Shared Leadership, Part 1 (EP.07)
Last Updated
February 14, 2020
On this episode, part 1 of “CEO Not *Necessarily* Required.” We look at shared or distributed leadership models, what are they, what aren’t they, how they work, how you might evaluate different models, and might they be right for you and your organization.
Guests: Michael Courville, Kelly Kienzle, Holly Sidford & Russell Willis Taylor
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guests
MICHAEL COURVILLE is Founder and Principal of Open Mind, an independent consulting firm that combines research insights with direct social sector experience, to tackle problems that impact people and spiral out to organizations and into complex systems. Michael has deep experience with organizational capacity building, change management, applied social research, community development, and social sector strategy formation. His current research and client projects focus on workplace democratization and decision-making systems in nonprofits, understanding the role of arts and culture in community change, social policy under neoliberalism, and the political cost of inequality for civil society. Michael holds graduate degrees from the University of California-Berkeley in social welfare and comparative development policy. He is an associate member of the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers and an affiliate of the RoadMap consulting network. He currently serves as adjunct faculty in the Department of Sociology at Sonoma State University. (The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation's case studies in Distributed Leadership can be found here.)
KELLY KIENZLE, founder of Open Circle Coaching, provides leadership coaching and professional development programs to individuals and teams to improve organizational performance in the private, public and nonprofit sectors. Kelly is a people development specialist with over 25 years of experience and is a certified coach of the International Coach Federation logging over 1,500 hours of coaching leaders. A description of her philosophy and approach to coaching can be found at www.opencirclecoaching.com.
HOLLY SIDFORD is an expert systems thinker–seeing connections and making more than the sum of the parts. Her endless curiosity, penetrating intelligence and commitment to excellence underpins all of Helicon’s work. Holly draws on her training as an historian and her experiences as a program developer and funder to inform Helicon’s efforts to elevate the role of artists, recognize the full diversity of creative expression and make the arts and culture a more central part of community life. Holly has a knack for identifying the most important issue facing the field at the time, and her work is often a thought-provoking catalyst for change. Reports such as Bright Spot Leadership in the Pacific Northwest (Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, 2012) and Fusing Art, Culture and Social Change (National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2011) have stimulated field-wide discussion. Earlier in her career, her work at the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund helped shift national discourse and practice in the ways cultural organizations engage audiences and communities. In 2000, Holly’s work prompted unprecedented research on artists, Investing in Creativity (Urban Institute, 2003), and the creation of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a unique ten-year initiative to expand support and recognition for artists nationwide. Holly serves on the board of Sadie Nash Leadership Project, an award-winning leadership program for young female leaders in metropolitan New York, and Fractured Atlas, a national organization pioneering technology-based ways to empower artists, cultural organizations and other creative enterprises.
RUSSELL WILLIS TAYLOR served as interim Vice President for arts and leadership at The Banff Centre in Canada from 2016 to 2018. Prior to that, she was President and CEO of National Arts Strategies from January 2001 to December 2014, and she has extensive senior experience in all areas of strategic, financial and operational management. Educated in England and America, she served as director of development for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art before returning to England in 1984 at the invitation of the English National Opera (ENO) to establish the Company's first fund-raising department. During this time, she also lectured extensively at graduate programs of arts and business management throughout Britain. From 1997 to 2001, she rejoined the ENO as executive director. Russell has held a wide range of managerial and Board posts in the commercial and nonprofit sectors including the advertising agency DMBB; head of corporate relations at Stoll Moss; director of The Arts Foundation; special advisor to the Heritage Board, Singapore; chief executive of Year of Opera and Music Theatre (1997); judge for Creative Britons and lecturer on business issues and arts administration. She received the Garrett Award for an outstanding contribution to the arts in Britain, the only American to be recognized in this way, and in 2013 was honored with the International Citation of Merit by the International Society for the Performing Arts, presented in recognition of her lifetime achievement and her distinguished service to the performing arts. She currently serves on the advisory boards of the British Council's Arts & Creative Economy Advisory Group, the Alyth Development Trust, the Salzburg Global Seminar, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about, well, that. On this episode, CEO, not necessarily required. We look at shared or distributed leadership models. What they are, what they aren't, how they work, and might they be right for you in your organization? We're joined by Mike Courville, Kelly Kienzle, Holly Sidford, Russell Willis Taylor. And if after this episode you're still hungry for more about shared leadership, next week's episode we'll dive into part two of this adventure by chatting with the members of the Fractured Atlas Four Person Non-Hierarchical Leadership Team. We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started.
