Native Hawaiian Insights on Leadership: Conversations with Cheryl Kaʻuhane Lupenui and Noelani Lee

When you think of a “leader,” what comes to mind?

For many who are accustomed to working and thinking in a Western context,  a set of leader archetypes—the strategist, the innovator, the visionary—spring to mind.

But these models of leadership have their limitations. As we face collective and global challenges—or perhaps more accurately, as we become aware of the necessity for collective action in the face of these challenges—alternatives to Western leadership archetypes can offer frameworks for navigating unfamiliar waters. Climate change, potential future pandemics, and ongoing racial and social unrest are just a few examples of challenges that require that organizations and communities move beyond the hero leader model. And in truth, these non-Western models have always offered lessons to inform our approaches to leadership, long before current crises gained purchase in our global consciousness.

I recently spoke with two Native Hawaiian women who have both provided leadership and guided leadership development in others:

• Cheryl Kaʻuhane Lupenui is the President & CEO of The Kohala Center, a Hawaiʻi-based nonprofit dedicated to research, education, and ‘āina based stewardship for healthier ecosystems. She is also the Founder and Principal of The Leader Project, which provides “both Hawaiian and Western worldviews to the creation of community-based strategies and the development of leaders to sustain the work.” 
• Noelani Lee is the Principal of Halau Hakalau, a consultancy that provides coaching and thought partnership to nonprofits, philanthropies, and people working within the social sector. Noelani is also the former executive director of Ka Honua Momona, a nonprofit based on Molokai, Hawaiʻi, which seeks to be a model of sustainability mauka a makai (from the mountains to the sea). 

Through separate interviews, Cheryl and Noelani shared insights on approaches of Indigenous and/or Native Hawaiian leadership, as well as what Western approaches might gain from these insights.

How, in your experience, does Native Hawaiian leadership differ from Western approaches? What does Native Hawaiian leadership look like in practice?

Noelani: When I think of Native Hawaiian styles of leadership, the first word that pops to mind is servant leadership. I think the stereotype of Western leadership is how well someone can exceed in a space and dominate. Native Hawaiian leadership, in my mind—and for many Indigenous leaders—is about, how can we lift our people up? It’s similar to conversations: Is your goal to win the conversation, or to have a greater understanding? I think it’s a parallel philosophy to leadership.

Another one of the characteristics of successful leadership, in my mind, is alignment. By that I mean, consistency in the things a person thinks, says, and does. What you think should show up in what you say, which should show up in what you do and how you do it. If I was looking for a leader, I would look for alignment in those areas. 

Indigenous people do not often call themselves leaders. And I think that’s a big difference between Western and Native and Indigenous approaches. In Western society, to call yourself a leader is like kudos and you get a feather in your hat. In Native leadership, I think if you call yourself a leader, it’s like a target on your back. 

Here’s the interesting thing: I think you’d be hard-pressed, if you were looking for leaders, to find people who would step forward in Native and Indigenous communities, and say, “I’m a leader.” But if you ask for people who could make a difference or help, then you’ll have a lot of people step forward. In Native Hawaiian communities, leaders are identified by community rather than being self-identified. If you went to someone and said, “I’m trying to figure out a way to solve this problem, who would you suggest I turn to?” That would be the way to find the quote-unquote leader, even if that person wouldn’t self identify as one.

Fundamentally, leadership is all about relationships, right? What better cultures to learn leadership from than those that are very high on the scale of collectivism versus individualism? — Cheryl Kaʻuhane Lupenui

Cheryl: I’ve realized if you’re going to come into any discipline, if you want to come into it from a Hawaiian or Indigenous way, you can’t just take your Western views and beliefs and systems and then try to translate an Indigenous model into that. You have to start the work of coming from an Indigenous place as foundational. And even though we can use translation to help crosswalk things a little bit so we get our footing, there are concepts that will never show up in Western culture that will show up in these Indigenous cultures. 

