(Photo by iStock/sharply_done)
Is co-leadership having a moment? The model is not exactly new, particularly in the nonprofit sector. But the pandemic exposed crises in leadership at the same time that new (or renewed) commitments to equity were being made, as people of color were gaining ground in leadership roles and as existential risks to organizational sustainability were being revealed. With a renewed attention to the “glass cliff” or “hollow prize” when leaders of color are brought into lead organizations at their most vulnerable state—and the fact that decision-making, investment, and power do not necessarily shift to those communities—many organizations are giving co-leadership a second look.
At Common Future, we shifted to co-leadership because we saw that the default CEO structure was no longer congruent with our values or the structural and systematic changes we seek to enable through our work. We believe that co-leadership is necessary for the next economy, a way of rejecting the hero narrative that requires a single person to “save” us; that narrative not only erases the needed and inevitable input of the collective, but in practice can leave the person, the organization, and economy at risk of deepening exploitation and apathy.
We see co-leadership as helping to break a self-reinforcing loop: Just as our economy and supporting systems are organized around the accumulation and concentration of power and wealth—placing value on efficiency and simplification—the single CEO structure also concentrates power because, in theory, it allows for simplified and efficient decision making. Like an economy which sustains itself on the extraction of time and labor from its participants, is rooted in competition for scarce resources, and is sustained by narratives of rugged individualism, models of solo leadership require time and effort above and beyond the standard workweek, as well as telling a heroic narrative in which one person conquers all challenges.
There are, of course, many successful organizations run by single CEOs. Single leadership is still the default norm, or at least the devil we know. But if those closest to the problem are closest to the solution—and if collective work is core to that solution—there are also costs to focusing on a single leader (especially given what we know about the heavy expectations that bring stress, burnout, and exhaustion). Instead of focusing on the efficiencies, we ask what it would mean to approach our collective challenges from multiple perspectives and points of view? And how might this approach keep us better focused on the actual problems we are solving?
It’s not enough to just propose a solution, however. We need to model it and show what’s possible, addressing criticism with care, iteration, and practice. And as we’ve tested ourselves and learned more about this new way of working, it’s become clear that organization readiness plays a huge factor in potential success. We’ve learned that the move to co-leadership need not, at this stage, be ubiquitous.
This week, SSIR is publishing a miniseries on co-leadership. Read more articles in this miniseries on co-leadership, “Co-Leadership for Bottom-Up Transformation” and “A Reality Check for Nonprofit Co-Leadership,” and share these valuable insights with your colleagues.
The move to a co-leadership model has significant implications for organizational health and culture. Determining whether the organization is equipped and ready to take it on requires full commitment to making it work, and a willingness to revisit, retool, and reassess when it isn’t. Here are some of the considerations we and our peers have made in gauging whether this step was the right one:
1. Leadership is at a natural point for transition.
As practitioners of emergent strategy, we look to living and organic systems for examples of evolution. Particularly with the fragile ecosystem that is organizational culture, leadership transition should not be abrupt, nor imposed from the outside, nor for the sake of experimentation itself. There may be step changes on the way to co-leadership that would be better suited for where your organization is now; for example, what can shared decision-making look like on a day-to-day basis? It’s important to make that assessment.
2. There is lead time for the transition.
At Common Future, we were fortunate to have an outgoing CEO who timed stepping down to a natural progression around organizational readiness and internal leadership. With well over a year to make the transition, we could bring board, staff, and external stakeholders along through a change that felt gradual, less like an abrupt change than an intentional and natural progression extending our values along a path the organization was ready for.
3. The board is supportive (even if you have to remake it).
Board support can make or break the transition to co-leadership. Not all members of our board were aligned around this key decision; some had negative experiences with the structure in the past, and, despite the research, others brought preconceptions and biases as to how co-leadership might turn out (or thought of it as only a short-term solution). Through hard conversations, we used this opportunity to transition Common Future to what Vu Le described as a “minimally viable board”: one that focuses primarily on the legal requirements of board membership. This allowed us to forge alignment around the necessity of co-leadership at this stage and focus on right-sized governance structures to get us there. We are still in this process, now with the goal of becoming what we call “minimally viable, maximally valuable” in our board structure, making sure we receive the full benefits of this triangulated expertise.
