About Jocelyn

Hi, I'm Jocelyn Lindenger (she/they)! I’m a white, queer, femme, transgender, nonbinary, disabled, and neurodivergent engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building software and stewarding teams across startups, scale-ups, and public-sector organizations. My work lives at the intersection of people leadership, technical delivery, and organizational systems — especially in environments navigating growth, complexity, and change.

These identities shape how I experience work, power, and access, and they inform why I care so deeply about building leadership systems that are more humane and sustainable. I also hold significant privilege, particularly through my whiteness and professional standing, and remain in ongoing learning about how that shows up in my leadership.

Alongside my formal roles, I’m developing Consentful Leadership: a living leadership framework shaped through real practice. It reflects how I hold authority, negotiate scope, attend to capacity, and design for care in systems where power is real and consequences matter.

Photo of Jocelyn Lindenger

How I think about leadership

I understand leadership as a relationship, not a role.

Power is always present — the question is whether it’s examined or left implicit. Consentful Leadership is my attempt to practice authority with clarity rather than force, to make responsibility explicit, and to build humane systems people can actually remain inside over time.

This work has been shaped through managing engineers and managers, navigating feedback and conflict, setting scope under constraint, responding to burnout, and learning — sometimes the hard way — where harm is reproduced and where it can be interrupted.

I care about outcomes.
I care about accountability.
And I believe those are strengthened, not weakened, when consent, care, and power are named.

Lineage and influences

My leadership practice draws from multiple traditions that help me understand power, relationship, and responsibility more clearly, including:

These influences are lived experience for me, not theoretical. They shape how I lead, how I listen, and how I make decisions in uncertainty and imperfection.

A little mini bio

  • 20+ years in software and engineering leadership across multiple sectors
  • Experience mentoring individual contributors and managers at all career stages, and working with people from many underrepresented groups and nontraditional backgrounds
  • Longstanding involvement in ERG and affinity-group leadership
  • Influenced by somatic movement, performance, and contemplative practice as a practitioner
  • Trauma-aware facilitation practice
  • Postgraduate education in qualitative methods for exploring alternative futures in addition to my technical training
  • I’m often found with visible tattoos, occasionally blue hair, and a strong love of cats and coffee

My positioning (so you know)

I’m not a leadership guru, and I’m not trying to scale a universal method. Consentful Leadership is a living practice: reflective, relational, and grounded in responsibility. It’s slow by design, shaped through real constraints and real people rather than abstraction or performance.

I’m interested in leadership that can hold complexity without collapsing into urgency or control, and in building cultures where care is not an individual burden but a shared, structural concern.

I remain in ongoing learning about how my identities and privileges shape my leadership, and I welcome feedback when I cause harm or miss something important. I live and work in the unceded territory of the Munsee Lenape and Canarsie people.