Posted in Decision Making

September 9, 2024

What is Shared Leadership and Why Now?

Note to readers: This blog is based on IISC’s internal exploration of shared leadership in our organization, our work with clients, and conversations with leadership practitioners in the Knowledge Share Group, a partnership of capacity and infrastructure building organizations around the country. I particularly want to thank Miriam Messinger, Sara Oaklander, Cynthia Silva Parker, and Jasmine Williams of IISC , as well as Shannon Ellis of CompassPoint, for their ideas which sharpened this blog post.

What is shared leadership in nonprofits and philanthropy? And why are some organizations turning to different leadership models to sustain their organization’s work, forge transformative collaboration, and generate powerful intergenerational models of running organizations? IISC and many of our peers in the Knowledge Share Group¹ believe that shared leadership is a better model for the future of the nonprofit sector.

Why Shared Leadership?

Leadership and organizational models that rely on the one executive leader or the senior leadership team for success are not serving our organizations and communities. Leadership concentrated in the hands of a few leaves an organization vulnerable to a number of pitfalls: uninformed decision-making, deep inequities, limited perspectives in strategic direction setting, underutilized and disempowered staff, disruptive executive transitions, and exhaustion for leaders who hold too much responsibility.

We believe executive directors and other senior staff have a choice. They can continue to hold concentrated power and make decisions independently, or they can embrace shared leadership for collective action and responsibility. It is the latter that enables us to most fully live our missions and expand democracy. We must do everything we can to support leadership in all the places it exists in our organizations.

What is Shared Leadership?

Shared leadership is an evolving concept and practice. It’s one of the most compelling options social justice communities are experimenting with to heal our relationships with traditional manifestations of power, authority, and dominance. Based on IISC’s experience and learnings from the Knowledge Share Group, I define shared leadership as the ethos, structures, processes, practices, and behaviors that promote the equitable distribution and decentralization of information, roles, authority, decision-making, and labor.

What are the Key Features of Shared Leadership?

Nonprofits are essentially a network of people, programs, and ideas working together for transformative social outcomes. Shared leadership fuels that network, with more people generating and carrying out ideas for greater impact, and doing so in more equitable ways.

There are are five key features of shared leadership:

All people in the organization are viewed and operate as leaders, mutually accountable to a set of values and practices that are in service of collective goals. They make major decisions together and trust others for the rest.

They are mindful of and attend to the needs of the whole organization and how their work impacts the whole. And they take note of critical organizational gaps and see to it that they are filled. They build redundancies in roles and create back-up plans in the event someone is unavailable to work.

Shared leadership moves away from the notion that the solo leader or executive team has carte blanche to develop and implement solutions to problems in an organization. And instead moves toward a model that centers decentralization and multiracial and multigenerational leadership, with decision-making and problem-solving shared across the organization. It fosters what we teach at IISC – Facilitative Leadership, which is an intentional practice of creating the conditions for transformational collaboration in which people do their best work together to achieve optimal results.

Shared leadership assumes that power² is not finite and can be meaningfully shared. It requires a shift in heartset and mindset from “it’s about me” to “it’s about us,” and from “power over” to “power with.” It dismantles concentrations of power and dominance, and prevents extraction, while creating environments where trust-building, transparency, and creative autonomy are cultivated and can flourish.

Shared leadership doesn’t necessarily mean an end to executive roles or hierarchy or even the creation of a completely flat organizational structure. Organizations can implement the values and practices of shared leadership within a myriad of different organizational models and structures. The key is that senior leaders and managers are not in a dominant position where they control the fate of the organization or its employees. They are instead part of the ecosystem with information and decision-making flowing across the organization.

What is IISC’s Evolving Shared Leadership Model?

At IISC, we are about to implement a network-based team model, and we are experimenting along the way, building off of our longstanding commitment and internal practices of collaboration and distributed leadership. We believe it will enable us to harness the leadership, creativity, and ideas of all of us who work for IISC.

In our model, we are experimenting with what we call shared and equitable leadership. We will have a single president and multiple teams convened by hosts and supported by facilitators that will make decisions for their areas, while other teams will provide cross-functional input and expertise to ensure the teams are connected around strategy. Ad hoc teams – each with a unique and time-bound task – are also part of this model.

A center-holding group with membership from the various teams will weave the domains of activity and ensure people have what they need and are empowered to make change in their domains. This group will also have a host and facilitator and will include the president of IISC, and it will shift in membership as the organization’s needs change and members rotate. The group will include people with different roles and tenures in the organization, not based on their seniority or executive functions.

