Women’s History Month is always a chance to celebrate groundbreaking leaders, and for Symphonic Strategies, Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee is not just the force behind an entire women’s movement, but a prime example of a symphonic leader. As Gbowee herself makes clear, she didn’t rise to leadership from an obvious position or pedigree—she was an “ordinary” mother and social worker who happened to be an ordinary citizen of a country, Liberia, being torn apart by successive civil wars. But after she had a dream that God was telling her someone should gather the women to do something about it, she decided that someone was her. She became the founder and leader of the nonviolent movement Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, whose thousands of “ordinary women, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers” changed a nation. And her phenomenal innate leadership skills showed the three key characteristics of a symphonic leader: Seeing the impossible. Playing from the soul. Moving the crowd.

Gbowee’s story is covered in her 2011 memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War, and the powerful award-winning 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell. She was still a teenager when the first Liberian civil war broke out in 1989, and was working as a trauma healing specialist when the second civil war began in 1999. In an environment where the government forces and opposing militias were both controlled by men, sexual violence, forced recruitment of child soldiers, and widespread destruction of communities and chaotic displacement meant that even when women were not frontline soldiers themselves, they and their families were under constant physical threat. This was the environment where Gbowee stepped in. We often hear about the importance of adaptive leadership, but symphonic leadership goes one step further. Adaptive leadership is indeed a prerequisite for symphonic leadership, but it isn’t sufficient for symphonic leadership. As a symphonic leader, you don’t just adapt to the environment—you are prepared to change it. Gbowee and the other women in her movement were no longer willing to simply adapt to life during wartime. They were determined to transform their environment for themselves and their children.

In the process they took several more pages from the Symphonic Playbook. The vision Gbowee saw in her dream was to gather the women together to pray for peace, and she began by doing this in her own Christian church—but when Muslim women were soon invited and encouraged to join them, the young movement’s force was quickly multiplied through the power of establishing a shared identity. As the first group of women started meeting at the local fish market to sing and pray together, they began sharing stories that allowed them to understand and develop empathy for one another, and they began wearing white every day as a visible symbol of their shared group status. They also skillfully identified ways to use existing cultural narratives as a means to change behavior. In a patriarchal society, the women chose a sex strike as one tool to encourage male partners to use their own structural power to advance the women’s peace agenda. After months of nonviolent protests that grew larger and larger the women eventually succeeded in their demands to meet with the nation’s president, with Gbowee as their spokesperson. When the government and the ruling warlords finally agreed to attend peace talks in Ghana in 2003, the women sent a delegation to the hotel where the meetings were held, and when the talks seemed on the verge of breaking down several weeks later the women staged a sit-in to force the factions to stay at the table. At one critical moment when guards were threatening to arrest them for obstructing justice, Gbowee chose to use another cultural narrative: understanding that it would be considered a humiliation and curse for the men in the room to see a married or older woman undressed, she led the women in threatening to strip naked unless they were left alone and the men kept talking. Days later, a comprehensive peace agreement was signed, and in 2005 the women’s movement fought for and achieved another milestone: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won the Liberian Presidential election and became the first elected woman leader in Africa. In 2011, Sirleaf, Gbowee, and Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman were co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Symphonic leaders make a difference on large and small stages. Symphonic Strategies celebrates symphonic leadership every day—and trains and supports women and men using it to transform their own teams and organizations.