Leading at the steppe’s pace: how Kazakh women are redefining creative leadership

Standfirst

Interviews with 21 women running craft, design and heritage businesses in Kazakhstan reveal a form of leadership shaped by cultural memory, community care and cyclical time. The research by Professor Shumaila Yousafzai, PhD student Alua Nurbayeva and co-authors highlights a model the country’s creative-economy policy has largely overlooked.

The question: who gets seen?

“Our history is not lost,” says a silk-scarf maker in Kazakhstan. “It is here, living through our hands.” Businesses like hers rarely appear in the country’s plans for its creative economy.

Kazakhstan has made the creative industries a strategic priority in its National Development Plan to 2029, and the sector has grown more than threefold in nominal terms since 2017. Yet support largely follows a familiar template: digital, export-oriented and urban. IT and video games account for 38% of the sector’s value added, and two-thirds of registered creative businesses are in Astana and Almaty. Women-led craft and heritage enterprises, many of them rural and informal, barely register. Nor do mainstream leadership models, built around the lone visionary chasing speed and scale, do much to explain them. So what does leadership look like when it grows out of recovering a culture that Soviet rule pushed to the margins?

What the research finds

The researchers conducted in-depth interviews in Kazakh and Russian with 21 women leading ventures in felting, weaving, fashion, architecture, eco-tourism, festivals and yurt-making. They identify three stages in what they call decolonial feminist leadership (see figure).

For many women, leadership begins with rediscovering the self through cultural memory. They came to business through a personal reconnection with the Kazakh language, ancestral crafts and family history. Reviving traditional alasha (hand-woven carpets) and tekemet (felt mats) became a way to reclaim authority as well as earn a living.

From this reconnection grows an infrastructure of care. Leadership runs through networks rather than hierarchies: cooperatives, workshops, mentoring by older craftswomen, and even new rituals, such as healing circles for women going through divorce. As the head of an industry association put it: “Alone you speak for yourself. Together you speak for many.”

These networks also sustain rooted enterprises. The women turn heritage into products for today’s markets, from fashionable takiya hats to energy-efficient yurts for year-round living, while setting their own standards for what success means.

One idea connects all three stages. The study calls it temporal sovereignty: the women organise their work around seasonal, ritual and generational rhythms, such as wool gathering and festival preparation, rather than quarterly growth targets. Working at this pace is a deliberate choice about whose time the business runs on.

Why it matters

The study challenges the assumption that leadership is an individual act and growth the only measure of success. Care, heritage and community are what keep these businesses, and the cultural knowledge they carry, alive. For Kazakhstan, it means that a part of the creative economy where many women lead is largely invisible to the statistics and programmes meant to support it.

Implications for policy and practice

The findings suggest practical ways to support this part of the economy on its own terms. For incubators and grant-makers, this means offering flexible timelines that fit seasonal and cyclical production, instead of rigid milestones. Policy support could also strengthen cooperatives and community learning hubs, while counting heritage and knowledge transfer alongside revenue when judging success. Statistics agencies and investors, meanwhile, could extend measurement and finance beyond IT, urban and export sectors to rural, informal and women-led heritage ventures. Business schools and leadership programmes have a role too: teaching shared, community-led models of leadership alongside the heroic founder.

Takeaway

Not every business is built to scale. Some are built to last, and to carry a culture with them.

Read the full article
Yousafzai, Shumaila, Alua Nurbayeva, Rana Zayadin, and Muzhar Javed. 2026. “Reclaiming Time, Reclaiming Space: Decolonial Feminist Leadership in the Creative Industries of Post-Soviet Kazakhstan.” Gender, Work & Organization 33 (4): 1359–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70121