Our countdown continues this week with leadership lesson #2 which is about Community, and not the surface-level kind.
If you are only building a team, you’ve missed the point.
Real community doesn’t form because people simply gather or even work together.
It forms when people share intense experience.
In this cultural institution in my upcoming book Call & Response, community was forged over generations, through shared struggle, responsibility, and survival.
We struggled.
That cultural context taught leaders early that you don’t succeed alone, you carry one another forward.
This week’s leadership lesson explores why leaders shaped in that environment instinctively lean toward collaboration, collective accountability, and belonging, and why those instincts matter more than ever in today’s fractured workplaces.
Community isn’t soft, and it is forged through battle scars--not pizza partes or beer carts.
It’s also strategic. What has your team been through that can bond them?
Call & Response: 10 Leadership Lessons from the Black Church
Publishing Feb 10, 2026 (Amistad Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing | JVL Media )
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