Power With, Not Power Over: Why Leadership Needs a Redesign

In our new world saturated with productivity tools, knowledge, and opportunity, it’s no longer a lack of information or skills that holds people back—it’s the systems that hoard power and preserve hierarchy.

Today’s visionary leaders understand this. And they are quietly redesigning leadership from the ground up.

While legacy institutions still cling to command-and-control thinking, a new kind of thought leaders are building ecosystems rooted in “power with,” not “power over.” They are not chasing titles or trying to climb outdated ladders. They’re building entirely new scaffolding—relational, trust-driven, and resilient by design.

This shift isn’t ideological. It’s strategic. In a volatile world, cooperation isn’t a soft virtue. It’s a survival imperative.

Leadership in the Age of Agency

Traditional models of leadership were forged in a time when power came from gatekeeping—when influence was reserved for those with elite education, corporate titles, or the right connections. But that monopoly has been broken, in spite of its prevailing dominance. 

Today, agency is no longer inherited. It’s self-activated.

Take Ben Francis, who at just 20 years old started Gymshark from his bedroom while juggling university studies and a part-time job delivering pizzas. He didn’t have an MBA, a board of directors, or a trust fund. What he had was a laptop, a sewing machine, and a vision for a new kind of fitness brand—built around community, not just product. A decade later, Gymshark is a £1.2 billion company, a testament to what high-agency leadership looks like in practice. 

This generation doesn’t see systems as fixed. They see them as editable. Changeable. Reprogrammable.

They don’t wait for permission. They don’t seek validation from legacy power structures. They build better ones—and invite others to build with them.

From the Margins: Real-World Leadership Redesigns

This redefinition of leadership isn’t abstract. It’s already happening.

In Jharkhand, India, a remarkable organization called Yuwa uses football as a vehicle to educate and empower girls from some of the most underserved communities in the country. These girls aren’t simply recipients of charity or subjects of development—they are captains of their teams, authors of their futures, and leaders within their villages. They challenge entrenched norms not with speeches, but with skill, strategy, and solidarity. These girls have been given the chance to become tomorrow’s leaders. 

In the UK, social enterprise Change Please is transforming the way we think about homelessness. Instead of offering short-term relief, they train people experiencing homelessness to become baristas, pay a living wage, and offer housing and wraparound support. They didn’t launch a campaign—they built an ecosystem. And in doing so, they turned consumers into collaborators, and beneficiaries into changemakers.

In Ghana, at the Right to Dream Academy, young footballers are trained not just as athletes, but as future leaders, scholars, and citizens. And the impact doesn’t stop at graduation. Many alumni go on to earn scholarships at top schools or join professional teams—including FC Nordsjælland, a European club now competing at the highest level of professional football, led by the academy itself. This isn’t about giving opportunities—it’s about shifting power. When a grassroots academy builds its own professional club to create a full-circle pathway for youth, you realise what leadership designed for the long-term truly looks like.

What “Power With” Actually Looks Like

If this shift in leadership feels abstract, it doesn’t need to. Here’s what “power with” actually looks like in action:

• Shared authority over symbolic inclusion
  Leadership isn’t giving young people microphones—it’s giving them mechanisms.
• Relational trust over positional status
  Trust is built in the field, not awarded in the boardroom.
• Reflexive humility over managerial control
  The best leaders are those who know when to step aside.
• Co-creation over consultation
  Don’t ask for opinions after the plan is done. Build the plan together.
• Distributed leadership over heroic individualism
  We don’t need more visionaries. We need more leader-full movements.

And most importantly, traditional leaders don’t need to unlearn everything they know. They don’t need to reinvent their companies or themselves. They simply need to seek out those building what’s next—and build with them.

That’s what happened when DHL partnered with FundLife. What began as a sponsorship of the Sama-Sama Games—an inclusive youth football festival—evolved into a strategic partnership. DHL didn’t just fund visibility. They invested in shared outcomes: youth inclusion, community play, and purpose-led employee wellbeing.

This simple shift in thinking led to the DHL Asia Cup for Employees, turning corporate engagement into a platform for purpose. DHL didn’t need to create a new CSR playbook. They just partnered with a new generation already writing one.

This is how legacy leadership meets emergent agency—not through competition, but through cooperation.

The Horasis Challenge: Actions Speak Louder

As we gather for the Horasis Global Meeting in São Paulo this October, we do so under the theme “Harnessing the Power of Cooperation.” But if cooperation is to be more than a theme and a catchy buzzword, it must reshape our very models of leadership.

That’s why Young Horasis is not a symbolic space. It is a structural reimagining. In our session—“Cooperation as Rebellion: Youth Redefining Systems for Good”—we are not asking for attention. We are building frameworks where intergenerational leadership is shared, not staged.

Because this is not about reverse hierarchies. It is about dissolving hierarchies that no longer serve – evolving into ecosystems fit for a new generation. 

A Call to Redesign, Not Just Reform

This is the Cooperation Generation. They don’t want to scale tired institutions. They want to grow resilient systems. They measure impact not by profit margins, but by proximity, dignity, and trust.

And the most future-fit leaders aren’t those who command the most. They are those who listen best, partner deepest, and share most widely.

So here is the invitation:

• Don’t invest in youth to tick a box – build with them to unlock new boxes entirely.
• Don’t fund visibility – fund validity.
• Don’t talk about change – action it 

And that is the future of business leaders;  not if you can reach a billion dollars in revenue, but if you positively impact one billion people in the process – that’s the meaning of not leading over, but leading with.