In this Season 2 opener of The Fosgail Mindset, Myka Kennedy Stephens names how control‑focused, top‑down leadership is eroding trust and fragmenting community in libraries, higher education, and other mission‑driven institutions. Drawing on a recent committee meeting and wider political patterns, she connects today’s leadership dysfunction to the crisis that prompted Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership—and explains why that model’s servanthood vocabulary is now too limited to address power and context.​

Myka then introduces Attendant Leadership as a more holistic, power‑aware framework rooted in practices of service, justice, and peace, and outlines the eight‑part series that will explore its two dimensions of relationality and five expressions: healer, sage, emissary, companion, and steward. Listeners are invited to reflect on where autocratic patterns show up in their own contexts and to join an ongoing conversation about what a more attendant way of leading might look like.

Read the companion blog article: https://www.fosgail.org/blog/2026/01/22/2026-01-22_disrupting_autocracy/ Join the Fosgail Community: https://community.fosgail.org Subscribe to Fosgail’s biweekly newsletter: https://www.fosgail.org/discover-more/newsletter/