Interview: Amanda Litman Offers Advice For The Next Generation Of Leaders In Her New Book ‘When We're In Charge'

Forbes

13-05-2025

Amanda Litman
Barb Kinney
'Everything would be better if we blew open the model of what good leadership looks like,' says founder and executive Amanda Litman, whose new book, When We're in Charge: The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership, came out today. With an increasing number of millennials and Gen Zers taking on positions of power, the book serves as a timely, much-needed resource that encourages the next generation of leaders to transform outdated leadership models and workplace cultures and to lead in new ways.
Litman is the cofounder and president of Run for Something, the nation's premiere candidate recruitment organization, which supports young, diverse progressives running for local office. Since their founding in 2017, Run for Something has launched the careers of thousands of millennials and Gen Z candidates, many of whom are women and people of color, helping to shape the future of leadership across the U.S.
When Litman founded her organization at the age of 26, she realized there were very few resources for young execs like her and decided she wanted to provide new leaders with, as she writes in the book, 'the advice I wish I'd had over the last nearly ten years.'
In the book, Litman candidly shares her own personal experiences and lessons learned as a founder, executive and mom of two, while also drawing on conversations with more than 100 next-gen leaders across politics, business, media, tech, education and more, including Versha Sharma, editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, Maxwell Frost, first Gen Z member of Congress and Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc. among others.
I had the opportunity to interview Litman to find out more about the book and her thoughts on how young leaders can show up differently and create a 'compassionate and effective' workplace culture that 'gives people their time back and their autonomy back,' the importance of having diverse teams, the surge in young people wanting to run for office, what gives her hope right now and more.
Marianne Schnall: Who is When We're in Charge for, and what made you decide to write this book now?
Amanda Litman: The book is specifically talking toward millennials and Gen Z who are thinking about becoming a leader one day or are currently in leadership positions. But it's not exclusively for either of those audiences. I really think it's for anyone right now thinking about what it means to run a space, a community, a workplace, a team that is compassionate and humane and genuine and also effective at whatever the goal is.
I started Run for Something in 2017 when I was almost 27 years old. I had never done something like this before. I kept realizing that I was the youngest person, or one of the youngest people, in a lot of rooms I was in. And the challenges that I was experiencing were very different than the ones that many of the other executive directors or CEOs were experiencing.
Fast forward to 2022, I started hearing from political reporters who reached out to me to say, 'Hey, a bunch of the Run for Something candidates seem to be making national headlines. What do these folks have in common?' And I realized many of them were, like I was, trying to lead differently. They were trying to do things differently. They were showing up in spaces not meant for people like them and breaking a new mold. That seemed to me like a new path for leadership that no one had quite put pen to paper on, so I decided to.
Schnall: How do we empower people to model new paradigms of leadership that are more authentic to them, rather than the outdated ways it has been modeled to us that no longer serve us or maybe never served us?
Litman: In the political realm, for example, there was a period of time where every woman running for office would have to wear a pantsuit and would have to sort of model male masculinity leadership styles. That is no longer the case. In the last couple years, we've seen that there are now a number of ways in which women can run for office and show up as themselves. And the same is true across the private sector, education, the legal field—we're blowing up the number of ways you can show up as a person in charge. And that really does expand our imagination of what is possible. I think it's really exciting, but it's also really scary and really hard.
It is really important to think about what it means for leadership to look like a whole bunch of different things, not just the older white guy. And that is a really powerful driver for what change could look like across the workplace. Everything would be better if we blew open the model of what good leadership looks like. What if it didn't have to be like 'beep bop robot boss,' and working hundred-hour weeks, hustle-grind culture? What if it didn't? What if that didn't serve us anymore? What could come next?
Schnall: How does the workplace culture need to change to be able to support successful leadership? And what are your highest hopes for the next generation of leaders?
Litman: I'll be the first to name that we need more than just workplace changes—we need broad cultural shifts in what it means to live a full life and the kind of support that we give people. Workplaces shape how people spend a vast majority of their waking hours, so it's really important that these be places where people have really strong guardrails.
What I'm hoping, what I am already seeing, is that next-gen leaders can show up and think about running their spaces in a way that gives people their time back and their autonomy back: that we could imagine a world where everyone has a four-day work week and paid time off and paid time to care for their families, to care for new members or elderly members; making sure that workplaces are family friendly or people friendly, that you can have time to be a full person outside of your job; that people have sabbatical policies and generous benefits; that people are paid well for the work that they do, and also can do it in a way that gives them dignity, but doesn't demand more of them than they are willing to give; that understands that the core nature of a job is an economic transaction, which doesn't mean it also can't be meaningful and provide a whole bunch of other goods, but that the expectations really meet reality.
All of this is about making sure that you can live a good, full life and that as leaders, the people running these places, we can take advantage of those things too. I think that sometimes gets lost in the conversation, like, 'Oh, I want to do these things for my team. I want to do these things for the people I lead. But I also want to do these things for me because I don't want to be miserable either.' Our suffering doesn't serve anyone.
