Been reading @adriennemaree @BreneBrown and bell hooks and thinking about leadership and the ways “social justice Twitter” can sometimes be toxic. And I have three thoughts: 1) platforms ≠ leadership, 2) leadership requires community, 3) leadership disrupts the status quo.

1) Having a platform doesn’t automatically make someone a leader, and I think in the day of social media with verified accounts and visibly large followings it’s easy to forget that.

Leaders care for people, build cultures of care, are willing to be wrong, and find solutions that hold tension. As a result, a platform that merely reproduces talking points is not automatically leadership. And having a platform does not automatically make you a leader.

2) Leadership requires community, and, perhaps more importantly, the cultivation of community. Such a community must center care and vulnerability which are preconditions for growth.

While social media has the capacity to build community (I have connected with some of my closest friends through these platforms), it more often than not creates space for individual silos that fight against each other to center *their* voice and increase *their* following.

The “silo” effect of social media certainly connects to the ways these tools follow neoliberal logics, a thread for/from another day.

3) Leadership inherently disrupts the status quo by cultivating spaces where vulnerability and “humanness” allow space for people to offer paths, plans, and solutions that are out of the box, messy, not 100% thought out, but that are moving towards something greater.

In cultures where the status quo is centered, fear reigns supreme, preventing people from sharing anything other than the accepted talking points ( @BreneBrown talks about this a lot).