The Leadership Nobody Trains You For: Lesieli Oliver
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
In an episode of the Zeducation Podcast, we sit down with Lesieli Oliver, founder and CEO of Lalanga and the first Pacific person elected to the Franklin Local Board, to talk about the moment everything she'd built stopped working.
From the outside it all looked right. A thriving organisation reaching thousands of students and teachers. A master's degree. Named in the University of Auckland's 40 under 40. A home, a family, a long way from the poverty she was born into.
Inside, something had gone quiet. She was at the office by six in the morning and home with nothing left by seven at night, climbing straight into bed with the covers up. No energy for her kids. Her body had simply stopped.
December 2024, she went for a walk and asked God what was happening.
"Now that you know how to lead from the outside, I'm going to teach you how to lead from the inside out," - Lesieli
She knew exactly what it meant.
Lalanga Means Weaving
The name goes back to her mother and grandmothers.
Lesieli was born in a small village in Tonga to parents who both left school before they were twelve. Her father, a talented musician, won a brass band scholarship to New Zealand. That scholarship was the family's ticket out of the poverty cycle, and education was the vision they carried for their daughters from the beginning.
Years later, sitting on the couch in the 2020 lockdown, she looked at headlines about Māori and Pacific students struggling and realised she was reading her own childhood. Then she looked at her own life and asked how she'd got out.
The answer wasn't her. It was everyone who had helped.
That's when she remembered watching the women in her family weave. Each one bringing her own strands. Nobody's strand enough on its own. Together they'd complete a fala, something precious.
She built a mentoring programme on that idea, applied to a Ministry of Education fund with an application that took her a month and terrified her, and was one of around 100 projects chosen out of thousands.
Your Struggle Is Not Your Weakness
Ask her why her application stood out and she doesn't say strategy. She says connection.
"One thing that Māori and Pacific see as a weakness that is actually a strength is our problems, our trials, our struggles, our poverty."
Her view is blunt and worth sitting with. A lot of leadership fails because people are trying to fix problems they have no lived experience of and no real empathy for. She knew what it was to be poor, to struggle academically, and also what it felt like when someone put a hand out.
That's the same conviction that keeps her at a council table where she is often the only brown person in the room, in a role she is honest about finding genuinely hard.
"At the table is where change happens. At the table is where the ideas are wrestled and the solutions are made and where money gets invested is decided."
Even when it costs her, she stays, because staying makes room for the ones coming behind her.
What the Walk Changed
The burnout wasn't laziness or weak commitment. It was the opposite.
She loves work. Her husband jokes that working is her fun. But the pendulum had swung all the way over. Her team slept in the office some nights to get programmes printed and out. Weekends disappeared. On top of delivery there was the part nobody warns founders about: constantly hunting the next six months of funding.
What she heard on that walk named the gap precisely. She knew how to perform leadership. Brave face, right words, push past empty. What she'd lost was alignment with herself.
So she put every project on hold for a few months and did the harder work.
"Once you lose sight of the vision and the joy, nothing flows. Creativity, money, opportunities, everything comes from love and joy."
The Job She Turned Down
Here's how seriously she took that lesson.
A major private equity firm approached her. They wanted her frameworks and experience to help build a foundation, funded by investors putting $15 million a year into Māori and Pacific initiatives. No more chasing funding, ever.
Then they talked salary. They opened at $225,000. More than she had ever been paid in her life.
She sat there pinching herself under the table. And then she went away, pictured the tower in the city and the polished people she'd be working alongside, and knew the joy wouldn't flow there. She said no. Then a second, similar offer came along and she said no to that one too.
Her filter is simple. Vision and values first. Joy and gratitude are non negotiable, because without them she can't produce anything worth having anyway.
What Our Ancestors Already Knew
This is where the conversation opened right out.
Lesieli went to a Pacific exhibition at the museum, stood in front of the vaka and the navigation instruments, and felt embarrassed. Not proud. Embarrassed.
Her ancestors read the sea, the sun, the stars, and the flight paths of birds. They mapped the ocean before telescopes arrived. They stepped into enormous unknowns with courage, and not just for themselves.
"If our ancestors were here right now, they would not be standing at the pump complaining. They would not accept being poor. They would not accept not being at the table."
They were strategic too. She asked how her grandparents bought homes in New Zealand in the 1980s and learned they'd formed a collective of ten, pooling money to pay off one house, then the next, then the next.
And they shared. She talks about the tokonaki, the Saturday basket, and how her great grandmother's brother saw it as his honour to bring his sister's family food, cut her lawns, and clean her house every weekend. She worries we're drifting into an independent mindset and losing that.
"We're not selfish people. We're generous people."
She also links it to wellbeing. She never saw her mother or grandmother struggle the way women do now, and she thinks it's because they lived collectively, weaving and cooking and talking together every night.
Final Lesson: Get a Vision
Her advice for anyone who feels stuck starts somewhere unexpected. Not with what you want. With what you don't.
Then give yourself permission to dream.
Name what you refuse to accept for your life.
Then name what you actually want, for you, your money, your kids, your people.
Then check your circle, because the wrong voices will talk you out of it.
"It's okay to be stuck now. Maybe you don't have much money. Maybe you're living a life you aren't happy with. But have a vision. If you know what you want, opportunities will flow to you to meet that vision."
What Leading From the Inside Out Looks Like in Practice
➜ Put one non-negotiable back in your week that has nothing to do with your work, and defend it like a meeting you can't move.
➜ Before your next big yes, ask whether the environment will let joy flow. If the answer is no, the money won't fix it.
➜ Write your vision down in plain words. If you can't say it out loud, you can't lead from it.
➜ Audit your circle honestly. Who sharpens you, and who quietly talks you smaller?
➜ Give away one thing this week that costs you little and would change someone's day. A call, a skill, an introduction.
Reflect
❑ Where in your life are you leading beautifully from the outside while something inside has gone quiet?
❑ What lived experience have you been treating as a weakness that is actually the very thing that qualifies you?
❑ What is the vision you stopped saying out loud, and who could you tell it to this week?
🎧 Want to hear the full conversation?
👉 Watch the episode on YouTube: (3) Zeducation - YouTube
👉 Follow us on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/10FMuh2ccplNTbpI2d7Dg6?si=06fd4fdb74e247ff
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