As we head into the Easter long weekend, I’ve been reflecting on the symbolism of Easter and how it relates to leadership right now.

There is a moment in most leadership stories where something has to die before something new can emerge. We may dress it up in corporate language, calling it ‘transformation’ or ‘a new chapter’ or ‘a strategic pivot.’ But what we really mean is that something we have built, believed in, or identified with has come to an end. That ending mostly always hurts, regardless of how necessary it was.

This week, many parts of the world pause. For some it’s Easter, for others it’s simply the turn of the season, but the pattern underneath is the same. Whether you observe it religiously, culturally, or simply as a long weekend with family and good food, the story underneath it is one that most successful leaders have lived: something must be surrendered before something better can emerge.

What the World Actually Does With This Moment

The Easter story is told and retold across every continent, but the way different cultures mark it reveals something fascinating about what renewal really requires.

In Corfu, Greece, families hurl enormous clay pots from their balconies on Holy Saturday. They shatter on the streets below, a tradition believed to originate from Venetian settlers who threw old belongings from windows to make space for the new. It’s loud, dramatic, and deliberately destructive. The message is, you cannot fill what is already full.

In Norway, the entire country settles in with crime fiction, calling it ‘Påskekrim’. Publishers release special thriller editions, television networks screen murder mysteries, and Norwegians disappear into stories about solving what went wrong. It started in 1923 when two authors ran a crime novel headline so convincingly on the front page of a newspaper that people mistook it for real news. A century later, the tradition endures. There is something honest about a culture that uses its most sacred holiday to sit with what is dark, unsolved, and tangled before it celebrates the light.

In Poland, Easter Monday means Śmigus-Dyngus, a nationwide water fight rooted in ancient fertility rites. People douse each other in the streets with buckets and water guns. It’s cleansing, disruption, and play. The message is that renewal is not polite, but messy, soaking, and sometimes catches us completely off guard.

In the Philippines, some devotees are physically nailed to crosses on Good Friday. It’s a practice that shocks Western audiences, but the intent is visceral participation in suffering, not observation of it from a safe distance. They are not watching the story, they are living it.

And in the small French town of Bessières, volunteers crack over 15,000 eggs on Easter Monday to cook a single colossal omelette for a thousand people. The tradition supposedly began when Napoleon enjoyed an omelette so much he ordered one large enough to feed his army. The message is what you break open, you share.

The Leadership Thread

Here’s my thoughts about these traditions. Not one of them is neat, or a controlled, boardroom-approved process with a change management framework and a Gantt chart. They involve shattering, soaking, bleeding, breaking, and feeding. They are embodied, requiring people to actually feel something before they step into what comes next.

And yet in our organisations, we often keep trying to engineer renewal without the mess. We want the resurrection without the crucifixion. We want the new strategy without mourning the old one. We want the restructure to land cleanly, without acknowledging that real people may have lost something real in the process.

I have sat with many senior leaders who are in the middle of their own organisational Good Friday. It might be that the strategy that got them here is no longer the strategy that will carry them forward. Or perhaps the team that was right for the last era is not the right team for the next one. Or even that the identity they built over decades needs to evolve, and they are terrified of who they might become if they let it.

This is the gap worth discussing. Not the gap between performance and potential, but the gap between who we have been and who we need to become. Easter, in every tradition, in every culture, tells us the same thing, that the gap cannot be crossed without loss.

The Responsibility of the Leader in the In-Between

What most leadership frameworks miss is that there is a Saturday in the story. Friday is the death. Sunday is the rising. But Saturday is the silence, the uncertainty, and the not-knowing. Saturday is where most leaders actually live.

The Corfu tradition happens on Holy Saturday, not Sunday. The shattering comes before the celebration, and I think there is real wisdom in that. The willingness to break things open in the in-between, before we can see what is coming next, before we have proof that the new thing will work. That is not recklessness, it’s courage.

Our responsibility as leaders is not to skip Saturday, but to stay in it honestly, naming what’s been lost, and sitting with the discomfort of not yet knowing.  Resisting the temptation to rush toward the next initiative, the next announcement, the next slide deck, before the organisation has had a chance to grieve and gather itself.

The leaders I admire most are the ones who can hold both truths at once, where something important has ended, and something important is beginning. They do not pretend the ending did not happen, or catastrophise it. But rather they hold the space between what was and what will be with enough steadiness that their people feel safe to step into it.

A Question to Sit With

As this long weekend unfolds, wherever you are and however you mark it, I want to leave you with this question:

What are you holding onto that needs to shatter before something new can emerge?

When reflecting, I challenge you to try not to just name the easy thing: the thing you might have already decided to let go of, or the thing you are still gripping because letting it go might mean becoming someone you have not yet met.  Instead, ask yourself what you would do differently if you stopped protecting who you were and started building for who you could become.

That is where the real renewal begins.