Leadership Lesson: Leading with Music and Hope

Hello friends, NEW grants available: Ben & Jerry’s, Whole Foods Market and MANY more at Big Mama’s Playbook! Please share! Here’s this week’s message: Many songs from the 70’s had some of the most powerful messages about life, relationships, and along with some valuable leadership tools. Songs that taught us about resilience. They reminded us of what is possible. They gave words to feelings we can’t always name and inspire us to take the next step. Music had a way of being a comfort and a message. Back in 2012, I was the keynote speaker at my 40th high school class reunion. Music from 1972 was an amazing soundtrack of life lessons that taught us about the importance of real friends, songs like Lean on Me (Bill Withers); about friends we thought were our friends…Back Stabbers (O’Jays). Break up songs like…Neither One of Us (Gladys Knight and the Pips) Everybody Plays the Fool (Main Ingredient). About Falling in Love - You are the Sunshine of my Life (Stevie Wonder), Day Dreaming (Aretha Franklin) – and one man, in particular, talked a lot about love… I’m Still in Love (Al Green) Love & Happiness (Al Green).

Music as a Leader’s Lesson:

Actually, reflecting back as a 15-year-old sophomore in 1970, my small predominantly Black high school was a microcosm of the 60’s movie classic, “Cooley High”. Back then, I was filled with more questions than answers about the world I was stepping into. The music soundtrack to my life that year included “O-o-h Child” by The Five Stairsteps – a group of five siblings from Chicago. That song gently and soulfully whispered, things are gonna get easier, things’ll get brighter. For this young Black girl growing up in the projects, that song was more than just lyrics - it was a vision. The Five Stairsteps were telling me not to quit, not to let my circumstances shrink my dreams. And I believed it, even when the world around me suggested otherwise.

For my generation, music was not just entertainment; it was teaching. Curtis Mayfield told us to “Keep On Pushing.” Marvin Gaye asked, “What’s Going On?” Nina Simone declared it was time to stand and be proud: “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Each of these songs was a classroom without walls that blared out of our transistor radios and onto the streets - shaping us into young leaders, thinkers, and community builders. Life was not easy for many of us growing up. Violence, poverty, social injustices, and uncertainty pressed in. But those songs were soulful, sweet, powerful and unshakably hopeful. These songs gave me a lifeline - still do.

What About Today?

Now I ask myself: what songs are today’s leaders using to teach and inspire our young people? We are facing social challenges that feel as deep and wide ranging as any I remember - gun violence, political division, climate crisis, racial and economic inequities. The need for leaders to use the arts, and especially music, to heal and inspire has never been greater.

Are we pointing our young people toward songs that give them language for resilience and vision? Songs like Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” that became an anthem for protest. Kendrick also told us, “We gon’ be alright.” The artist, H.E.R. sang “I Can’t Breathe” in response to injustice. Beyoncé reminded us with “Break My Soul” that we don’t have to carry the weight of the world on our backs. ‘Queen Bey’ spoke to working folks ready to reclaim their dignity. These songs shape resilience in ways that statistics or speeches cannot. These aren’t just tracks to stream; they are really survival guides and roadmaps for the collective courage that we all need.

Leaders, Choose Your Soundtrack

As leaders, we have to ask: what are we putting on repeat? What soundtrack are we offering to this generation’s most formative adolescent years, for Generation Z? What’s the soundtrack to remind them that, as The Five Stairsteps sang to me in 1970, things are gonna get easier?

Leadership isn’t only in the boardroom, pulpit, or protest march - it’s also in the playlists we create, the songs we teach, and the lyrics we quote when the room feels heavy. Music carries wisdom across generations. If we don’t pass down songs of healing and resilience, we leave silence where there could have been strength. We live in times just as complex as the 1970s. Young people are navigating school shootings, climate change, deep political divides, and questions of belonging. They need leaders to hand them more than instructions via TikTok, AI, and the “dark web” - they need hope (we all do).

So today, I call on every servant leader: share your songs. Sing them, teach them, quote them, live them. Because somebody out there - that sixteen-year-old sitting in their own version of struggle and strife - needs to know that brighter days are still ahead. Leaders must think about the soundtracks we are passing on. Are we teaching our young people songs that remind them they are strong, gifted, and able? Are we surrounding ourselves with melodies that make us braver, softer, wiser?

When I was sixteen, “O-o-h Child” told me that brighter days were coming. I carried that promise into adulthood and into leadership. Now it’s our turn to share songs of hope, healing, and courage. Because leadership isn’t only in policies and plans - it’s in the lyrics we lift up, the music we sing together, and the optimism or hope we dare to spread. So, I wonder…what songs are you using today to inspire the next generation?

Weekly wisdom, in their own words:

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears....”

— Gloria Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 - May 15, 2004)