With contributions from Rachel Berdan, Dawn Burns, Mojdeh Cox and Dharshi Lacey
Propelled by our strategic plan that calls us to operationalize equity, recovery and change in action, Pillar’s women-led leadership team is embarking on a journey to implement a shared leadership model across our organization. This model is critical to helping us make the internal shifts required to act out our strategic plan and connects across all areas of the plan: equity is about rethinking and redistributing power, the change we are working toward is structural and transformational, and the recovery we are envisioning is just.
Implementing a shared leadership model of decision making was one of Pillar’s Executive Director’s leading internal priorities. Practicing leadership in a different way, where collective decision making and personal accountability are rooted in the work, is an example of the “in action” piece of our commitments. Things don’t change until we do, and in order to influence change externally, we must adapt our internal practices as we evolve. So, what do we mean by shared leadership? Read on to learn how we’re implementing this approach at Pillar along with benefits and best practices for those looking to approach leadership from a more equitable framework.
Shared leadership explained
Shared leadership means sharing power and influence in strategic decision-making when and where possible to heighten transparency, accountability and equity across an organization. This approach acknowledges that we go farther together than we can alone and that, since decisions affect people, better ones take into account multiple perspectives.
The three key components of shared leadership are – aligning around a shared purpose, providing mutual support for one another and making space for all voices involved in a decision to be heard. It’s about gaining the perspective required to make high-level organizational decisions with intention and care for both our colleagues and the communities we serve. With this approach, everyone affected by a decision gets to have a voice in the issue that is heard and considered, with the ultimate decision resting with the leadership team.
Shared leadership doesn’t make an ED’s or CEO’s role easier, it means that leaders are willing to be challenged and understand the added value that tapping into the collective skills and knowledge of team members brings. This can make the role of EDs and CEOs harder at times, taking longer to make decisions, but these friction points are outweighed by the value of transparency, building trust and making better collective decisions.
Pillar’s approach
Alongside our new Executive Director, Pillar is led by a diverse group of six women directors who intentionally review key decisions and determine the appropriate stakeholders (internal, external, network, board) to consult before a final decision is made. Pillar’s directors bring this input back to the leadership table where they pause, deliberate and discuss the steps needed to reconcile pressure-points and lead our organization onto a path towards greater clarity and genuine transformation.
For our directors, shared leadership is about more than just decision making, it’s about being radically accountable as leaders and ensuring that Pillar colleagues bring this lens to their work. Radical accountability is holding yourself accountable to the commitments you have made or must make to move an agenda forward. To be radically accountable we must approach our work with fearless honesty; set clear intentions; make room for self-reflection; and act based on changed behaviour. Our commitment to shared leadership at Pillar enables leaders, and their teams, to put these aspects of radical accountability into practice and holds us to our shared commitments to each other and our network.
Beyond the opportunity to provide input on key issues impacting our work, the broader Pillar team is encouraged to participate in shared leadership in a variety of ways beginning with onboarding. During onboarding, colleagues receive training on our equity and inclusion policies that will soon include a zero tolerance policy. Additionally, we invest in continued education for colleagues through participation in our learning and development programs and colleague-specific learning and reflection exercises like the Indigenous Canada course, a Nonprofit’s Guide to Homelessness training and other opportunities that enable us to expand our understanding of the issues facing diverse individuals in our community. As a team, we unpack these learnings and root them in a localized context. Making an investment in sharing resources and tools across our team, and providing opportunities for sharing reflections, is key to enabling shared leadership.
Examining the benefits
How is Pillar’s shared leadership model helping us do the internal work to ensure we’re living out our strategic plan in support of our network and of each other? What shifts are we noticing or do we hope to see going forward? As our learning continues to emerge, we see the capability of shared leadership to dismantle hierarchy and harmful systems, and create psychological health and safety as the most prominent benefits for organizations and leaders.
Dismantling hierarchy and harmful systems
Through many of our programs at Pillar we explore and reflect on the work of Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones and their White Supremacy Culture Characteristics. While it’s clear that our systems - capitalism, colonialism - were designed by cisgender white men to disproportionally benefit this group while excluding and disadvantaging all others, it can be more challenging to dissect the insidious behaviours of this culture that manifest in our daily lives and work.
Even in the impact sector we know that our structures, attitudes and behaviours often replicate these harmful characteristics such as only one right way, paternalism, either/or thinking individualism and power-hoarding. Implementing shared leadership allows us to counteract many of these characteristics by slowing down, sharing the load of decisions and work, sharing information and getting input from each other. This approach can help leaders, and colleagues, feel less alone and remove a lot of pressure, which enables better self-care and community care.
Creating psychological health and safety
As our director’s team has worked toward implementing shared leadership, a common thread has been that changing systems and supporting communities isn’t possible if we don’t start with caring for ourselves and our teams. Creating a psychologically healthy and safe work environment for leadership and colleagues is a priority for Pillar and can be supported by shared leadership.
One of the key components to shared leadership is support. Organizational leadership can be lonely and places EDs and CEOs in deep vulnerability. The weight of making organizational decisions is heavy and holding power for the sake of it is not worth the emotional toll it takes to lead organizations through transitions and crises. For racialized leaders, leaders of colour, and those with multiple intersecting social locations that make them vulnerable to systemic white supremacy, this model is a strategy to navigate systemic racism, sexism, ageism and all forms of discrimination.
Psychologically safe and healthy workplaces also enable colleagues to apply “power from within” to meaningfully contribute to the work (i.e., having the information, tools, relationships, and capacity necessary to do so) where the power of decision making and of knowledge are linked with degree of accountability and ability to act. Shared leadership includes intentional distribution of accountability, with clarity and consent, to arrive at good alignment between information, resources, capacity, individual power and accountability to the collective. Shared leadership enables clear pathways for honest conversation when those pieces are out of alignment and collective work to resolve the issue so all colleagues feel empowered and aligned with purpose.
Best practices for implementing shared leadership
- Start with trust and respect - To garner genuine, transparent feedback from peers and colleagues, building trust as a leader, and across the organization is crucial. Building trust and respect amongst teams also results in greater commitment to radical accountability.
- Stay committed - Sometimes it’s easier to make an executive decision without consultation. Shared leadership means letting go of what is easy and focusing on how our decisions impact our networks and our colleagues.
- Clarity and transparency are critical – Teams must be provided adequate information so they understand what needs to be solved, who needs to be consulted, who is responsible for what, the timelines and how to provide comments or feedback along the way. You can’t say “everyone is a leader” if they don’t understand how they can contribute.
- Don’t solicit feedback you can’t use – Shared leadership isn’t performative so be sure to only consult stakeholders when you know you can take the time or have the capability to reflect on their feedback. There are times when executive decisions must be made and consultation isn’t possible; in these situations being clear is kind.
- Commit to growth and evolution – Shared leadership is a learning process; changes and adjustments may need to be made along the way. Create space for continual dialogue and learning opportunities amongst teams and be open to regularly re-evaluating what’s working and what’s not.
For social impact leaders tasked with bold plans to persevere through recovery shared leadership, done with intention, is the way forward. We know that colonial systems of hierarchy won’t serve us any longer. Shared leadership offers a path toward operationalizing equity and inclusion within organizations. Shared leadership dismantles harmful structures that are set up to hoard and centralize power, knowledge and relationships. Shared leadership is transformational.