Tim Cynova:
Our first guest is Mike Courville, Founder and Principal of Open Mind. Mike and I connected after he published a series of case studies based on his research around how different organizations are distributing leadership. And since our first few conversations flew by, I'm excited to have him on the podcast to kick off this episode. Mike, welcome to the podcast.
Mike Courville:
Hi, Tim. Great to be here. I appreciate being invited and looking forward to talking with you today.
Tim Cynova:
We had a conversation a couple of months ago, it ran long, it was rich with a lot of information, around shared leadership, around just workplace in general. I'm really excited that we can capture some of this for posterity on recording, because you've done a lot of work around shared or distributed leadership models through your work at Open Mind Consulting. You've been engaged in research around this with various different organizations. What do you call it, shared leadership, distributed leadership, and whatever you call it, what is that thing?
Mike Courville:
It's really interesting. When I really started to get involved and thinking about this more deeply, I recognized quite quickly after talking to a lot of organizational leaders in the nonprofit sector, that people describe shared leadership and distributed leadership often in similar ways. They'll use both words and they use other forms of leadership to describe what they do, collaborative leadership or they might sometimes describe it as relational leadership. And I think what I was recognizing is that taking together, what we're talking about here is when there's more than one person who's essentially making decisions and ultimately driving something forward. It's really about a more participatory approach.
Mike Courville:
So I think shared leadership is lik a concerted action between many people or groups of people within organizations to get something done. And distributed leadership is a really deliberate, intentional effort to include people in decision making from many different levels within organizations. That's kind of how I think about it. One is going down vertically and across horizontally. The other is more just saying, how do we bring as many people into this process as possible?
Tim Cynova:
We first met when you were presenting at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in October. You were a part of a panel about the work that you had been doing with the Hewlett Foundation and some of the organizations that have various different models around distributed or shared leadership. Can you talk about that work? Was this your first foray into it or do you have a prior background as a shared leadership aficionado?
Mike Courville:
My interest in this stems from both having worked within large nonprofit organizations that were truly trying to figure out, how do you bring in new perspectives, new ideas, new voices into complex decisions? And I myself had worked as a co-director, co-executive director for a while for a nonprofit or research institution. And myself and my co-leader really sort of went back and forth about what does that look like? How do you do that in a way that's truly shared? And then I've worked in larger organizations where I saw leadership teams trying to figure out, how do we include people from the right level of the organization to inform decisions.
Mike Courville:
But I also started to observe and notice that a lot of folks were talking about being more inclusive and participatory, but sometimes their practices weren't quite participatory and inclusive. And so I got more driven to think about this as a research question and I started looking at the literature and talking to colleagues who are both scholars and researchers around leadership, nonprofit management, and other fields. And what came to recognize is that we haven't done a good enough job of really understanding and parsing out the practices or what I call the cultural attributes that actually sort of manifest when you actually distribute and share leadership.
Mike Courville:
And so the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave me an opportunity to think more deeply about what's happening in the arts sector, arts and culture sector. And so we took a close look at arts and cultural organizations in other nonprofits to see how do people actually do this. When I started to sort of point finger on with my colleagues from Informing Change with my research partners, was that we're really thinking about the way decisions get made. Like, it's a really practical location within organizations that see how power, participation and inclusion play out when big decisions are made that are high stakes decisions.
Mike Courville:
So decisions about how resources should be distributed, who gets paid what, what are we going to produce as an organization, or if it's a performing arts organization, what are we going to put on to our performance calendar for the year? Big decisions. And we really look closely at that. The research kind of helps bring into sharper focus some of the attributes, I think, practices and organizational forms that manifest as a result of being more distributed in your leadership practice.
Tim Cynova:
What were some of the forms like? A lot of your research is available? I've watched video series that you put together, I've read some of the research. What were the different types of organizations that you studied that are part of this cohort?
