February 2025

By Mylonne Sullivan, ETB LEEAD Program Director

Evaluation is not just about methods and metrics. It is about navigating power, building trust across difference, communicating findings in politically charged environments, and advocating for communities whose voices are too often sidelined. These are leadership acts.

Yet traditional leadership development in evaluation often relies on prescriptive models that center individual charisma, hierarchy or neutrality—approaches that fail to reflect the lived experiences of evaluators of color. Many of us lead relationally, collectively and contextually. We translate between worlds. We hold community accountability alongside institutional demands. We lead while navigating racialized expectations and structural barriers.
Without language or frameworks that name this work as leadership, evaluators of color can feel disconnected, isolated or undervalued—despite doing the very work the field needs most.

A Pluralistic Vision of Leadership

The Leaders in Equitable Evaluation and Diversity (LEEAD) program developed the LEEADership Framework to address this gap directly. Rather than treating leadership as separate from evaluation practice, LEEAD Scholars are guided to develop their own LEEADership framework that recognizes leadership as embedded within it.
Importantly, Scholars begin developing their frameworks during the curriculum phase of the program, grounding their leadership identity in coursework, positionality reflections and early engagement with leadership concepts. The framework challenges the idea that there is one right way to lead in evaluation. Instead, it embraces a pluralistic approach that recognizes leadership as dynamic, relational, and rooted in values.

At its core, this approach invites evaluators to explore multiple leadership traditions and theories, including culturally responsive and equitable evaluation (CREE), adaptive leadership, relational-cultural theory, servant leadership and Indigenous leadership practices. Scholars reflect on what resonates with their positionality, values and aspirations. Rather than prescribing traits, the framework asks: What kind of leader are you becoming, and in what context? This shift matters. When evaluators are supported to identify and claim their leadership voice, leadership stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like alignment.

Leadership as Co-Creation, Not Individual Achievement

One of the most powerful aspects of the LEEADership Framework is its emphasis on co-creation. Leadership is not framed as individual ascent, but as a collective practice shaped by relationships, reflection and shared accountability.

Through structured reflection, professional development sessions, collaborative sensemaking and tools such as living visual boards, LEEAD Scholars document what leadership looks like in practice. This includes how power is shared, how trust is built, how equity is operationalized and how sustainability is maintained. Throughout the process, Scholars are reminded that leadership is something you do with others, not something you claim over them.

For evaluators of color, this mirrors how many already lead — through mentorship, coalition building, facilitation and community partnership — often without formal recognition. Naming these practices as leadership is both affirming and transformative.

Centering Positionality and Power

A critical contribution of the LEEADership Framework is its grounding in positionality. Evaluators reflect on their social location, values and lived experiences, and examine how these shape their leadership choices.

This is not abstract reflection. It is an equity imperative. Leadership that ignores positionality risks reproducing harm. Leadership that engages it can redistribute power, elevate community wisdom and challenge extractive evaluation practices.

By centering questions such as: Who does this framework serve? Whose knowledge is centered? How is accountability enacted? — Scholars are supported to lead in ways that align with justice, not just compliance.

From Frameworks to Action and Culmination

A leadership framework is only as powerful as its use. That is why the LEEADership Framework emphasizes practical application, including defining core values, articulating guiding principles, identifying leadership domains and translating them into observable practices and indicators. For Cohort 6 Scholars, this work is moving toward culmination. Scholars have the opportunity to finalize and share their LEEADership Frameworks by presenting them at this year’s American Evaluation Association conference. For LEEAD Scholars, attending AEA serves as both a professional contribution to the field and part of the formal culmination of the program.

Leadership in action may look like slowing a project timeline to build trust with community partners. It may mean pushing back on funder assumptions with evidence grounded in lived experience. It may involve creating space for healing, reflection and collective care within evaluation teams.

These acts are not trivial. They are strategic. They are courageous. And they are necessary.

Claiming Our Leadership Legacy

For evaluators, leadership is not about fitting into existing molds. It is about reshaping the field itself. The LEEADership Framework reminds us that frameworks are living documents meant to evolve as we grow, learn and respond to changing contexts.
More importantly, it reminds us that our voices matter. Our ways of leading matter. And the evaluation field is stronger when leadership reflects the diversity, complexity and brilliance of those doing the work. Moving from evaluator to evaluation leader is not a promotion. It is a reclamation.

And it begins by naming what we already know to be true: We have been leading all along.