Harnessing the Power of
Underrepresented Leaders
Untapped Leadership:
The leadership strategies we overlook may be the ones we need most.
Untapped Leadership examines the strategies leaders of color have developed while navigating conditions not designed with them in mind—and what every leader can learn from those strategies about context, power, adaptability, and possibility.
The book that introduced the thinking behind Untapped Leaders’ contextual approach.
Leadership is never exercised outside of context.
Many leadership models were built from a narrow set of experiences and then treated as universal. This book widens the frame by studying leadership forged in conditions of complexity, constraint, and unequal access.
What we have overlooked
Leadership knowledge rooted in lived experience has too often gone unnamed, under-recognized, or excluded from the field’s dominant frameworks.
What the book surfaces
Leaders of color have developed capacities shaped by heightened awareness, strategic navigation, identity, responsibility, and adaptation.
Why the wider field benefits
When those strategies are made visible, every leader gains a fuller picture of what effective leadership can require.
The book begins with underrepresented leaders. The lessons do not end there.
Across stories, research, and reflection, Untapped Leadership invites readers to examine how context shapes what leaders can see, risk, mobilize, and imagine.
What becomes visible when lived experience is treated as knowledge?
What histories, structures, and power dynamics shape a leader’s choices?
Where does a leader have meaningful room to act—and at what risk?
What possibilities emerge when the leadership lens expands?
A leadership book for readers—and organizations—ready to widen the frame.
Read it for personal recognition, a broader leadership repertoire, or a more contextual way of understanding the conditions shaping people at work.
See more of yourself in leadership.
Recognize strategies you may already carry, name capacities that have been overlooked, and expand how you understand your own leadership.
Rethink what development requires.
Look beyond capability alone to the systems, norms, relationships, and access shaping whether leadership capacity can be used.
Create shared language for the work.
Use the book to open a more honest conversation about leadership, context, power, and the conditions your organization is creating.
A necessary widening of the leadership conversation.
“Critical perspectives from leaders of color too long overlooked in the field.”Deanna Singh
Author, Actions Speak Louder
“A refreshing and powerful take on why we must rethink leadership.”Dr. Bianca Baldridge
Harvard Graduate School of Education
“The book that leaders of color have been waiting for.”Reena Hajat Carroll
Executive Director, CCEJ
Choose your copy.
Bring the book into the work your organization is already navigating.
Use Untapped Leadership as a foundation for a facilitated conversation, leadership experience, or deeper advisory engagement grounded in your team’s real context.
Untapped Leadership: Broadening Perspectives on Bookshelves
The book explores more expansive and connected definitions of leadership within marginalized communities. As a result of white-dominant leadership culture, leaders of color have navigated and even thrived in spaces not built by and for them, exemplifying a style of leadership that has remained unnamed yet highly effective.
Untapped Leadership centers on the under-recognized and overlooked leadership strategies of leaders of color, serving as the first to do so in this genre and broadening the lens through which we identify effective frameworks.
Leadership can be akin to a pilot's role in flying a plane.
Critical in fulfilling a purpose, seemingly tenuous in moments, consequential in many respects. Unsurprisingly, no one pays too much attention to the pilot who lands the plane in perfect weather. While, yes, leadership likely exists in that uneventful cockpit, the leadership that should be celebrated, studied, and considered exemplary are in the moments a pilot successfully lands a plane when the conditions are fraught with difficulties.
What would it look like to learn from the leadership of those who lead when their conditions are fraught?
When the environment is not ideal?
When decisions are riskier?
When they carry more significant societal burdens, and yet they still lead?
Untapped Leadership:
Highlights the limited and limiting nature of current leadership theories and frameworks due to dominating perspectives. Through connections between the development of prominent frameworks and the societal contexts of their time, you will journey through a narrative that illustrates a very narrow and exclusionary view of leadership.
Names, amplifies, and celebrate the unique leadership capacities and contributions of leaders of color and their often-intersecting marginalized identities.
Offers a reframing of leadership practices for all readers to access, whether or not they hold marginalized identities. Untapped Leadership's offers lessons grounded in overlooked leadership that are lessons for everyone-- from readers beginning their leadership journeys to those leading teams and organizations through complex and fast-changing environments.
Testimonials
Untapped Leadership provides a necessary jostle to this body of work, offering a critical eye given the dominance of only certain perspectives deemed the authority on leadership.
Find Your Reflection in Leadership:
A Book for All Voices
Untapped Leadership comes to life via narrative leader vignettes.
ENHANCE
YOUR
LEADERSHIP
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