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.

Read the full article about co-leadership for equity by Sandhya Nakhasi, Jennifer Swayne Njuguna, and Jess Yupanqui Feingold at Stanford Social Innovation Review.