Leading in the Unbearable Middle

I have been living with a small book by Pedro Alexis Tabensky on African philosophy and the postcolonial self. It is not a tidy survey. It is someone taking apart a live circuit and showing you what hums inside. The claim is simple to say and hard to live. Many of us inherit a forced fusion of identities that were never meant to share a room. There is no path back to an untouched origin, only the work of making a new integrity from what remains. That sentence has been rearranging how I think about leadership.

I am not writing a seminar recap. I care about how groups hold together, make decisions, and become more honest over time. The book gives me a frame that cuts through management slogans. Leadership is identity work in public. If your organization is a merge of histories, your leadership has to be a merge too. The faster you admit that, the less damage you do pretending purity exists.

Tabensky uses the figure of the mestizo to describe life after conquest. Neither pure victim nor pure perpetrator, both at once, contradiction under the skin. In organizational terms, the mestizo leader is the one who stops selling the fantasy of a blank canvas. Teams are not newborns. They are living stacks of choices, promises, debts, habits, and hurts. The job is not to stage a renaissance every quarter. The job is to steward a system that started before you and will keep moving after you, then add integrity without erasing what came before. There is nothing romantic about that. It is just honest.