Mike Courville:
Yeah. So we did a combination of things. We collected data that was more of a narrative, kind of told a story about different organizations who have adopted distributed practices. And we often say that they're adopted to different degrees. So in some instances, we have organizations who have boards of directors and you've kind of ... Maybe this is something going on for Fractured Atlas as well. Boards of directors who actually reflect or include individuals who may have actually been participating on staff or were as staff at one time. In an organization we saw called Orpheus, which is a conductorless chamber orchestra in New York City, we saw this example where they actually had members of the orchestra just sitting on the board as voting members. And then they would rotate and other members get to sit on the board.
Mike Courville:
So they're participating and thinking about big governance questions. And they're bringing perspective from the performers side, the practitioners side, and also the side of leadership and making decisions about the organization. So in that form, we're seeing how even at boards of director levels, you can have this sort of participatory opportunity for staff to be part of the leadership process in an organization to high level. We also saw organizations who distribute to different degrees, where what they built are really intentional teams to deal with day-to-day decisions that have to do with operations, have to do with strategic plans, that have to do with resources and expenditures.
Mike Courville:
So we would see smaller teams coming together, like at the Denver Center for Performing Arts, they run a sort of experimental program called Off-Center. And in this particular effort, you have a lot of new leaders who are coming together to think about new ways to engage audiences who didn't traditionally show up for performances that were taking place in the Denver Center. They were looking for younger audiences, and they were trying to figure, how do you engage them? So they started to make more decisions together and they kind of brought people in from marketing, people who were actually involved in the design and the decisions about the performances and about the artistic director. Everyone coming together and thinking through, what can we do to bring more people in to see our performances from a new demographic?
Mike Courville:
In that size of distributed leadership, you have small teams that membership often changes and adjust and adapt over time, depending on what they're trying to accomplish. But you have more people getting engaged in a decision. And those people actually take full responsibility for whether that's a success. Or if it didn't go as well, what did we learn from that? How do we change and do it differently next time? So you can have people involved with very formal leadership practices like at the board level or senior leadership teams, but you can also see groups coming together to make decisions about programs or about performances, or about the production of something really specific for an organization.
Tim Cynova:
When Fractured Atlas started our exploration or journey into shared non-hierarchical leadership, I was struck by the number of cultural organizations I spoke with who thought this is really novel thing. And then I pointed out well, you have an artistic director and an executive director, that's shared leadership at the highest level at the organization. And there's a lot of aha moments, were like, all right.
Mike Courville:
Yeah. I'll say something about that. I think that there's definitely moments where people kind of lead alongside each other and we looked at that in organizations. We may have like, what's called the co-leadership model. And while I do think that's opening up for shared leadership, for me, and for what I'm thinking about when we look at organizations, it's too much agree are more people participating in decisions? So if those two individuals are co-leading, how are they practicing their leadership in ways that makes room for others to participate? So this can include, what we noticed was a lot of directors who are more distributed, they see themselves as sort of a central communicator within the organization.
Mike Courville:
They're really helping to push out information, connect people across departments or across service providing areas of an organization. Like, how do you connect people? They don't see themselves as having all the authority vested them can make each and every decision. So I think co-directorship is a great example of sharing. And then what I'm interested in is, how does that then sort of manifest further in the organization in practices across departments and teams elsewhere where others get involved in decision making? And that was something we looked kind of closely at because, well, I think shared leadership can be expressed as just two leaders working alongside each other as a co-leadership, that may not be sufficient for truly building the kind of inclusive participatory workplaces we see.
Mike Courville:
I think they're more democratic and more collaborative when there are more voices and more people making the decisions together. And not everyone's going to be a decision maker. But we did see a lot of organizations like On The Move, which is based in Napa, which is not necessarily an organization that traditionally operates with just sort of programs and services. They really are a leadership pipeline organization that tries to match leaders to new projects and community that can make kind of progressive social change. And in doing that, they built out this cadre of powerful leaders who then can participate in senior leadership decision making. They can participate in leadership decisions for programs. They become more engaged in leadership decision making.