And beyond that, especially right now with what's going on, making sure that every space we are in is really compassionate and humane, and that people are treated like people first and workers or contributors to the cause second, because I think that makes everything a little bit easier and everyone's lives a little bit better.
Schnall: Can you talk a little bit more about the importance of leaders both providing and taking family leave? We're one of the few countries that doesn't have these policies in place.
Litman: Again, we've got to fix that on the cultural and societal level. And this was really personal for me. I have a toddler and a seven month old, so I've now taken maternity leave twice as the boss. When I was doing this with my first kid, I really struggled through it. And there wasn't a really clear how-to manual for that; everything I Googled was just how to ask HR or your boss for leave. I write in When We're in Charge the thought process that I went through, what my memo looked like, how I handed things off and how I negotiated that reentry to work, which is just as hard as taking the time off in the first place.
This is a relatively new problem, especially for women. But I would point out that it should also have been a problem for a long time for new parents, for new dads who should also be taking paid leave. It's part of your compensation, it's part of your benefits, you should take the time. It makes you a better partner, a better parent and a better leader. So I'm really glad to be able to give people some real concrete steps on how to think about it, knowing that the process of doing that makes your whole organization more resilient to any kind of absence, not just having kids. What can I do to prep for any kind of emergency, or good thing, happening?
Schnall: With your book—and this has also been a big part of Run for Something—you talk about having more women and diversity in leadership. With many DEI programs being rolled back, what can we do to fill in the gaps?
Litman: Part of it is taking a stand and refusing to back down. Diversity, equity and inclusion is both a moral good and also a business imperative for nearly every kind of space. It is good to hire diverse teams, to build heterogeneous spaces. It gets you better outcomes. Generative conflict is a good thing; it combats groupthink. And there's a reason you see this in basically all advertising, all Hollywood and media marketing programs; they know that diversity is a net good for business. And we're seeing this in reverse too: when companies have rolled back their DEI efforts, see Target, they have felt it on their bottom line.
It's often hard to know where to start, and I write about this quite a bit in When We're in Charge. There are so many different ways that equity and inclusion programs could look, some of which are really meaningful. And representation is just one of many tactics in service of that goal. There are a whole bunch of things we can think about—from hiring goals to compensation to creating psychological safety in the workplace to being welcoming and really clear about the kinds of lines that we want to draw.
Part of being inclusive and creating inclusive spaces is being exclusive to bigotry and hostility. And that can be a little counterintuitive, but it's really, really important for leaders to be clear-eyed about what kind of space you want to create and who you need to keep out in order to create it.
Schnall: You announced recently that Run for Something has surpassed 200,000 signups from people ready to run for office since launching in 2017. And that since the 2024 election, Run for Something has seen a surge of interest in running for office: nearly 40,000 people, 20% of the total pipeline, have reached out just since election day. What do you think is driving it, and how can we support this trend?
Litman: I think there are so many things driving it, which is what makes it really exciting. Part of this is a frustration with the current leadership, and I mean that across both parties. These are not the people fighting for us, and if they're not going to fight for us, we have to fight for us. I think there's a frustration among certain issues. We're especially seeing people show up around housing, childcare, book bans and public education. We're seeing people who've gotten laid off from the federal government, or whose friends and partners have gotten laid off, and are saying, 'I want to fight for public servants.'
One of the best ways we can help this new generation of leaders is to encourage more of them, create permission structures for them, give them money if you want to see them run and lead and engage in these local elections in particular. Also, think about the people in your life who would be amazing public servants if only they were asked—and then ask them. And be willing to knock on doors for them, write them a check, show up for them.
Running for office in particular, like any leadership task, is both really hard and requires incredible courage and is not done alone. So any way that you can help someone in your life who's thinking about doing this by encouraging them and then being there for them, it's huge.
Schnall: What is your call to action right now?
Litman: Right now one of the most important things we can do as leaders is to show up in a way that is compassionate and effective, to refuse to see those two things as mutually exclusive. Because we're going to need a little bit of both. To get through this period, we're going to need to be both really clear-eyed about what we're trying to accomplish and also really humane in how we're trying to accomplish it. In every possible space we can, we've got to make it feel good and also get the thing done.
Schnall: Are you hopeful?
Litman: I am so hopeful, and I think part of this is because my day job is so future oriented: Run for Something is trying to build long-term sustainable power and do it in a way that looks and feels different than what came before. The 40,000 people who have signed up in the last five and a half months just since the election, they are just ordinary people who are willing to even consider doing this extraordinary thing and putting their name on the ballot. I want a little bit of their courage. I want a little bit of their bravery. And I've seen over the last eight years what it looks like when ordinary people do the extraordinary: it can change lives, it can build homes, it can make insulin cheaper. Even outside of politics, it can make work more compassionate. It can give people their lives and their dignity back. That matters. And I think it will continue to matter, and I think we're going to see more of it and not in the places you'd expect, which is even more inspiring.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
For more about Amanda Litman and her work, visit AmandaLitman.com