by: MJ Mathis
In our last post, we wrote about the relationship between sovereignty and interdependence, and why coalition can’t be built on compelled participation or fear-based compliance. It has to be chosen. And that choosing requires a self that is grounded enough to enter into genuine relationship with others.
But knowing that isn’t enough. The question we keep returning to is: what does it actually take to practice coalition? What are the skills? What does the relational work look like?
That’s where our Human-Centered Practices come in.
What Makes Coalition Possible in Practice
At Leverage to Lead, Human-Centered Practices are the tools and frameworks we use to build the relational conditions on which coalitions depend, namely agency and shared responsibility. They are also the foundation of our personal and professional development program, ANCHOR, which develops the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills that make building stable coalitions possible. These practices establish psychological safety so that ideas and concerns can actually surface. They facilitate the ability to give and receive feedback within relationships that are strong enough to hold it. They promote the vulnerability that creates trust rather than performative leadership and high shared standards that come from genuine accountability rather than fear.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re the infrastructure of interdependence. And they look different depending on where you sit in a system.
Asking Different Questions About Money
One of the most revealing places we’ve seen this play out is in conversations about finances. In a recent cohort working through our Leading for Organizational Health program, we brought leaders into a direct examination of their own beliefs about money and profitability. The question we opened with was this: What beliefs do you hold about money and profitability as a leader with fiscal responsibility?
What surfaced was a pattern most leaders recognize but rarely name. Most organizations operate from what we call the Extraction Question: how much can we make, how do we grow revenue, how do we maximize output? What we are rarely conditioned to ask as leaders is the Sufficiency Question. How much revenue do we need to do our work well? How would that amount sustain our people and our purpose? What does financial health make possible?
Human-Centered Practices helped the cohort see that the shift between those two questions isn’t just philosophical. It’s relational, and it requires something specific from people depending on where they hold power.
For those in the employer or supervisor role, the practices included naming what profit is actually in service of, being transparent about financial reality rather than managing it behind closed doors, and leading with vulnerability when trade-offs are hard. For those in the employee role, the practices included bringing curiosity to financial decisions rather than making assumptions or harboring resentment, communicating directly about concerns and ideas, and taking responsibility for their own financial literacy rather than waiting to be informed.
What this made visible was that the social contract in many of these organizations had been subtly fraying because the financial conversation had been happening separately from the relational one. Human-Centered Practices bring those conversations together. Financial transparency becomes an act of trust. Shared accountability becomes possible. And the idea that culture and financial health are competing priorities starts to dissolve.
This is coalition work. It requires people on both sides of a power differential to understand their own responsibilities and to practice them with intention.
Everyone Stewards the Purpose
In our work with a technology organization navigating significant structural reorganization, a different dimension of coalition came into focus. The team’s responsibility was growing and changing at a fast pace. People were disoriented. Some were resistant. Others were performing buy-in while quietly disengaging. The relational fabric had taken a real hit.
Our work with them centered on a core idea that is fundamental to coalition: everyone holds responsibility for stewarding the shared purpose, and that responsibility looks different depending on your role and your position in a given relationship.
The coalition this team is building needs multiple viewpoints that carry the weight of the expertise and impact from different groups. The needs of a system cannot be seen clearly from a single vantage point. When only certain voices are shaping the understanding of how things are working, the system itself can go unexamined, allowing for gaping holes in the output. Everyone’s perspective on the needs and challenges is part of what makes the full picture visible. Without that, coalitions become vulnerable to being shaped by the very dynamics they’re trying to change.
We use an organizational change model in our work that maps the emotional journey people move through when change happens around them, from shock and denial through resistance toward genuine commitment and collaborative creation. Most people in this organization were somewhere in the middle, tolerating the change without owning it. When we presented our Human-Centered Practices, the practices gave them a way to engage their agency and move forward in an aligned way.
What shifted the dynamic was a reframing of power. Power is often understood as something you have or don’t have, something to be sought or avoided. Human-Centered Practices expand that understanding toward agency and responsibility. The question stops being “how much power do I have?” and becomes “what is mine to steward here?”
That question landed differently for people depending on where they sat. For those with more perceived authority, stewardship meant building trust, sharing information, leading with vulnerability, and making it safe for people to challenge them. For those with less perceived authority, stewardship meant resisting the pull to wait for someone else to create safety, bringing ideas and concerns forward directly,
Something else happened as people started practicing this: the moments when things weren’t working became useful rather than threatening. A breakdown in communication, a decision that landed badly, or a relationship with real friction in it become information. They illuminate what the system actually needs. Learning to welcome that signal, rather than manage or suppress it, is one of the more important skills Human-Centered Practices build.
When people start showing up from that orientation, the quality of how they move changes. Stewardship, practiced by everyone, is what turns disparate moving parts into a coalition
The Relational Work Is the Work
We sometimes hear coalition described as if it’s primarily a structural or strategic challenge: finding the right partners, aligning on goals, dividing up the work. Those things matter. But we’ve seen enough coalitions fracture under pressure to know that the relational infrastructure underneath is what actually determines whether it holds.
Human-Centered Practices build that infrastructure. They give people the specific skills to show up differently across power differentials and create shared language for what the purpose is and what it asks of each person. They make it possible for people to choose interdependence, again and again, even when it’s hard.
They also make something else possible that often goes unnamed: imagination. When people feel genuinely safe to bring their full perspective, when curiosity is the operating mode and others’ viewpoints are treated as essential, something generative opens up. People start to see possibilities together that none of them could have seen alone. That’s not a side benefit of being in a coalition. It’s one of the most important things a coalition is designed to accomplish.
Coalition is something you practice. And the practice starts with each person understanding what they are responsible for, and showing up to hold it.If this is work you’re interested in, we’d love to be in conversation. Our program, ANCHOR: Human-Centered Practices, is where people build these skills directly, in community with others who are trying to do the same thing. And Leading for Organizational Health brings this work into human-centered systems that create the foundation for real cultural change.