership.
We see it in leadership programs where inclusion is promoted but not practiced. We see it in spaces where cultural fluency is demanded from some participants but rarely mirrored by those who hold the most power. We see it at decision-making tables where someone’s presence is welcomed but their influence is withheld.
These environments are not merely exclusive. They can also be extractive.
They thrive on scarcity. They reward assimilation. They ask people to edit themselves before their judgment will be trusted.
The leadership we need now cannot remain locked behind a gate.
It must be built in a circle.
What Is Circular Leadership?
Circular leadership is a context-aware approach in which responsibility, insight, and influence move across relationships rather than remaining concentrated at the top of a hierarchy.
It is grounded in meaningful participation, relational trust, shared power, and collective responsibility for outcomes.
A circle is not a rejection of structure. It is a way of designing structure around interdependence.
Circular leadership recognizes that:
The people closest to a challenge may hold insight that positional leaders cannot see.
Relationships are part of an organization’s infrastructure, not a distraction from its strategy.
Authority and expertise do not always sit in the same place.
Decisions are strengthened when the people who will implement or experience them can meaningfully influence them.
Leadership must move across a system if the system is going to adapt.
In a circular model, leadership remains accountable, but it becomes less dependent on control.
Power is made more visible. Context is taken seriously. Leaders are expected not only to establish direction but also to build the conditions in which others can shape and carry that direction forward.
The result is not leadership without authority.
It is authority exercised with a greater awareness of the whole.
Rethinking the Leadership Blueprint
Organizations are operating in a period of sustained complexity.
Trust in institutions has weakened. Employees are questioning workplace expectations that once went unchallenged. Leaders are navigating burnout, rapid change, competing values, and organizational problems that cannot be resolved through technical expertise alone.
Yet the traditional leadership blueprint continues to offer the same instructions:
Climb higher. Perform louder. Stay polished. Maintain control.
That model prioritizes perception over purpose. It teaches leaders to master established power dynamics rather than examine them. It reinforces the belief that a select few should interpret the context and shape the whole.
We do not need another ladder.
We need new ground to stand on and new ways to stand together.
That is why a circular approach is not simply a more welcoming alternative to hierarchy. It is a strategic response to complexity.
Hierarchies can provide useful clarity around roles and accountability. But when hierarchy becomes the only way an organization understands leadership, insight stops moving. Information gets filtered as it travels upward. People wait for permission. Positional leaders become responsible for interpreting realities they may not directly experience.
Circles make different movement possible.
They allow leadership to emerge where the relevant insight, relationship, or responsibility sits. They support coordination across differences. They create room for people to contribute without requiring them to first imitate a narrow leadership ideal.
Who Circular Leadership Serves
Circular leadership does not simply make room for underrepresented leaders. It has been shaped by what underrepresented leaders have long had to know and practice.
Many people lead within systems that were not designed around their values, identities, communities, or lived realities. They learn to translate between groups, read unspoken dynamics, build relationships across differences, and navigate contradictions that more traditional leadership models overlook.
Circular leadership recognizes these capacities as leadership.
It honors:
The program officer pushing a foundation to value long-term community trust alongside short-term metrics.
The school leader trying to meet institutional requirements without abandoning cultural responsiveness.
The nonprofit executive balancing board expectations, staff realities, community needs, and personal sustainability.
The consultant refusing to offer a generic solution to a deeply contextual organizational challenge.
The internal culture or people leader attempting to move an organization beyond symbolic gestures while holding limited formal power.
The team member who notices whose knowledge is consistently missing and finds a way to bring it into the room.
This model is for leaders who are:
Translating across power, identity, and organizational position
Holding complexity while others push for overly simple answers
Practicing values that do not always fit the dominant mold
Leading without needing to remain at the front of the room
Building connective tissue across teams, roles, and perspectives
Creating change from the middle of a system
These leaders are not waiting to be included in an existing definition of leadership.
They are already reshaping what leadership looks like.
Five Anchors for a Circular Approach to Leadership
Circular leadership is not a vague invitation to collaborate more or simply “be yourself.”
It is a disciplined practice that centers context, relationships, shared power, and intentional action.
At Untapped Leaders, five anchors help ground this approach. They are particularly important when systems push leaders toward assimilation, urgency, control, and performance.
They are not meant to be mastered once. They are meant to be returned to, especially when the pressure of the environment makes established habits feel easier.
