How to be Human , Ubuntu and the Early Roots of Belonging: In Conversation with Leslee Udwin
In a world often marked by indifference, the language of teams can sound strangely small. Yet when Jenson8’s Head of Teamship, Jena Davidson, sat down with filmmaker-turned-activist Leslee Udwin, it became clear that how we behave in teams is inseparable from how we behave as a species.
Leslee has had, as she puts it, five careers: teacher, actor, producer, director and now activist as Founder of Think Equal, a global non-profit reshaping early years education. She is widely recognised for her documentary India’s Daughter, which investigated the 2012 Delhi bus rape and, crucially, the mindsets that made it possible. Today, her energy is directed at something even more radical than awareness-raising: preventing discriminatory mindsets from forming in the first place.
From monsters to mindsets
A recurring pattern in public discourse is the urge to label perpetrators of extreme violence as monsters or psychopaths reassuring labels that allow the rest of us to disown any connection. Leslee’s months-long interviews with the men responsible for the Delhi attack, as well as with other perpetrators, disrupted that comfort.
Clinically, they were not psychopathic. Culturally, however, theyhad been meticulously taught that some people mattered less. In other words,they were living out a curriculum not of mathematics and grammar, but of hierarchy and dehumanisation.
This is where Leslee’s analysis becomes uncomfortable for all of us. If culture teaches people to rank human lives, then the rest of society is not a horrified bystander; it is implicated. Violence is the visible expression of a much older and quieter disease: the belief that some are us and some are irrevocably other.
Ubuntu and theforgotten logic of we
To name an antidote, Leslee reaches for Ubuntu, the African philosophy that says “I am the other you, you are the other me; we can only be human together.” This is not a sentimental slogan but a different logical together: the self does not exist in isolation but is constituted in relationship.
In contemporary societies organised around individual achievement, this logic is not just neglected but actively reversed. We are invited to compete, accumulate and differentiate ourselves, while our fundamental social wiring continues to crave belonging. That craving can be channelled into life-giving communities or into destructive forms of comradeship that offer connection without empathy.
From this vantage point, teamship is not a corporate add-on. It is a local expression of a global need: to experience ourselves as part of a we that honours the dignity of each member.
The narrow window of formation
One of the most striking parts of the conversation is Leslee’s insistence on the early years as the decisive arena for change. The habits of mind that govern how we see ourselves and others are formed early, and while adults can change, those changes tend to be incremental and fragile underpressure.
When stress rises, we revert to the deep grooves laid down in childhood. For Leslee, this is not cause for fatalism but for strategic clarity: if we want empathy, inclusion and peaceful conflict resolution to become reflexive, we must co-create them with children between the ages of three and six.
Think Equal’s response is a structured, narrative-based curriculum that teaches 25 competencies, from empathy and self-esteem to collaboration,critical thinking and peaceful conflict resolution. It is designed to be practical for teachers, low-cost and transformational.
Empathy as the organising principle of teamship
Within this broader framework, empathy emerges as the organising principle of teamship. Leslee draws a helpful distinction: perspective-taking —the much-invoked walk a mile in their shoes is a cognitive act; it can be done at arm’s length, even cynically. Empathy, by contrast, is an affective event: we feel another’s joy or suffering sufficiently that our own concerns temporarily recede.
In organisational life, this difference matters. A leader can intellectually understand a colleague’s constraints and still treat them as are source. An empathetic leader, by contrast, recognises the colleague as another self whose flourishing is bound up with their own.
For Leslee, empathy is the glue that makes other teamship capabilities meaningful. Collaboration without empathy can be exploitative; conflict resolution without empathy can be mere damage control; criticalthinking without empathy can become sophisticated rationalisation of injustice.
Masking,duality and the cost of indifference
The conversation also surfaces a more ambivalent theme: masking.Organisations can and do enforce civilising norms, codes of conduct, HR policies, leadership frameworks, that constrain the worst impulses. Without such norms, the world might indeed feel like a jungle.
Yet the inner life of many adults remains unchanged. People learn to perform the required behaviours at work and then enact very different patterns at home or in private. This duality is psychologically costly. It fuels guilt, dissonance and, in many cases, contributes to the mental health crises visible across societies.
At scale, the coping mechanism is often apathy. Confronted daily with images of suffering, many of us find ways to look away in order to function. That survival mechanism may be understandable, but it leaves teams and societies dangerously detached from one another.
Purpose as a binding force
Amid this sobering analysis, Leslee is remarkably hopeful. That hope is grounded in purpose. Having spent decades in other careers, she describes finding her purpose later in life as a kind of existential reorientation.
Purpose, in her account, is not a slogan or a slide. It is the binding force that holds together her team across countries and disciplines. It is what allows people to persist in the face of difficulty and to keep advocating for a version of education that treats human value and healthy relationships as non-optional.
When asked what single change she would invite any team member to make, she returns to purpose: ask, seriously, what is our purpose here? If the honest answer is to make money, then we have reduced ourselves to instruments, not humans. If the answer reaches beyond the self, then teamship becomes a practice of aligning daily interactions with that larger horizon.
Implications for leaders and teams
For leaders, Leslee’s reflections pose at least three challenges.
· Treat empathy not as a soft add-on but as the central capability that determines whether teams contribute to healing or to harm.
· See early years education as a foundational lever for the kind of workforce and citizenry organisations will one day depend on.
· Interrogate the gap between the behaviours, cultures, reward, and the pro-social habits they claim to value.
At Jenson8, this sits at the heart of the work. Through immersive scenarios and reflective practice, teams are invited to experience not just discuss what it means to be the other you for a colleague under pressure, a stakeholder in conflict or a community affected by their decisions.
Leslee’s work reminds us that the stakes of teamship are far larger than any quarterly target. It is, in a very real sense, about whether we choose to educate hearts as deliberately as we educate minds and whether we can still remember, in time, how to be human together.