BIPOC and next generation leaders will be prioritized to ensure that we don’t replicate the negative attributes of white dominant culture or rely on time in the organization as a proxy for knowledge and influence. The model assumes healthy redundancies so if people shift in and out of the organization, take on different roles, or attend to health or personal crises, we will be resilient and not fall off course from our goals. The distinction between part-time and full-time staff will only be the hours they work, not how much influence they have over the organization.

This model will initially take time to implement and decision-making may be slower at the start as people learn to trust each other and move into formation. Most people are accustomed to traditional hierarchy and know instinctively how to operate in that kind of system. It can be hard for people familiar with holding positional power to adjust to letting go of making decisions, especially when they may disagree with those decisions. And for people newer to decision-making, it takes time to build confidence and skills, and to accept accountability for the impacts of those decisions. Patience is needed and power struggles and mistakes will invariably happen. Staff need information, tools, and experience to get their feet planted and take initiative. And once they do, we expect creativity and problem solving to expand and positively impact the organization.

In my case, as president of IISC, I am already experiencing the benefits of this new approach as we pilot some aspects of it. Fewer people are coming to me for answers or expecting me to make decisions. Generative conflict is surfaced and negotiated at individual and team levels and rarely comes through to me to resolve. I’m less fatigued and more inspired. I can more fully focus on what I believe are my essential roles of strategy, partnership-building, board development, fundraising, and program work. I am now more of a coach, offering questions for people to explore and occasional wisdom for those who are really stuck.

But there are tough realities to face as we experiment with parts of the model. We cannot always keep up with the flow of decisions that are needed or handle the bigger ones quickly. In the end, though, I am already finding that the quality of our decisions are better. And when we face tougher times, either organizationally or financially, we tend to find ourselves reverting to old habits of command and control. We have to remember to snap ourselves out of old practice and reprioritize our values and return to our new model. And in the end, we’re becoming a more dynamic and responsible organization because of shared and equitable leadership.

Do You Want to Try on Shared Leadership?

Shared leadership can lead to more effective organizations as diverse minds and expertise are applied to solving problems. It can achieve more balance in the lives of people as decision-making, responsibilities, and burdens are shared across the organization.

Shared leadership rocks the boat. For many of us, it’s not what we’re used to. And it liberates people to act on their visions and solutions which improves organizational performance and cracks impenetrable systems of oppression that we live and work under.

What would it look like to try shared leadership practices and experiments in your organization or institution? Where are you having success with shared leadership? Please comment.

The Knowledge Share Group is a partnership of capacity and infrastructure building organizations in the United States. The groups include Change Elemental, CompassPoint, Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training, Interaction Institute for Social Change, ProInspire, and Rockwood Leadership Institute. ↩︎
James Shelton III at the PolicyLink Equity Summit 2018 defined power simply and clearly as “power is the ability to create, limit or make choices for oneself or others.” ↩︎

The fastest way to kill collaboration? Obscure decision making.

by Cynthia Silva Parker

Folks who know me as a facilitator know that one of my first and favorite questions in planning a meeting is “who’s deciding?” It’s a question that can be counter-cultural for groups that are unaccustomed to clearly defining the decision-making process. And yet, leaving the question unanswered or unclear is one of the fastest ways I have seen to erode trust and to drive people away from working together.

Tips for doing better

Answering a few simple questions can help to avoid a great deal of frustration and prevent the fracturing of collaborative work:

WHAT decision is being made? What information will we need to make the decision? What criteria will guide the decision?

WHY is this the decision we’re making? Is there something else that we need to address first?

WHO is the final decision maker? Is it the group that’s meeting now or is it actually some other group or individual?

HOW will the final decision be made? If the group is making the final decision together, do they have an understanding of what consensus is and how to reach it? What will they do if they can’t reach a consensus? If an individual is making the final decision, will they gather input from others or proceed alone? How will they share the factors that will be considered as the decision is made? How will people be informed about the final decision? (Check out our Levels of Involvement in Decision Making framework for many more details about options for how to involve people in decision making.) What constraints will shape the decision-making process (e.g., time available, resources needed, etc.)?

Using the Questions in Sticky Situations

Do any of these situations, which we’ve seen repeatedly in our work, sound familiar to you? Here are some ideas about how applying our tips could have helped.

A team receives a task with minimal guidance about constraints, other than when the project is due. They complete their task and are told, “No, we don’t have time or money to do all of that.” or “That’s not actually what we thought you’d do with the task.” The team is asked to go back to the drawing board but many members feel disrespected and frustrated, and are reluctant to continue working on the project.

