Real change often happens slowly and without credit, so radical patience means continuing to plant seeds and support progress even when influence looks invisible at first.
What radical patience actually does—and why it makes you more strategic.
"I think you're misreading the room," her manager said. "Everyone on our team feels free to speak up."
Imani walked away feeling what so many of us have felt—the particular deflation of having said a true thing and been told it wasn't true. For those of us who are often the only one in the room, it lands with particular weight. We have less margin for error and fewer people connecting the dots on our behalf.
Six weeks later, he announced a team exercise: at the next offsite, they would spend the morning building a plan to make space for more voices in meetings.
Exactly what she had asked for. Without a single nod in her direction.
Imani had been watching her peers on the team for months.
She could see it clearly—
…the hesitant way Clara, the only other woman on the team, would usually preface her opinions with a disclaimer, "No one else may agree with me, but here's what I think for what it's worth."
…the quick sideways glance two of the men exchanged before venturing an idea, as if checking whether it was worth the risk.
…the three quieter members who stayed largely silent, present in body but absent from the conversation.
…And Alex, who spoke up with a kind of braced defiance—as though they expected pushback and had decided to forge ahead anyway.
Her team wasn't disengaged. They were being careful. And careful, in her experience, was another word for afraid.
So she did what felt right. She decided to take a few moments in her one-on-one with her manager to surface her concerns. Her intent was not to confront or be overly dramatic. Rather, she wanted to give her careful, measured observation. She told him she had noticed some team members seemed reluctant to speak up in meetings. That she had been quietly trying to encourage them and thought it was worth paying attention to.
Her manager shook his head, looked her deadpan in the eyes without blinking and said, "I think you're misreading the room. Everyone on our team feels free to speak up."
And that was the end of that.
She walked away feeling what so many of us have felt in that moment—the particular deflation of having said a true thing and been told it wasn't true. That feeling is one most leaders know.
For those of us who are often the only one in the room, it lands with particular weight. We have less margin for error and fewer people connecting the dots on our behalf.
Suppressing her tears and anger, she filed it away under the long mental list of things she had tried that hadn't worked. Another seed that hadn't taken.
Until six weeks later, when it turned out it had. Her manager announced a team exercise to make space for more voices. The kind of intervention she had been hoping for. No acknowledgment of her suggestion.
She brought it to her coach almost as an afterthought. A small grievance in a longer conversation.
"He completely dismissed what I said," she told her coach. "And then six weeks later he runs this whole team exercise like it was his idea."
Her coach let that sit for a moment.
"What were you hoping would happen when you raised it with him?"
She thought about it. "I wanted him to take it seriously. To do something about it."
"And did he?"
She opened her mouth. Then closed it, her mind racing, reconstructing what had happened.
The team exercise was not what she had asked for. It wasn't labeled with her name. Her manager had never said—and probably never would say—that she had planted the seed. But something she said in that conversation had clearly landed somewhere, even if it hadn't looked like landing at the time.
She had gotten what she asked for. It just didn't look like what she asked for.
This is one of the most common and most costly mistakes I see leaders make—and I say this having made it myself more times than I care to count.
We advocate for something. We push, carefully or boldly, for a change we believe in. And then we watch for that exact change to appear, enacted precisely as we suggested it, ideally with some acknowledgment that it was our idea.
When it doesn't happen that way—and it almost never happens that way—we conclude that nothing changed. That no one listened. That we had used up our credibility credits for nothing.
And so we go quiet, believing the costs of speaking up had far outweighed the benefits. We do the math, as I wrote in [my last post], and silence wins again.
But here is what the research on organizational change consistently shows: change rarely arrives labeled as our idea. It arrives sideways, six weeks later, in a form you didn't quite request, without your name anywhere on it. Leaders almost never announce "I'm doing this because you suggested it." They absorb, they sit with it, they reframe it as their own idea—sometimes consciously, often not—and eventually something shifts.
If you are only watching for the exact change you requested, enacted exactly as you requested it, you will miss most of the movement you caused.
This is not a small thing. This is the difference between people who create change over time and people who exhaust themselves pushing against a wall that was actually moving, just not fast enough, or visibly enough, for them to feel it.
What Imani was missing—what most of us miss—is a skill that V. Jean Ramsey and I wrote about in Conscious Change. We call it radical patience. Not the passive kind. The kind that keeps moving.
This is core work for navigating systems—reading power dynamics, working within bias, creating systemic change without positional authority.
After her manager told her "people here feel free to speak up," what should she do? Say nothing more? Accept his version of reality and move on?
That would be passive resignation—accepting what is unacceptable, staying quiet about what needs to be said. That is not what I mean by radical patience.
Radical patience is staying hyper-aware—laying the groundwork for change by scanning the room, noticing the small movements, and seizing opportunities to quietly advance your cause. It means connecting the dots no one else is connecting, and doing it without making a production of it.
It means resisting the urge to push the change you are seeking, and instead noticing the moments when you can support it—without being obnoxious about it, and without rubbing anyone's nose in the fact that you were right.
It may be inadvisable to publicly contradict your manager. But you can work the edges.
When you notice Clara leaning forward as if to speak, and then leaning back—you can say, "Clara, I get the feeling you have something to add."
When Alex speaks up with that braced, expecting-a-fight energy—instead of letting the tension spike, you can say, "Alex, what you're raising has real pros and cons worth thinking through together."