Some of the fundamental differences between Western and Indigenous leadership are reflected in our languages. Even the word “leadership” doesn't translate over to Hawaiian, just like the word “agriculture” doesn’t translate over. So if you are looking to explore Indigenous leadership, you have to say, “I’m willing to enter into a different place. So what I see, how I speak, the language, my interactions, and my relationships are different.”

These differences in language reflect a difference in worldview. When I was learning ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s so many pronouns.” We don’t have all these pronouns in English. For example, in English, we have one way of saying “we,” but in Hawaiian we have multiple ways of saying “we.” And which one we choose gives the listener a lot of information, both at the surface and many layers down. Another example: We’re taught in English not to use the passive voice, right? In Hawaiian, I find passive voice is more predominant, because it doesn’t matter who the subject is. It doesn’t matter that I did this. We don’t start with the “I.” It’s a whole different experience when “I” am not the most important part of leadership.

Now, fundamentally, leadership is all about relationships, right? What better cultures to learn leadership from than those that are very high on the scale of collectivism versus individualism? I would say this is a big distinction between Indigenous and American models of leadership, is where they show up on the cultural scale of individualism versus collectivism. 

Where, in your experience, does the idea of spirituality and nature fit into Native or Indigenous models of leadership?

Noelani: I think one thing is that Western leadership tends to be very linear in thinking. Native Hawaiian leadership, and most Indigenous leadership I’ve observed, is very cyclical in thinking. In Indigenous cultures, the idea of the circle of life is one of our main truths.

I think that powerful Native Hawaiian leaders always have this spirituality with them. And that differs from many Western approaches, where spirituality equals religion. In my mind, religion is a practice of a certain set of beliefs that is usually organized around a place of worship, while spirituality is about recognizing that connectedness to all things, and that’s very different from organized religion.

That spirituality is so important, because it’s remembering how you are connected to your staff or to your community or to your family. That spirituality in your ancestral connections, into the future generations, and that continuum, that cycle of life, those connections are the spirituality that runs through you and is uniting and inclusive of everyone and everything—the plants around you, the land that you are next to or that you’re caring for—it runs through everything and is a part of you. 

Because that spirituality has been so heavily connected in Western society with organized religion, I think that’s been compartmentalized and set aside. When I’ve seen Western leaders come and really experience Native Hawaiian leadership, they’re allowed to bring their spirituality with them, and that feels so freeing and new. I see it really changes people. It doesn’t change who they are, but the ability to bring a spirituality with them is really transformative in the spaces I’ve seen.

I think Indigenous leadership has a strong, continuous ancestral connection. There are things that people have a kuleana for, or privilege and responsibility to care for, that have been passed down through generations, that are not necessarily their choice, per se, but their mission was given to them, possibly through an ancestral connection that they may or may not know. We have children in our program that have gifts that they don’t understand until later in their life. I think in Native Hawaiian and Indigenous communities, spirit is one of our strengths and guiding forces in leadership, as well as a strong, spiritual connection to a greater power, to your ancestors, to those that came before us, and just as strongly, to the next generations. Our place in that continuum, that cycle, is held strongly. 

Hawaiian leadership is also very inclusive of family. There are so many things that are cut away or amputated from a whole person in Western leadership spaces, whereas in Hawaiian and Indigenous thinking, we’re not supposed to be just this “one.” We are supposed to have all these connections—the connections are honored and revered, and they allow us to bring our whole self into the space. These familial ties need to be recognized, and the spirit should always be present and never asked to be in silence.

I think you’d be hard-pressed, if you were looking for leaders, to find people who would step forward in Native and Indigenous communities, and say, “I’m a leader.” But if you ask for people who could make a difference or help, then you’ll have a lot of people step forward. — Noelani Lee

Cheryl: We don’t have a word in the Hawaiian language that equates to the way we use “success” in English. Yet “success” and “achievement,” those words are very prominent in Western leadership, right? When you explore Native Hawaiian leadership, you enter into a culture that also has no word for “nature” or “environment.” As you learn Hawaiian, that already takes you into a whole different zone right there. That’s a very Indigenous relationship, where there’s no separation between man and nature. When you are not “racing to the top” or defining success for others. We’re all one, we’re all related. That’s a huge difference in worldview that leads to very different actions and behavior. So if you’re like us who are in the fields of conservation, agriculture and education, coming from a Western perspective looks entirely different than when you come from a Hawaiian perspective.