The leader who set the team up with the project could have named specific time and resource constraints to help both the leader and the team set clear expectations, and could have indicated what would happen next if the group couldn’t make its decisions within those constraints.

A coalition is meeting to decide on its goals for the year. A few priorities rise to the top, but there is no moment when the group clearly affirms the choices. Everyone goes away feeling good, but thinking differently about what was actually decided. A few days later, members read the meeting notes, which sound to some participants like they were from an entirely different meeting. Frustration ensues as individuals jockey to get the items they thought were agreed upon onto the final list of goals.

The meeting facilitator could have explicitly checked for consensus as priorities began to emerge, and clearly identified where there was/was not agreement. The note taker could have recorded on chart paper or used a computer and projector (in an in-person meeting) or screen sharing or a shared online document (in an online meeting) so that everyone could see what was happening with the information in real time.

A team receives a meeting agenda saying that the outcome of the meeting is an agreement on a solution to a pressing organizational problem. During the meeting, people spend all of the time exploring the problem. Some people are frustrated that they didn’t even begin to move towards a solution. Others are frustrated with the stated meeting outcome, since there hadn’t been any problem analysis. The meeting ends without a clear sense of what to do next and what to say to those who are waiting for the solution.

Typically, if a group is deciding on solutions, they first need to understand the problem they are trying to solve so they can identify solutions that effectively address root causes. The facilitator and meeting planners could have designed pre-meeting work or discussions to build understanding of the problem before getting into solutions. Or, they could have shifted the timeline so the group could explore problems during this meeting and solutions later.

People leave a staff meeting thinking they have reached agreement on organizational priorities. A few days later, the CEO announces priorities, which are slightly different, thanking the group for the way the meeting helped her to make her final decision on priorities. Staff members are confused and frustrated because they thought they were all making the decision together. Some team members begin to wonder if they can trust the CEO.

The leader could have first asked herself whether this is a decision the team should actually make together. If the situation really did call for her to make the final decision after consulting with the team, she could have started and closed the discussion by clearly stating why she is the final decision maker and how this discussion gives the team a chance to inform her final decision.

A colleague sends you an email, assigning you a task that you didn’t know about and asking you to do it in a way that doesn’t make sense to you. They don’t invite any questions and do not appear willing to discuss your ideas about how to get the job done. You wrestle with how much energy you want to put into asking questions and whether you have the energy to deal with a potential conflict if you just do the task in a way that makes most sense to you.

The colleague could have explained who decided that the task needed to be done in this particular way and why, spelling out important factors that led to this decision. They could have asked for your questions, concerns, or ideas about how to proceed. And they could have explained any degrees of flexibility around how the task was to be accomplished.

While clarity about decision making isn’t magic, it will make many collaborative ventures much smoother. It will grow the precious resource of trust, without which your efforts to work together are destined to fall short. It will also give you new ways to explore and expand power, which is so often experienced through the act of decision making. Questions about who decides on things like priorities and strategy; the allocation of time, money, and other resources; involvement in designing and implementing activities; and who decides who gets a seat at the decision-making table are fundamentally questions about power. Clarity around decision making will create space to address power dynamics more directly and grow more shared power to accomplish together things that you could never accomplish on your own.

Let us know how these tips are helping your efforts to collaborate for social justice and racial equity.For more on power and power dynamics, check out our series Bringing Facilitative Leadership for Social Change to Your Virtual Work, which includes sessions on Managing Power Dynamics in Virtual Meetings and Collaborative Decision Making and Shared Leadership.

Honeybees Build Consensus so Why Can’t We?

One of the many things I appreciate about adrienne maree brown’s new book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, are the questions she asks over and over again: what are you learning from nature? how does nature inform your organizing and movement building efforts?Autumn Meghan Brown, interviewed in this book, talks about consensus. Building consensus is one of my favorite practices to teach in IISC’s Facilitative Leadership for Social Change workshop. People love consensus and people hate it; I’ve seen many people struggle with when and where consensus is the appropriate decision making method, and with how to facilitate an effective consensus decision making process.

I believe two reasons for this are that we live in a society with an unhealthy relationship to time, and with a low level of skill for collaborative group process. Autumn says these wise things about consensus:

The history of consensus is deeply rooted in feminist and Indigenous movement work
Building consensus is the work of collective liberation
People want consensus to be an antidote to power, but it is not! Consensus does not require equal status; it requires equal voice.

So back to brown’s question, where does consensus happen in nature? What might we learn from nature about consensus?

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