These are not dramatic moves. They are small, deliberate ones. And they are the difference between giving-up waiting and working-while-waiting.
Waiting for naturally occurring opportunities to move the change forward is, frankly, one of the hardest things I know how to ask of someone who has already been patient for a very long time.
The women I work with have often been more than patient. They have been heroically, exhaustingly patient—and they have watched that patience be mistaken for acquiescence.
That is not what this is.
The difference is in what you are doing while you wait. Passive waiting means giving up, watching the door while time passes. Radical patience watches everything—and when the moment comes, it moves.
Radical patience doesn't sustain itself. It needs infrastructure. Here are three skills that hold it up:
The late Chris Argyris, one of the most influential organizational theorists of the 20th century, called these "undiscussables"—the things everyone knows but no one says out loud. I've kept his term because nothing better has come along in three decades.
Imani raised something her manager didn't want to hear. He dismissed it. She felt shut down.
And then something happened anyway.
What she did—naming the thing that wasn't being named, putting language on what everyone could feel but no one was saying—is one of the highest-leverage moves available to someone trying to create change without positional authority.
It doesn't always work immediately. It almost never works immediately. But it creates a crack in the silence that wasn't there before. And cracks, over time, let light in.
The key is to surface without attacking. To name without blaming. To say "I've noticed" rather than "you're doing." She did this well—and even though her manager's first response was dismissal, something she said stayed with him long enough to become a team exercise six weeks later.
That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the beginning.
The team exercise was a small win. It wasn't the full cultural shift she was hoping for. But it was movement—real, concrete, in the right direction.
The skill is learning to see it.
This sounds simple. It is not simple. We are trained, especially those of us who have had to fight for every inch, to measure wins in large denominations. Change gets measured on a pass/fail scorecard, not a more-or-less dimension. Anything that falls short of full enactment feels like failure—or worse, like being managed.
But organizational change does not move in large denominations. It moves in small ones, accumulating over time, compounding in ways that are only visible in retrospect.
Start keeping a different kind of record. Not just what hasn't changed—but what has. Not just what was dismissed—but what quietly landed. Clara speaking up after you noticed she might have something to add. Alex visibly relaxing after you commented that there were pros and cons to what he had to say. Team members looking at you rather than each other, silently asking for your support. The leader who, six weeks later, ran a team exercise.
When you acknowledge small wins, they become evidence that change is possible. That evidence sustains your patience through the long stretches when nothing seems to be moving. And that patience creates the conditions for the next small win to emerge.
Imani went to her manager alone. One voice, one conversation, one dismissal.
What if two people had noticed the same thing? What if she had spent those six weeks quietly having the same conversation with one or two trusted colleagues—not to organize a campaign, not to build a coalition against her manager, but simply to find out if others were seeing what she was seeing?
Change that sticks rarely comes from one person pushing hard enough. It comes from multiple people, in multiple conversations, nudging in the same direction over time. The manager doesn't feel pressured. He feels the wind shifting. And eventually he runs a team exercise.
This is not manipulation. This is how change actually works. It is a team sport, not a hero's journey. And the person who understands that—who is willing to share the credit, to let the idea belong to everyone, to celebrate the win without needing their name on it—is the person who creates the most change over the longest period of time.
She didn't get credit. She probably never will—not for this particular win, not from this particular manager.
I'm not going to tell you that's okay. It isn't.
What I will tell you is this: spending your energy demanding acknowledgment from someone who isn't ready to give it is a tax on your future. This is self care—knowing the difference between what you deserve and what you can afford to fight for today.
And it's also about influence: your impact doesn't disappear just because no one labeled it with your name. The team exercise happened. Voices that weren't being heard will now have space. That movement traces back to a conversation she had the courage to start.
The long game player knows the difference between what she deserves and what she can afford to win for today.
Six weeks after being told she was misreading the room, her team sat together and built a plan to make space for more voices in their meetings. Something she cared about moved. Something she said planted a seed that grew—not on her timeline, not in her preferred form, not with her name attached.
That is a win.
Radical patience is the skill of knowing that. Of being able to hold that as enough—not because you've given up on more, but because you understand that more is built from exactly this. One undiscussable surfaced. One small win acknowledged. One person brought along. And eventually a team involved in creating a change.
And—you will have to trust me on this—as these moments accrue, as you gain a reputation for truth-telling and subtle cultural shifts, you will get credit. Not for each separate instance. But over time, you become known as the leader behind positive changes and forward movement.
That is a different kind of credit. And it lasts longer.
The trajectory of organizational change is long. The people who bend it are the ones still in the room.
Have you ever dismissed a small win because it didn't look like what you asked for? Or recognized one only in retrospect?
Share in the comments—or bring it to the Black Women Leaders Gateway, our free Skool community, where these conversations go deeper.
Next in this series: the specific skills for navigating the room you're in right now.
The skills in this post are drawn from the Conscious Change model, developed with co-author V. Jean Ramsey. The full model—36 skills organized around three promises: Influence, Navigating Systems, and Self Care—lives in our books, workshops, and the coaching work I do with leaders who are ready to stop pushing alone.
Link to Skool community: www.skool.com/black-women-leaders-gateway-81
Dr. Jean Kantambu Latting is the author (with V. Jean Ramsey) of Reframing Change and Conscious Change, and the founder of the Black Women Leaders Gateway community.
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