4. Do your homework.
Our team did desk research, as well as interviews and stakeholder outreach, to assess the literature and the field for models. But while many have written about their experiences in co-leadership, the few horror stories stand out among the less-likely-to-be-picked-up stories of success. We recognize this gap and are also playing our role to set the record straight, through the lens of our own experience with a toolkit that lifts up resources from folks in the field and shares in more detail about Common Future’s own experience.
5. Organizational culture is centered on shared power.
To even consider co-leadership, you need a good understanding of your organizational culture and vision, and to consider the alignment of shared power within that context. Our work at Common Future focuses on making a more equitable economy possible by investing predominantly in Black and Indigenous communities, trusting their leadership, and sharing power and decision-making with those who are historically and structurally excluded. For us, therefore, co-leadership was a natural extension of our ethos and a way for us to demonstrate this value in practice—even if difficult. Whatever your organization is and does, this needs to be the case!
6. Organizational infrastructure is supportive.
At a recent panel on co-leadership models at SSIR’s Nonprofit Management Institute, there was general agreement around an overlooked issue that can turn co-leadership from nightmare toward dream scenario: whether the board and team provide the necessary resources to make it work. This support can take different forms: coaching for co-leaders (separately or as a leadership unit), organizational consulting on decision-making and strategies for shared leadership, and staff (such as a chief of staff, executive assistant, or others) that can take on critical work to maximize the effectiveness of multiple leaders.
Ready? Plan for Success
Working with the incredible organizational consultant Ingrid Jacobson—who had some previous familiarity with our organization—helped give our co-leadership team intentional support in right-sizing our new structure for the organization and making it adaptable for changing conditions. We recommend the following tools as areas of investment for leaders embarking on this journey:
- Work-style interviews: We kicked off our co-leadership transition with a self-assessment of work style and preferences, being specific about our ways of working and lifting up the ways in which we might thrive in a workplace setting. We could present these to each other in any format—song and dance encouraged—but each of us took a more straightforward route.
- Decision-making matrix: Ultimately, each of us shares the same exact job description (and is therefore capable, fully and on our own, of fulfilling the requirements of the CEO role), but we bring unique work experience and expertise to the table. By acknowledging our superpowers as well as growth areas, we were able to allocate key decisions that would be “sponsored” by an individual Co-CEO, who would be responsible for raising respective decision points. We also were able to figure out what decisions we could share or delegate to our Executive Team as we began this journey of figuring out what it would look like for us to create clarity around who is responsible and involved in making decisions that impact the organization. Note that the process of sharing and cascading power throughout the full Executive Team is still a work in progress, one critical to our approach.
- Consensus tools: In our co-leadership model, we choose to lead by consensus. So, while an individual is clearly delegated responsibility for raising proposals in specific areas of organizational leadership, we decide together. This meant introducing a simple but critical decision-making tool: the fists of five, or the gradients of agreement (with the adaptations that no decision is neutral and you cannot opt out of taking a stance). Additionally, we don’t rule by majority (even though that could conceivably work well in structures with odd numbers, like ours). Instead, opposing viewpoints must offer counter-proposals. And we don’t move forward until we reach a place we can all agree to.
- Conflict tools: Conflict is inevitable and can’t be avoided. We recommend looking at one another’s conflict styles, being honest about triggers and behaviors that might instigate. The need to step back, to take a walk, to revisit heated discussions later—each of these are options that can help one engage while in constructive conflict. Organizationally, we have worked with Karla Monterosso of Brava Leaders on a teamwide Conflict Charter, serving as an extension of our policies and making clear how we resolve conflict across the team. Tools like this make conflict normative and not something to fear, even while challenging us to continue to engage in solution-seeking with one another.
- Wisdom harvest and quarterly co-CEO tune-ups: These are opportunities for the entire Office of the co-CEOs, inclusive of our chief of staff, to engage in a format for 360-degree feedback on what’s working and missed opportunities. We are able to be candid, vulnerable, and constructive with one another—bolstered through outside facilitation—and can hone in on areas to focus on to improve our trust and relationship with one another. Tune-ups are a way to hold us together in the face of the many instances at work that risk pulling us in separate directions.
- Communications norms: We recommend finding regular ways of staying in touch with one another and with the team. For us, it means a weekly touch-base, or stand-up meeting to surface what each of us is prioritizing and needed areas of input and alignment, as well as a bi-weekly strategy session to hash through more intensive topics and make decisions. It’s also important to be clear how you plan to communicate with the team, in terms of frequency and channels. We set these expectations on our Notion page so that folks know what to expect from us.
