Adopting collective leadership, with interconnected teams working together to make decisions, can help your nonprofit create a more inclusive, efficient, and flexible organizational structure.

Just over one year ago, the nonprofit at which I work did a total tear-down and rebuild of our leadership structure. We envisioned a new leadership rooted in shared responsibility and authority, with more staff members involved in the directing of the organization. Our goals were to spread decision-making roles to more staff members, add more seniority levels, and amplify more voices internally. One year on, we now have a leadership team of more than a dozen people as well as an overall leadership structure of more than 20 people; I would cautiously say that the change has been a success—and a bumpy road at times.

This article provides a brief background on why and how we made a drastic change as well as offers tips for other organizations thinking about a similar shift.

Why did we make this change?

When people find out about our diffused leadership structure, they often ask how we get anything accomplished. Then they ask, “Why?”

The answer requires a bit of backstory about CAIR Coalition. As a nonprofit that provides free legal services to immigrants in government detention centers, the need for our help has increased significantly over the past decade. To meet this need, we have grown from a staff of 12 to more than 100. Along the way, we relied on a small “management team” to run the organization—usually four or five director-level staff members. While that size made sense for a smaller organization, it did not grow with us as a whole.

Were we doing ok as a management team? Sure. Was the organization growing? Yes.

But could we do better? Absolutely.

The challenges resulting from a small management team should not be a surprise: transparency issues, lack of diverse voices, overloaded management staff (sometimes leading to hastily made decisions), and that pesky feeling of “us” versus “them” dividing staff and management.

On top of this, we were struggling to move forward our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) goals. Like many groups, this has been a major focus for us for the past several years. Our former management team was not only small, but it was also not representative of either our staff or our clients from a DEIB perspective. A top-down approach from this team was not the answer to how we do better.

We believed that moving towards a more collective leadership structure could begin to address these challenges.

Read the full article about collective leadership by Michael Lukens at Blue Avocado.