Many Hands: The Leadership Practice Nobody Teaches and The Tradition That Already Knew

There is a tradition from St. Lucia called Koudmen — a practice where the community comes together to carry what one person cannot carry alone. No payment. No contract. Just hands. In this episode, Lisa names the loneliness that lives inside leadership, shares a message from a team member that stopped her in her tracks, and asks the question most leaders are afraid to ask: what if you were never meant to carry it by yourself?

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter Boba, where science meets soul. Somebody sent me a message recently that I have not been able to stop thinking about. It was from someone on my team, someone I lead. And in this message, she did something that leaders almost never experience. She held me. She did not ask me for anything. She did not need direction. She did not copy anyone. She just saw me. And she named what she saw. And then she offered to carry part of it with me. And the thing that broke me open was not the kindness. It was the fact that I did not realize how much I needed it until I read it. She wrote about a tradition from the island where she was raised, a practice called kudman. And when I tell you what it means, I think you're going to feel something shift inside you. Because it is the word for the thing that most of us have been aching for and did not know how to name. I'm Lisa Carterbawa, and this is soul to soul. There is a sentence that we have been told so many times that we have stopped questioning it. It's lonely at the top. We say it like it's a natural law, like gravity, like something you just accept as the cost of ambition. You rise and the air gets thinner, and eventually you look around and realize nobody is standing beside you anymore. And we nod, we accept it. We even wear it like a badge, as if being alone is proof that you made it. But what if that is not wisdom? What if that is just a system that was never built for the fullness of who you are? Think about what we reward in leaders: decisiveness, independence, self-sufficiency, the ability to carry it all and make it look easy. We celebrate the person who never breaks, never asks, never leans. And then we wonder why 70% of senior leaders report feeling isolated. We wonder why the people who hold everyone else together are the ones quietly falling apart. I lead from a place that does not separate the person from the position. I have said those words publicly, and I mean them. But here is what I do not always say out loud. Sometimes the person inside, the position, is tired. Sometimes the person who pours into everyone else's cup looks down and realizes hers is empty. And the hardest part is not the tiredness itself, it is the silence around it. Because when you are the one people come to, who do you go to? The loneliest place in leadership is not the top. It is the space between holding everyone and having no one hold you. In St. Lucia, there is a tradition called Kudman. It comes from the Cuol, the Creole language of the island. I probably pronounced that wrong, and I am so sorry. But it describes a practice that has roots in African communal traditions carried through the brutal passage of slavery implanted in Caribbean soil. Kudman is a form of cooperative self-help. It is what happens when a community comes together to do for one person what that person could never do alone. Here's how it works. When someone in the community has a task too heavy to carry by themselves, clearing land, building a house, harvesting a crop, the community shows up, not for pay, not for recognition, not because anyone signed a contract. They show up because that is what community means. They bring their hands, they bring their tools, they bring food and music and encouragement. They work hard, they sing, they challenge each other, they laugh. And when the work is done, the person who called the Koudman does not owe money. They owe presents. The agreement is simple. When someone else calls a Koudman, you show up too. Many hands make the burden lighter. And community exists so no one has to stand alone. Now I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I want you to notice how foreign that feels in the context of modern leadership. We have been trained to believe that asking for help is a failure of competence, that if you cannot carry it yourself, you are not ready for the role. That vulnerability in leadership is a liability, not a gift. Kuudman says the opposite. Kuudman says the work was never meant to be carried alone. It says the community is not your luxury. It is the infrastructure. It says that the strongest thing you can do is open your hands and let other people place theirs beside yours. Kuudman does not ask, can you handle it? It asks, why would you try to handle it alone? I want to tell you something about the message I received. Because it did not just comfort me. It changed how I think about what I am building. This person wrote to me during a hard moment. We were navigating a loss on our team, not a death, but the kind of departure that leaves a hole. The kind where someone's spirit, not just their skill set, is what you miss. And she could see that I was carrying it, not because I said so, because she pays attention, because she leads with her eyes open. And in her message, she offered something that I rarely receive. She offered to help hold the anchor. That image has stayed with me, because an anchor is not light. An anchor is the thing that keeps everyone from drifting. And most leaders are holding that anchor alone, in silence, with steady hands and a calm voice, while underneath their arms are shaking. What she was saying, what Koudman teaches, is that the anchor does not belong to one person. The anchor belongs to the community. And the leader's job is not to hold it alone. The leader's job is to trust the hands that are reaching for it. But here is where it gets hard because trusting those hands requires you to do one thing that leadership culture tells you never to do. You have to let people see that the weight is heavy. You have to stop performing strength and start practicing it. And real strength, the kind that sustains, looks a lot more like receiving than it looks like carrying. Real strength is not carrying everything. Real strength is letting someone carry it with you. So, how do you build this? How do you create the conditions for Kuudman in a world that rewards self-sufficiency and punishes vulnerability? I want to offer you three things, not steps, practices. First, name the weight out loud, not in a crisis, not in a breakdown, in the ordinary quiet Tuesday afternoon way that is honest without being dramatic. Say to someone you trust, this one is heavy for me. That is not weakness. That is an invitation. And most people are waiting for the invitation because they already see the weight. They just do not know if you will let them touch it. Second, stop measuring your team by what they produce and start measuring them by how they show up. The person who sends a message at the exact moment you need it is not being productive. She is being human. And if you only reward output, you will teach your people that their humanity is irrelevant. Kudman does not measure contribution by volume, it measures it by presence. Did you show up? That is enough. Third, reciprocate. This is the part we forget. In the original tradition, Kuudman is not charity, it is a circle. When someone helps you build your house, you help them build theirs. It is mutual, it is ongoing, and it means that you, yes you, the leader, the one who is always pouring, have to be willing to receive, not deflect, not redirect the attention back to them. Receive. Let the words land, let the care in. Let someone hold the anchor with you, and do not apologize for the fact that it is heavy. Kudman is not charity, it is a circle. You build my house, I build yours. That is the deal. Here is what I want to leave you with today. Somewhere right now there is a leader who is holding everything together with both hands and a straight face, and she is tired, and she will not say so because she thinks that saying so will make her less, less capable, less trustworthy, less worthy of the title she has earned. And somewhere near that leader, maybe right next to her, maybe on her own team, there is someone who sees it, someone who wants to reach out, someone who is carrying their own version of Kudman in their bones, even if they have never heard the word. They are just waiting for permission to show up. If you are the leader, let them. If you are the person who sees the leader, do not wait. Send the message, write the email, say the thing. You have no idea how much it will mean. The tradition of Kuudman has survived slavery. It has survived colonialism. It has survived centuries of systems that tried to teach people that they were on their own. And it is still here, still practiced, still breathing, because the truth it carries is older than any system that tried to bury it. You were never meant to carry it alone. Many hands make the burden lighter, and community exists so no one has to stand alone. Not roll to roll, soul to soul. I'm Lisa Carterbawa. I'll see you next Monday.