Maroon Leadership: A Blueprint for Workplace Resistance and Collective Strength

In today’s workplaces employees, especially those from historically excluded and marginalized backgrounds, are facing an uphill battle. Systemic inequities, along with growing DEI resistance and an avalanche of executive orders have created a precarious work environment. History can offer us a powerful guide for navigating our current reality. Maroon communities—self-sustaining societies created by Africans who escaped enslavement during the transatlantic slave trade—offer a powerful blueprint for leadership, survival, and resistance. Their strategies for harnessing collective power can provide valuable lessons for workplaces today.

“Maroons were self-liberated enslaved persons, choosing freedom and communal ways of life through distancing themselves, as much as possible, from the system of slavery, spatially just outside of White dominance,” Diane Jones Allen shared in an email. Allen is a professor, the director of landscape architecture at University of Texas Arlington and has written about Maroons at length. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Maroon Landscape: A Cultural Approach to Coastal Resiliency.

“One of the most profound lessons from Maroon communities is their ability to lead within hostile environments—to resist oppression while simultaneously building something transformative and sustainable,” shared Joquina M. Reed. Reed is a JEDI practitioner, public scholar and the founding steward of J Reed Consulting. “Maroons really leaned heavily on their abilities to pivot. We are talking about folks who knew how to shift when the landscape changed, always staying one step ahead while keeping their larger vision intact. That’s adaptive strategy in action, and it’s a skill every leader needs today.” “Maroon Leadership is a concept I’ve coined based on the historical practices of Maroon communities,” Reed explained. “These communities thrived by leveraging collectivism, strategic adaptability, and ancestral wisdom. This leadership framework draws from the spirit of Sankofa, going back and reclaiming what is valuable from our past. It recognizes that beyond the trauma and oppression imposed on the African diaspora, there is also a rich inheritance of resistance, innovation, and self-determination. Maroon Leadership isn’t just about historical survival, it’s about how we apply these principles today to foster justice, equity, and self-sustaining change in the face of ongoing oppression.”

For centuries, leadership models have been designed around the dominant group, explained Adriele Parker. Parker is a leadership coach and the author of the Inclusive Leadership Journal. In an email Parker wrote, “These [leadership] models often prioritize authority, hierarchy, and uniformity over collaboration, adaptability, and lived experiences. And we don’t have to look far to understand why—modern leadership, as we’ve historically seen it practiced, is largely influenced by military structures, where command-and-control leadership has long been perceived as necessary for efficiency and order. Equitable leadership, on the other hand, is dynamic. It acknowledges that leadership isn’t one-size-fits-all and actively works to redistribute power in ways that benefit the whole team, not just those already positioned to succeed.”

Maroon Leadership is a historical blueprint for equitable leadership, teaching us how leadership can be adaptive, collective and rooted in justice. When navigating oppressive systems, the Maroons offer strategies for a sustainable future. “Maroon communities were built by the people, for the people. They were not just surviving but finding ways to create and protect collective well-being,” Reed shared. “Their power came from their ability to prioritize community over hierarchy and to make strategic alliances to ensure sustainability. Every day I'm sure there was a visceral reminder of how important each person’s life was and I'm sure they placed significant importance on every person’s wellbeing. Valuing and loving folks throughout the African Diaspora should be both practiced and studied, which is why I created my most recent guidebook.”

Reed went on to explain, “What really set Maroons apart, they didn’t just resist oppression, they built whole ecosystems that worked with the land instead of trying to control it. They took what they knew from their ancestors, adapted it to their new reality, and created new technologies that made their communities stronger. That’s a leadership lesson right there: sustainability isn’t about domination, it’s about alignment—with people, with the environment, and with a vision that actually serves the collective. And they didn’t do it alone. Maroons knew that survival meant building strategic alliances, forming powerful networks with Indigenous groups and other marginalized communities. That’s another lesson: if you’re trying to make real change, you better be linking up with the right people and making sure your work isn’t happening in a vacuum.”

The Maroons also provide powerful lessons to combat DEI resistance. “Maroons thrived, if only for a period in North America, because they found space to develop their unique culture and communities,” Allen explained. “There was assistance from outside their communities, mainly enslaved persons who provided goods, but for the most part they were not thwarted by domination like those left on the plantation.? To combat resistance to DEI, we can learn from Maroons that we must continue our work, our craft, our technology, our culture, undeterred. As with Maroonage, it is the best fight.?Their very existence was resistance.”

This article was originally published in Forbes

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