Chapter 12: Connective Leadership: From Zero-Sum to Inclusion

This chapter presents a leadership model grounded in ethics, accountability, and authenticity appropriate for building bridges of inclusion and understanding across diverse populations and sectors. We address questions about what it means to lead and provide practical lessons and behaviors to strive for pragmatic action. To illustrate the critical task of developing our future leaders, examples are provided through work with Fulbright students and International Youth Ambassadors, along with research into leadership in different types of organizations and across gender lines.

In our exploration, we start at the beginning where early humans set the stage in a grueling, all or nothing world where the strongest man in the tribe rose, sometimes by default, to the top. Valiant leaders, most of them men, fought to overcome the hardship of physical boundaries and to protect their clan from an unforgiving landscape of enemies both of the wild and human ilk. Mere survival determined the winners and losers. It was a zero-sum game of winner-take-all; often the prize was food, land, or shelter, at the expense of life. This mentality continued to persist even as colonies and countries formed based on geography and political ideology.