Many of us women from all corners of the world are walking the adventurous, often messy path of becoming better leaders. And on this journey, a couple challenging but persistent questions keep surfacing:
How can I lead firmly while staying horizontal within my team?
How can I be a strong, guiding presence, while ensuring that my team feels safe, seen, equal—and genuinely empowered to shape decisions?
I wish I had a simple, universal answer. But as with most things in leadership, the truth is more nuanced. It depends on context. On culture. On lived experience.
A good starting point? Probably a very obvious and common one: creating the right conditions. That means encouraging feedback, inviting participation, and delegating responsibilities with trust. These tools matter deeply and should be part of how we show up every day.
But I’ve come to believe that real leadership—collective, transformative leadership—goes beyond giving people permission to speak up. It doesn’t just live in the structure of our meetings or org charts. It lives in something more intimate, more radical: the energy we bring into our relationships. The essence we lead from.
For many of us women, especially in spaces like conservation, that essence is deeply tied to what we might call motherness. The act of caring for the other—a way of nurturing ideas, teams, communities, and movements.
But let’s be honest: this idea of “mothering” is often flattened. Made soft. Reduced to being nice or endlessly compassionate.
So, here’s a truth I’ve had to uncover and claim for myself: yes, my leadership is rooted in care—but that care is also fueled by rage. It’s a fierce, burning passion for justice that I share with the people I work with and for. It comes from frustration at the injustices we see and a relentless desire to protect what matters along with others.
We don’t often talk about this. As women, we’re taught to hide our anger. To smooth it over with a smile. But I’ve come to see that our anger is not a flaw—it’s a tool. A compass. A source of power. When that mothering instinct shows up in leadership, it doesn’t always whisper. Sometimes, it roars. It says: This is not okay. Something must change. It is protective, yes—but also bold, disruptive, and system-challenging.
And we need to learn to trust it. To leverage that fire for fairness and equality, not suppress it.
This is where I’ve found something essential to my leadership: what I call the bottom-up energy of compañerismo. Compañerismo is a Spanish term that can be loosely translated as “fellowship” or “collegiality” in English. It emphasizes a deep sense of solidarity, mutual support, and camaraderie among members of a group. In academic and organizational studies, such as those referenced by Jones et al. (2014), compañerismo is often used to describe a relational dynamic that fosters collaboration, trust, and shared commitment to collective goals.
But to me, compañerismo isn’t just solidarity and healthy collaboration—it’s the fire inside us, turned outward in collective action and projected in our day-to-day energy we bring into work.
While caring for someone is often rooted in individual empathy—I see you, I care about your wellbeing—I see compañerismo is something deeper. It’s a collective force. A shared alignment of energy, purpose, and action. It’s what happens when we care with each other, not just for each other.
It’s about reciprocity. It’s about standing side by side. It’s about mutual loyalty, shared reflection, honest feedback, and deep listening. It minimizes hierarchy—not by pretending power doesn’t exist, but by honoring each other as equals in purpose.
I experience this most vividly in my work alongside Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Many of these communities carry a justified, deep-rooted anger—born of generations of oppression, dispossession, and silencing. So when I show up, I make a conscious effort not to arrive as a savior. I come as a compañera. That means entering their fight with humility, knowing I have as much to unlearn as to offer. I’m not there to lead in the traditional sense—I’m there to walk beside. We stand together not just in shared purpose, but in shared rage—a mutual fire for justice. My passion is fueled by theirs, and theirs by mine. We acknowledge the differences in our backgrounds, but we refuse to let them define the terms of our relationship. When we sit down to face a challenge, we don’t meet through the lens of privilege or marginalization—we meet as humans in solidarity.
And compañerismo also means accountability. It means we challenge each other. We offer honest feedback. We call each other in—not from a place of superiority, but of respect. I resist the urge to romanticize my colleagues simply because they are Indigenous. And they, in turn, don’t hesitate to question the frameworks I bring with me—shaped by a fast-paced, results-driven Western worldview. This pushes me to slow down, to sit with discomfort, to embrace a rhythm of time that prioritizes listening and community process, while continuing to offer clear guidance stemming from my own expertise and vision.
This, to me, is compañerismo. It’s fierce motherness in motion. Not top-down. Not transactional. But a radical form of horizontal solidarity, where we share the work and the weight as equals.
And solidarity isn’t static. It breathes. It shifts. Sometimes I carry more, sometimes you do. But it only works when we trust the connection. It comes from a place of true respect and trust, where we know there’s a shared flame between us.
So no—compañerismo is not just about being kind.
It’s about reflection.
It’s about accountability.
It’s about the courage to give and receive criticism with love.
It’s about showing up, again and again, with humility, loyalty, and fire.
It means saying: I don’t lead from above—I trust you, I respect you, and therefore I lead beside you.
This kind of leadership isn’t always tidy. It asks us to release control. To be vulnerable. To trust that strength doesn’t always mean command. It demands we embrace the full, complicated duality of leadership: love and rage, guidance and equality, clarity and humility.
But when we lead this way, something beautiful happens. We create spaces where people feel held, not managed. Where decisions emerge not from authority, but from shared commitment. Where movements grow not by being led—but by being nurtured together.
So, when we ask ourselves how to be firm guides without reinforcing hierarchy, maybe the answer lies less in the how, and more in the who.
Who are we, truly, when we lead from our essence?
If we are women,
if we are nurturers,
if we are angry,
if we are passionate—
then let us lead like it. Fully. Fiercely. Together.
When our fierce, powerful motherness transforms diplomacy into authentic, transparent horizontal relationships, we unlock the very heart of compañerismo. This is leadership reimagined: where our shared energy redefines how we connect, stand together, and lead as equals, where we don’t turn our backs to that fire that sparks in us, but instead, let it guide us.