Mike Courville:
And that was really interesting to see. Because it's not just the executive director and a team of senior directors, you see people from within other programs stepping in to make big decisions with them and collaborate with them on big decisions. So I think that the multiplicity of voices and the opportunities for people to participate, really strikes me as a more significant degree of distributed or shared leadership. And I do think it's good to acknowledge that co-leadership can be right size for some organizations, but there are further degrees you could take that to be more distributed.
Tim Cynova:
Your concept of co-leadership, your categorization as co-leadership might actually hit at some of the problems that actually exist in organizations that have two different leaders who are operating effectively in silos, they're co leading, but they're certainly not shared leadership model. And that just because you have that, there are other things that actually need to be present in order for distributed or shared leadership models to be successful.
Mike Courville:
Yeah, it's a great point. I think that a lot of times people make an effort to bring new leaders or more leaders into positions of authority. And so they might have a co-leadership model where someone's a senior director of operations. Someone's a senior director of finance, someone's a senior director of program or in modern arts organizations, an artistic director, an executive director and they're like side by side or alongside each other. But they may still be operating within silos and be thinking these are my respective areas of responsibility. And so it sounds like you've built a team in title.
Mike Courville:
But in practice, what we often would observe in organizations that did that was that there wasn't really any sort of collaborative, deliberative kind of collective sense making around big decisions. People weren't necessarily participating or feel like they had a stake in driving or determining the outcome. There's a lot of opinion seeking that goes on in organizations like that too. Where they'll say, well, let's listen to each and every director and see what they think. And then the executive director still makes the final decision or in the case of an arts organization. We might solicit input from different people on staff but the artistic director makes the final decision.
Mike Courville:
That kind of sounds like it's making an effort to be more participatory. But when you step back and you think about who still holds power and who actually operates and practices leadership, as in the intentional sort of setting of direction of the work, I think that's what starts to become interesting to think about. In organizations that we looked at where they were making big decisions, where they took a lot of people's input, they oftentimes had to organize that in some manner, and then realize they come with like ... Almost a matrix where they would say, let's have like 25 people get together, have a conversation about, what might be produced this year? What might go on to our performance calendar?
Mike Courville:
We want to be more inclusive and we want to have more stories and shows about communities of color and people have been excluded historically in our community, LGBTQ folks. And the organization that did this kind of brought all that information together in sort of a master matrix and then working together with the artistic director, with managing director of marketing, with all the staff sorted through that and said, what decisions would be the ones that most people are invested in? It's kind of a more democratic process. So it's not just opinion seeking. It's actually kind of like ... I mean, it's really the old school crowdsourcing. It's like how do we get as many people to make a contribution and then together, figure out which of these is the best choice for us?
Mike Courville:
One thing I'll say about this is that also distributed and shared leadership, it takes more time to do this well, and that's because the more democratic you're, the more time it takes to include more people. But there's a sense of authenticity and genuineness that a lot of the organizations describe. That by being able to participate more intentionally in decisions, staff from many different levels in the organization would convey a sense of feeling connected and feeling like what they were providing to the organization was meaningful. So when we're thinking about building organizations that are both equitable and feel more democratic, there's something about distributed leadership when it's practiced right that seems to convey to staff and to organizational participants that they matter and that their voice matters and what they have to say is important.
Mike Courville:
Even if their particular opinion or issue doesn't get selected in the end, they felt like they got a chance to contribute. And a lot of executive directors in our study would tell me things some [inaudible 00:14:07] of, I spent a lot of time cleaning up messes because I didn't include enough people. I didn't actually collaborate and distribute the leadership process. It made me have to go back and clean up a lot of messes that I could have avoided making if I had been more intentional about it. And I think that's an interesting insight from sort of an executive director who sees the value of being more distributed as a way of making smarter, better decisions, and then having people feel enlisted to support them and engaged in the process of implementing them.
Tim Cynova:
It also creates transparency that helps people make better decisions in their own right. They have context, more context for how they're making decisions, and seldom are people making just bad decisions to make bad decisions. Despite someone, it's usually they're making the best decisions that they can based on what they know of the context in which they're operating.
