The Ella Baker Effect — Scale Beyond Charismatic Leaders

I remember being an employee myself, sitting through and waiting through many a change process. Being asked to do something and entertaining it, because I had to. Counting the days for when I no longer had to do it.

I knew that the ask did not address whatever made it feel unsustainable or irrelevant.

And guess what — my patience won out in the end, just as it does for many employees.

I want to start there, because I think patience is the most underrated force in organizational life. Not resistance. Resistance is loud and it gets budgeted for. Patience is quiet, it costs nothing, and it wins. Your people can outlast almost anything you roll out, and some of them already know it.

Two things change that outcome. One is who builds the change. The other is who is held accountable for it. They are different levers and they do not substitute for each other.

Why the steering committee beats the mandate

A multi-million dollar external consulting mandate buys you a great deal. It cannot buy you the one thing that determines whether the change holds.

Those people stay.

Your internal champions stay. They have social capital. They have a nuanced understanding of the lay of the land — where the landmines are, how different pains are experienced, and the ripple effects of that, and the consequences. When you leverage their voice, whatever is co-created is that much better, that much more likely to endure and be effective.

Internal champions do the work that a mandate can't do. They help move their peers. They help give insight into resistors. And just by showing up, just by doing the work, they help shift the culture. They grease the wheels.

Who is in the room — including the people you'd rather not invite

A cross-section of leaders across departments with decision-making power and social capital. Everyone whose work might be impacted, or whose work would support it, is absolutely there — because then they can give live, real-time feedback about how feasible something is or isn't as we design the solution. So that once we're ready to launch, we're actually ready to launch. The things that were roadblocks and barriers previously don't function like that anymore, because they've been handled or vetted or considered in the process. Not even necessarily solved. Acknowledged and decided in advance.

Including the loudest skeptic in that room is not a courtesy. It's the mechanism. Skeptics point out the things that need to be addressed on a systemic level, and some will run away with it and use it as an opportunity to opt out. But when they're in the process, there comes the opportunity to address it — and to remove the option of opting out.

Now the part that gets me in trouble

I actually think change is top down. It's a little scandalous, and it isn't what I'm supposed to say after everything above.

Let me sharpen it. Maybe change isn't totally top down. What I want to say is that accountability is top down.

Enduring, sustained accountability — to the actions, policies, habits, and mindsets that create the change we want to see. I say that because the people with the most decision-making power are the people who control the enabling conditions that allow the sustained behavior to happen. If accountability starts with them, that effectively, functionally, systemically removes all opt-outs from the goal-aligned actions. All opportunities to say no to the thing the organization has already decided to build. It makes the misaligned choice impossible to make. It takes it off the table.

Let me be precise about what that does not mean, because this is a place where the shorthand is dangerous.

It does not mean removing anyone's ability to disagree. Dissent stays live. Hard questions stay live. Refusal on ethical grounds stays live, and any organization that reads this as license to override it has understood me backwards. The steering committee exists so that objections land somewhere early enough to change the design. What comes off the table is narrower and more specific: the option to nod in the room and quietly do nothing afterward.

That's the pairing. Co-creation without top-down accountability produces a well-built plan everyone is free to ignore. Top-down accountability without co-creation produces compliance that ends the day the pressure does. You need both, and they're doing different jobs.

What Ella Baker has to do with any of this

Ella Baker didn't stay to own anything she built. She organized for five decades and left the organizations running without her, and her theory was this: strong people don't need strong leaders.

What she provided was activation energy. Not ongoing presence. Not ownership. The energy required to get a thing over the threshold and moving under its own power.

Activation energy is my phrase for the highest form of what I do, and Baker is where I got it. When I work with leaders and organizations, my goal is not to create a dependency. My goal is a transformational and enduring change that exists beyond me — institutionalized, embedded into the fabric of the organization, able to exist beyond any one individual. A system that draws on the genius of those in the room but is not siloed by the genius of those in the room.

The measure of that work is not how indispensable I become. It's what is still running after I'm gone.

— Sable

First published in The Sovereign Brief on LinkedIn, September 1, 2026.