Leadership through the lens of relationship
I had a slightly sideways thought this week. We often imagine divinity as a source of power. That it is something we beseech when we’re in need, hoping it’ll act on our behalf. But what if it’s the other way around? What if the gods gain their power from us? What if it’s the act of asking, remembering, tending, that gives gods their strength and not the other way around?
This line of thought won’t leave me alone. What if attention isn’t neutral? What if it’s generative? What if what we relate to is what becomes real?
pointed me to the Circumpolar Inuit Protocols for Equitable and Ethical Engagement which holds a quiet but consistent thread: relationship isn’t a step in the process. It is the process. Knowledge, identity, land, language, decision-making don’t exist in isolation. They exist through connection.
A hunter’s first seal isn’t just food. It’s a communal moment of reciprocity. The seal gives itself. The hunter shares it with elders and those in need. That act of sharing doesn’t just reflect community values; it constitutes the community. Without it, the relationship frays. And when the relationship frays, the meaning thins out. Things become less real.
So how does this land in our work? In the messy realities of philanthropy, leadership, and institutional life?
Let’s start with philanthropy. So much of the field still sees itself as a source of capital. We fund. We support. We enable. But if you shift the lens. If you accept that attention and relation create power. Then philanthropy more than resourcing. It’s about consecrating. What we fund is what we acknowledge as worthy of belonging. What we name, show up for, listen to, and keep returning to are the things we breathe life into.
Not to everything into a spiritual exercise. But to be honest that money follows meaning. And we shape meaning through where we place our gaze. When we treat certain knowledge systems as “input,” certain leaders as “investable,” or certain stories as “impactful,” we’re deciding what gets to be real in the system.
“We share our knowledge in the same way that we share our food.”
Doesn’t this line just hold everything? Knowledge isn’t abstract but is a living thing that’s kept alive through use, through ritual, through recognition. Like food, it’s meant to be shared with care, with context, with memory. If we forget to do that, if we extract, tokenise, summarise, the knowledge dies. And so does the relationship.
This applies just as much to leadership. If relation creates reality, then leadership isn’t about vision or control but stewardship of attention. What we notice. What we name. What we dignify with our time and trust. Leadership, in this frame, becomes a practice of presence. Less commanding, more convening. Less solutioning, more sensing.
It also demands a kind of humility that philanthropy and leadership often resist. Because if the system isn’t waiting to be fixed, but waiting to be related to, then we can’t start with answers. We have to start by becoming trustworthy partners in a relationship that might ask more from us than we’re used to giving including discomfort, slowness, and the willingness to let go of control.
Perhaps the work ahead isn’t so much about better tools, better strategy, better frameworks but to pause and to ask: what are we relating to as sacred? What do we return to with reverence? What have we stopped seeing that we need to notice again?
The world doesn’t need more saviours. It needs more people who know how to be in relationship. Because showing up is not a prelude to the work. It is the work.
Originally published on Substack on 22 June 2025. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
Leave a comment