To Lead or Not to Lead: Murmurations on Leadership

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I became a burned-out version of myself as a leader. Like I wrote in Burnout: The Tale of a Not-for-Profit Leader, it wasn’t a single event. It was a slow burn — a steady accumulation of pressure, responsibility, and self-neglect. By the time I noticed, I was deep in it. The fog was thick — around-the-bay-Newfoundland-in-late-spring kind of thick — and it took years to find my way out.

Unpacking what led me there was messy work. Some of it made sense right away; some of it took time to name. And even after all that, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to lead again.

The Great Refusal

At the time, I swore off leadership entirely. I said “never again” with the kind of conviction only exhaustion can bring. I wanted nothing to do with the not-for-profit world, or with guiding anyone, anywhere.

So I tried something else. Actually, I tried everything else.
I cooked professionally for a while, catered events, wrote a children’s book, made bathing suits, dabbled in change management. Each thing gave me a new kind of satisfaction — creative, immediate, practical — but none of it stuck.

Eventually, a restlessness crept back in. It wasn’t about ambition; it was more like an old instinct waking up. Leadership, or whatever that drive is to gather ideas and people toward something, started tugging again.

I realized the question “to lead or not to lead?” might not be one I get to answer once and for all.

What Needed to Change

When I thought about what had gone wrong before, it wasn’t the work itself. It was how I was in it.

I started asking:

How can I show up differently so that I attract different?

That’s still a hard question.

Before, I led with what I thought was generosity — being available, accommodating, understanding. But underneath that was a deep need to be liked and needed. I mistook people-pleasing for kindness, and avoided hard conversations in the name of harmony. It wasn’t sustainable.

The irony is that the more I tried to be everything to everyone, the less effective I became. The team, the work, and I all suffered for it.

Murmurations and the Un-scripted Dance

When I step back and look at where I’ve been — the slow burnout, the refusal, the experiments — I see that my leadership journey has been less a straight line and more of a murmuration: a swirling flock of birds shifting shape in the sky. There is no single leader in a murmuration. Each bird attends to the movement of the others, changes direction in response to something unseen, trusts the momentum, and stays in motion.

That’s the metaphor I’ve come to lean into. The lessons I carried from burnout — that it wasn’t what I was doing, but how; that people-pleasing and boundary-avoidance were unsustainable; that accountability to self matters as much as accountability to others — these lessons prepare me for this dance.

Showing up differently means acknowledging that the “how” is as important as the “what.” I’m learning to build trust, starting with myself: staying grounded, checking in with what matters, refusing to abandon my own voice in the rush to lead. Just as in a murmuration, there is no perfect choreography — there is only motion, connection, sensitivity, and contingency.

In the nonprofit world, in charitable leadership especially, there are unknowns everywhere. We step into rooms without maps, we lean into risk, we carry people’s hopes. There are mistakes, detours, missteps. And the murmuration image gives permission for that. The dance is imperfect, but it is alive. I don’t have to have all the answers, or present a flawless front. I need only show up, present, responsive, learning.

So maybe the question isn’t simply to lead or not to lead. It’s how will I keep dancing with integrity, how will I stay in motion without losing myself, how will I lead with both humility and curiosity, and how will I invite others into the dance rather than presume I’m directing it?

Leadership may not be a solo act. It may be the murmuration itself — a shifting, collective motion, grounded in self-trust and open to the unexpected.