1. Authenticity Over Optics
Leadership is not merely a performance. It is a presence.
Professional environments often train leaders to project certainty, confidence, and clarity even when those qualities are not genuinely present. Leaders learn to deliver the polished message, defend the plan, and avoid exposing anything that could be interpreted as doubt.
But performance-based leadership can create shallow engagement, disconnection from purpose, and pressure to maintain an image rather than respond honestly to the context.
In circular leadership, authenticity is not the same as unrestricted self-expression. It means aligning how you show up with your values, responsibilities, and actual understanding of the moment.
Authenticity may look like:
Naming nuance instead of flattening complexity
Acknowledging that you do not yet have the answer
Distinguishing confidence from false certainty
Sharing what is informing your judgment
Inviting insight rather than protecting an image
Taking responsibility when your impact does not match your intention
Leaders build trust by being credible, not by pretending to be infallible.
Try this: In your next team meeting, board discussion, or client conversation, resist the urge to default immediately to a rehearsed talking point. Ask one question you genuinely do not know the answer to and allow the group to wrestle with it together.
Notice what changes when the goal shifts from performance to shared understanding.
2. Context Is Queen
There is no universal leadership move that works in every environment.
A leadership behavior that creates clarity in one organization may cause harm in another. What is interpreted as confident in one cultural setting may be interpreted differently in another. A process that works well for a stable team may be entirely insufficient for a team carrying unresolved history, grief, turnover, or distrust.
Leadership models often present themselves as universal while paying limited attention to identity, culture, power, place, and history.
Circular leadership assumes that context is not background information. Context is part of the leadership challenge itself.
To lead contextually, leaders must become students of their ecosystems.
That means asking:
What histories are alive in this space?
Who holds formal authority?
Who holds informal influence?
Who has historically been left out of the room—or present but unheard?
What relationships are shaping how information moves?
What tensions remain active even if no one is naming them?
What external conditions are affecting what people can realistically carry?
Who will experience the consequences of this decision?
Contextual awareness allows leaders to move beyond applying a preferred style and toward choosing a response that fits the actual conditions.
Try this: Before launching a new initiative, pause for a context scan. Identify who is most affected, what has happened before, where influence sits, and what dynamics may need to be named before the work can move forward.
Even a brief conversation about context can change the direction—and the integrity—of a project.
3. Relationships Are the Strategy
Trust is not a side benefit of leadership.
It is part of the work.
In extractive leadership models, relationships become transactional. They are valued primarily for what someone can produce, approve, fund, introduce, or deliver.
Circular leadership treats relationships as infrastructure.
This does not mean avoiding accountability or prioritizing harmony over necessary conflict. It means recognizing that people’s capacity to collaborate, share information, take risks, and move through disagreement depends heavily on the quality of the relationships around the work.
When trust is weak:
People protect information.
Feedback becomes less candid.
Decisions are questioned after meetings rather than during them.
Conflict is avoided or personalized.
Leaders receive a filtered version of reality.
Change efforts appear aligned publicly but stall privately.
Relationships therefore cannot be treated as the “soft” work that happens after the strategy is complete. They shape whether the strategy can be carried at all.
To make relationships part of the leadership strategy:
Treat trust-building as an explicit objective.
Invest in consistent moments of connection, not only crisis conversations.
Listen for what people are noticing and carrying.
Clarify expectations before assuming shared understanding.
Address ruptures rather than hoping time will erase them.
Build relationships across roles and lines of difference before you urgently need them.
Try this: Set aside one hour this week for a conversation with no immediate deliverable attached. Ask someone in your organization, sector, or community what they are noticing, what they are carrying, and what they believe needs more attention.
The insight and trust produced by that conversation may be more strategically valuable than another polished presentation.
4. Stillness Is Movement, Too
Speed is not always evidence of progress.
Sometimes it is evidence that a system has become uncomfortable with reflection.
High-pressure environments frequently reward leaders for moving quickly, making immediate decisions, and maintaining visible momentum. Urgency becomes a default rather than a deliberate response to a specific condition.
But speed can prevent leaders from seeing what is actually happening.
When every challenge is treated as an emergency, teams lose the space to process experience, question assumptions, learn from previous efforts, or distinguish a symptom from a deeper systemic pattern.
Circular leadership creates room for emergence, reflection, and care.
Stillness does not mean passivity. It means creating enough space to respond rather than react.