Embrace (and Be Real About) Challenges
Despite our advocacy, we remain clear-eyed about the challenges and pitfalls. However, because expectations of the model’s inadequacies—and potential failure—can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, we recommend that organizations commit to this step wholeheartedly, revisiting what they need to before it presents significant risk. Acknowledging the reality of these challenges marks the beginning of conversations your organization will need to have, on an ongoing basis, when choosing co-leadership.
Some concerns are legitimate. But instead of criticizing “organizational bloat,” we would urge you to take a step back and consider the sustainability of our leaders and movements in context, especially in a sector that often asks us to be “scrappy and nimble.” Given the issues we work on, can we afford not to invest in best efforts? Where multiple leaders do incur additional direct cost, the indirect cost of management by the board as well as direct costs from outside consultants and experts is reduced, instead intentionally investing those resources internally. We see these investments within the larger system as trade-offs we must be willing to make if we are to adequately resource our causes, movements, and their leadership.
The risks around indecision and internal confusion are also real, and require intentional structuring to name and combat directly. A decision-making matrix is needed to clarify the decision process for internal leaders, leaving less room for ambiguity. But templates and structures alone are not enough: Clarifying processes and making plain the ways co-leadership needs to be navigated must be continuously done on an ongoing basis.
It takes time to build and practice shared power structures. This is truly a process of unlearning—from mainstream culture, to experiences in other workplaces—and it can be uncomfortable to try something new. Organizations need time to try out new practices and learn what works best for them; the feedback loop is ongoing. At Common Future, as mentioned, we are now experimenting with cascading and sharing power through our Executive Team, which is holding up a mirror to what the process has been like for ourselves, and what it means to expand shared power as a concept embedded throughout the organization.
Beyond the Day-to-Day: Practicing for the Next Economy
The importance of co-leadership extends beyond organizational thinking, to modeling the world we want, consistent with our values of racial equity and shared power. In an equitable economy, power is distributed and shared, time and labor are recognized as limited resources that cannot continue to be siphoned without restoration (our humanity is honored), and coalitions and alliances are built, iterated on, and have sustaining power. Co-leadership helps us put these values into practice, helping clarify how this can actually function on other scales.
- Sharing power: The practice of co-leadership requires power sharing not only amongst the individuals sitting in the position of CEO or executive director, but also across the entire organization. Sharing power means sharing information more widely and regularly across the organization so people have what they need to make decisions about their own day-to-day work. Practicing this as an organization helps us iterate our institutions and systems toward creating more equitable outcomes.
- Honoring time and labor: A single CEO model squeezes leaders into burnout and exhaustion from being the sole person responsible for the continuity and direction of the organization. A multi-leadership model practices leadership more sustainably. Leaders don’t have an endless supply of resources to give, just as our employees and community members don’t either. Practicing how to honor rest and welcoming this time as a ritual will help us shift our mindset from a grind culture to something more sustainable that will leave us and our communities full.
- Coalition building: Practicing co-leadership is practicing building consensus and alignment. Making decisions at Common Future by consensus means there is no majority rules among our three co-leaders: We have to hear each other’s concerns, address them, and build a palatable solution that works for everyone involved in the decision. This is such a critical skill needed to create large-scale change and being able to link our intersectional justice movements together will enable us to change the systems that are holding us back from a world where all people are able to thrive. To be clear, not every single decision is based on organization-wide consensus, and in those instances, alignment rather than unanimity is the principle we hold.
Moreover, multiracial co-leadership brings additional benefits, in terms of modeling the world that we want to live in, that honors and respects the beauty of our diverse experiences and perspectives and gives life to ideas and solutions that are connected to our many cultural values and principles that recognizes our interdependence as communities and with our planet.
Co-Leadership as Vision and Story
We cannot change systems alone or overnight. It takes years of intentional efforts with many different stakeholders pursuing a variety of solutions aimed at normalizing a nontraditional mindset. In that process, we need to test and practice how we can live these values. Central to this shift are new stories and narratives about what it takes to work and build together. Co-leadership can no longer be a story of skepticism that weakly challenges the narrative of individual power and control. Instead, we must focus on a vision and story of power building—one that strengthens our ability to live the values we want to see in an economy where all people can thrive.
Read more stories by Sandhya Nakhasi, Jennifer Swayne Njuguna & Jess Yupanqui Feingold.