Why Experienced Black Women Leaders Are Needed Now
Experienced Black women leaders have decades of wisdom worth sharing. Discover why their voices, leadership stories, and expertise are needed now.
Jacqueline Kaba-Harrison Hon.Ph.D.
9/24/20264 min read
There Is Wisdom That Only Experience Can Teach
There are leadership lessons you can learn from a book, seminar or business school.
And then there are lessons you can only learn by living them.
For Black women leaders who have spent 20, 25 or 30 years building careers, leading teams, managing organizations, navigating workplace politics and making difficult decisions, those lessons represent an extraordinary body of knowledge.
Yet much of that wisdom remains locked inside individual careers.
That needs to change.
There is another generation of Black women entering management, moving into executive positions, building businesses and learning how to navigate leadership.
They need more than inspirational quotes.
They need our stories.
They need to hear about the workplace wins—and the failures.
They need to understand what happened behind the promotion.
They need to know how we responded when we were overlooked, underestimated or simply got it wrong.
Most importantly, they need to see experienced Black women in leadership speaking openly about what leadership actually requires.
Why Experienced Black Women Leaders Are Needed Now
Your Leadership Journey Is Valuable
After 20+ years, it can be easy to minimize what you know.
Something that seems obvious to you today may have taken 15 years to learn.
Think about the younger version of yourself.
What didn’t she know about negotiating?
What didn’t she understand about organizational politics?
How long did it take her to recognize the difference between a sponsor and a mentor?
When did she learn that doing excellent work doesn’t automatically guarantee visibility?
How did she learn to advocate for herself?
When did she finally understand that sometimes leaving is as important as knowing how to stay?
These aren’t insignificant lessons.
They are leadership knowledge.
And someone else may be facing today what you learned to navigate 10 or 20 years ago.
We Need the Whole Story
Leadership conversations often focus heavily on success.
We celebrate promotions, awards, degrees, titles and accomplishments.
Those things matter.
But they aren’t the whole story.
What about the position you didn’t get?
The team you struggled to lead?
The project that failed?
The workplace where you stayed longer than you should have?
The time you questioned whether you belonged in leadership at all?
The corporate pivot you never expected?
Those experiences often teach us more than our victories.
Leadership development for Black women becomes more powerful when experienced leaders are willing to talk about both.
We need stories about achievement.
But we also need stories about recovery, reinvention, disappointment, courage and starting again.
Experience Can Become Thought Leadership
There comes a point in a successful career when the question begins to change.
Early in our careers, we ask: How do I succeed?
Later, the question can become: What am I going to do with everything I’ve learned?
That’s where thought leadership enters the conversation.
Thought leadership isn’t about pretending to know everything.
It’s about identifying what you do know and making that knowledge useful to other people.
Your experience could become conversations about executive leadership.
Your failures could become lessons about resilience.
Your corporate pivot could help another woman recognize when it’s time for her next chapter.
Your expertise could become interviews, television conversations, articles, speaking engagements, books, podcasts or mentoring opportunities.
Your career becomes more than something you experienced.
It becomes something you can teach.
Your Voice Is Part of Your Legacy
Eventually, every title changes.
Someone else occupies the office.
Someone else takes over the department.
Someone else’s name appears on the organizational chart.
But what happens to the wisdom you accumulated while you were there?
That’s a question experienced Black women leaders should be asking.
Our legacy shouldn’t only be measured by the positions we held.
It should also be measured by what we left behind for the women coming after us.
There is enormous power in documenting our leadership journeys while we are here to tell them ourselves.
We can talk about what worked.
We can talk about what didn’t.
We can tell the truth about leadership.
And we can create a body of knowledge that continues helping other women long after we’ve left a particular position.
Your Voice Is Needed Now
At RYP TV, we believe experienced Black women leaders shouldn’t have to wait for someone else to decide that their stories deserve a platform.
Our leadership journeys deserve to be documented.
Our expertise deserves visibility.
Our lessons deserve to be shared.
And the next generation deserves access to the wisdom we’ve spent decades acquiring.
If you’ve spent 20+ years leading, learning, succeeding, failing, rebuilding and evolving, don’t underestimate the value of what you know.
Somewhere, another woman is trying to figure out something you’ve already survived.
Your experience matters.
Your perspective matters.
Your voice is needed now.
Ready to host your own TV show? Let’s talk.
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