That space allows leaders to:
Gather wisdom, not only data
Notice their own defensiveness or urgency
Hear perspectives that take longer to surface
Reconsider a decision before its consequences become harder to reverse
Process the emotional realities affecting the work
Identify when action is being used to avoid a more difficult conversation
Slowing down is not always possible, and not every moment calls for prolonged deliberation. But leaders should be able to distinguish genuine urgency from an organizational habit of rushing.
Slowness can be a form of stewardship.
Try this: Begin your next meeting by asking, “What is shifting for you as we enter this conversation?”
This creates a moment for people to locate themselves before moving into the agenda. It reminds the group that internal change, uncertainty, and emotion are already present whether or not the meeting makes space for them.
5. Pass the Mic, Not the Burden
Representation is not the same as redistribution.
Organizations may invite people from historically excluded groups to share their stories, join committees, advise senior leaders, or represent the organization publicly.
But visibility without power can become another form of extraction.
People are asked to provide perspective without being given the authority, information, resources, or institutional support required to shape what happens next. They receive the mic but also inherit the burden of solving a problem they did not create.
Circular leadership does more than amplify voices.
It examines who makes decisions, who carries risk, who receives support, and who defines success.
This means distinguishing between several different forms of participation:
Being informed about a decision
Being invited to offer feedback
Helping develop possible options
Participating in the decision
Holding final authority
Receiving the resources to implement the outcome
Confusion among these roles often creates distrust. People believe they are being asked to shape a decision when leaders are actually seeking validation for a direction already chosen.
To share leadership more meaningfully:
Be transparent about what is and is not open for influence.
Provide people with the context needed to exercise authority well.
Shift decision-making power, not only storytelling opportunities.
Support emerging leaders without tokenizing them.
Ensure responsibility is accompanied by resources.
Protect people from carrying disproportionate relational or political risk.
Follow up on how input affected the eventual decision.
Try this: In your next planning process, identify one real decision point where authority can be placed closer to the people with the most relevant insight.
Do not merely ask them for feedback. Give them the context, decision rights, resources, and support required to make the decision successful.
Why These Anchors Matter
These five anchors are more than leadership principles.
They are correctives to a culture that has often asked people to fragment themselves in order to fit an established leadership mold.
They support leaders who:
Carry lived experience as a meaningful source of insight
Are reshaping systems from within
Are tired of being included but not heard
Want to practice leadership rather than perform it
Recognize that complexity cannot be controlled into submission
Believe organizational change must be carried collectively
Circular leadership does not require every person to hold equal authority over every decision. It does require leaders to become more intentional about where authority sits, whose knowledge informs the work, and how responsibility moves after a decision has been made.
What Would a More Circular Approach Reveal?
A team can appear aligned while important tensions, histories, or differences in power remain unspoken.
A leadership group can develop a clear strategy without understanding whether the wider organization trusts the people responsible for implementing it.
An organization can invite participation while leaving decision rights so ambiguous that no one knows whether their contribution mattered.
Moving into a circle allows people to see more of the system.
It creates room to surface what people are experiencing, connect those experiences to organizational conditions, and build shared responsibility for what comes next.
At Untapped Leaders, the Circle-Up is one way we help organizations create that movement. A Circle-Up is a facilitated process for surfacing insight, examining context, and translating multiple perspectives into shared clarity and coordinated action.
It can support leadership retreats, strategic planning, culture alignment, organizational transitions, and teams navigating complex change.
Moving Beyond Hierarchy Alone
Circular leadership does not require every decision to be made by consensus.
Nor does it ask leaders to abandon their responsibility.
It asks leaders to become more intentional about:
Where authority sits
Whose knowledge is considered
How context shapes the available choices
Who carries the consequences
How responsibility will be shared after the decision is made
This shift is especially important when organizations are navigating low trust, cultural tension, leadership transitions, or change that cannot be managed through a top-down announcement alone.
The future of leadership is not gated.
It is grounded in context, relationships, shared responsibility, and the recognition that the insight required to move forward rarely sits with one person alone.
You do not need to lead louder.
You may need to listen more carefully, examine the context more fully, and create a wider circle around the work.
Bring a More Circular Approach to Your Organization
Untapped Leaders helps organizations examine the leadership and cultural architecture beneath their most persistent challenges.
Through facilitated retreats, diagnostic engagements, and advisory partnerships, we help teams build the trust, clarity, and shared ownership required to move forward.