As I mentioned before, the person—the subject—is less important in the Hawaiian language. Western or American leadership is human-centric, but not so in Hawaiian leadership. There’s more of a lead/follow duality. Things go back and forth and in cycles. We follow signs, birds, stars, paths. The Hawaiian model of leadership is not always human-centric. 

Similarly, we don’t make plans with only humans in mind. In my organization, I try to work with both Hawaiian seasonality and Gregorian calendar seasonality, and honor traditions. Take for instance, the moon cycle. We’re of course not the only culture that follows the moon, and there are reasons for that, right? It affects all of us, even plants. Our energy is different—the wind, the waves, the rain, we’re all impacted. So we use these cycles to guide our work; for example, we started our recent design retreat on a new moon, to correspond with the new phase of beginning something. Anything we do, we think about the environment and how that’s impacting both individuals and the collective work.

What unique insights into shared leadership does a Native Hawaiian perspective bring?

Noelani: Before we really entered into shared leadership, my co-leader at Ka Honua Momona and I would sometimes be at odds. I was very passionately fighting for things. And my co-leader—who is a very peaceful person—would also be very passionately fighting for things. My practice at that time was to show up overly prepared for meetings, basically with a predetermined outcome. So I had to retrain myself. I had to get myself to show up to our meetings—which was contrary to my nature at the time—without having come to a single “best” solution. I had to remain open. What I learned in shared leadership is that you need to let go of predetermined outcomes to get to the best and most beautiful solutions. During retreats with my co-leader, we would get into a space where we could share the burden of what we were facing, and address things we might otherwise have hidden… After that exposure, we were really able to share with each other: “This is the place I’m having the hardest time, this is my weakness.”  When we unlocked that door in my mind, that was such a key space, because after that, we thought of everything together. We thought through problems and came up with solutions together. We didn’t hoard budgets, or authority over projects—we shared these things graciously. That’s when we went to shared leadership. Genuinely sharing it. And it was such a pivotal, beautiful transition. Because from that point on, I thought with my co-leader’s mindset even if she wasn’t there, and she said she did the same. Transparency, and a true vulnerability to growing, and being in that growth mindset space—we both embraced it. We dismantled any shame points and we actually went to those places first, because we were excited to see that the solutions we came up with together were better than either of us could have come up with alone.

I think one of the greatest things about shared leadership is that, while in Western thought, it’s about one leader, but in Indigenous and Hawaiian thought, it can be many leaders. Molokai has a history of a council of elders, leading together, being strong in different spaces. That was part of the inspiration for embracing shared leadership.

Cheryl: We don’t have a single word for “leadership” in Hawaiian but “readiness”—makaukau—is definitely a word in Hawaiian. Trying to develop readiness is a very different thing than trying to develop leadership. “What does success look like?”—that’s a very Western model. But when you look instead at readiness through a Hawaiian lens, it leads you down different pathways and you see different landscapes than you would if you only went down Western roads and pathways.

There’s a concept we co-created amongst ‘āina-based educators called “assembly of gifts.” When you really look at kuleana and the concepts of gifts, you can organize and share leadership in ways that you couldn’t if you only stuck to management job descriptions and formal titles and positions. It’s great, because I don’t have to hold everything. After four years, I have a lot more understanding of my team’s gifts, their kuleana, what they care about, what they want to lead, and what they’re called to lead. So then my job becomes making room and space for that in context to shared community and ‘āina gifts as well. Creating the conditions for shared leadership and constantly looking for indications of readiness allow for the full fruition and exchange of all our gifts.

How might an Indigenous approach to leadership inform your work, or the work of your colleagues? What might a Native Hawaiian perspective to shared leadership make possible for your organization?