Mike Courville:
Yeah. And I think we're trying to build out cultures in organizations that have a more equitable set of practices at their center. So thinking about equity and inclusion which becomes something of a real concern for many organizations today, and also in our society thinking about how to bring in more voices. And particularly, when we're talking about the work around racial equity, what we also have come to think about and sort of wondering about and wanting to do more research around this is that, are there conditions that distributed leadership creates that actually help accelerate organization's efforts to become more racially equitable, to become more inclusive, and to become more participatory?
Mike Courville:
Because what we found in the organizations we study is that they're creating spaces for staff to feel like they can contribute in a genuine way. And they're helping executive leaders and traditional senior leaders with positional authority, we would say reconfigure their relationship to others, they start to lead more from the middle. This was something we found was a pretty powerful practice. Meaning, it's not like one individual has all the answers and makes all the decisions and this sort of command and control from the top.
Mike Courville:
They really find themselves centered in the middle and they're having people get together and gather around them and gather with them to make smart decisions around oftentimes complex questions or tough calls, not always simple of yes or no kind of things. I think by pursuing distributed leadership, an organization may be helping itself create the conditions that will help build a more equitable organization with regards to inclusivity, but also in regards to race and other forms of identity and other forms of inclusion.
Tim Cynova:
What are some criteria that organizations need to have in place or immediately start to address in order for a shared or distributed leadership model to be successful?
Mike Courville:
From all the organizations we've looked at, they all sort of picked up and adopted distributed leadership at different points in their history. So some built it in at the beginning. It's kind of in their DNA. And others have tried to figure this out after having been long standing command and control kind of organizations. Shifting gears. I think some of the steps that organizations can take to get started is first number one, is think about the values that drive your decision making in the organization. Have you taken a look at where you share values as leaders in organizational stuff and where you might diverge? Do you have a value around equity? Do you look at who's missing from decision making opportunities? Do you look at who's present and who's missing?
Mike Courville:
Because if you start to build a sensitivity towards what equity looks like in practice, it starts to open up the possibility that you can change the way you actually practice decision making so it's more equitable. But first, you have to understand the value of equity, and building that in to organizational practice seems to help organizations get closer to adopting more distributed styles of leadership. The other is sort of your thinking through your board and your senior staff have to really take some time to build trust. And we found this to be really important as well. And trust building means listening to other people, hearing what they have to say, and not necessarily passing judgment but really listening. And then being able to respond in a way that's sort of thoughtful and reflective. And this is another set of practices we find often coexist in or distributed organizations.
Mike Courville:
Reflective practice on the part of leaders themselves, building a sense of trust with the other people you're going to make decisions with, and a recognition of the value of equity. And I think if you start working towards those three values, attributes and practices, you're starting to open up the pathway forward. And then you have to come up with some really explicit rules of engagement. I think this is important to lift up and elevate. Because other people have talked about forms of kind of distributed leadership that involves practices that don't actually allow others to step in and participate, because they don't know what the rules are. How do we do this?
Mike Courville:
So you kind of have to be clear with each other about when you're inviting people in to make decisions, what are the expectations about that? What is the amount of preparation required? And what's the time that's going to be necessary to do that? Another thing I'm noticing organizations have done, some of the realizations in our study did this, was thinking about the equity that comes with the pay to do the leadership work. So how do you actually allocate pay or salary so that people who are spending more time leading and making complex high stakes decisions feel like they're being compensated adequately. So that there's not going to be this sort of off-kilter or tilt of people still getting elevated salaries, because they're supposed to be positionally making all the decisions when you're now asking for decisions to be made across the organization. So you're going to have to take a look at that.
Mike Courville:
It's not to say you have to bring everyone's salary in line with each other. It's thinking about how you do that in a way that's equitable. And so I think all of those things may be helpful for organizations who are starting to think about this. But I will say one more thing, Tim. Something I've observed, and this isn't something we've studied deeply, but it's been sort of emerging from the findings. Organizations who've done this well have already accepted and embraced the importance of managing and being good managers. And there seems to be a relationship there. Meaning, thinking about time, thinking about how you give supervision and feedback, being reflective, being thoughtful, being intentional.
Mike Courville:
All of those things seem to carry well and carry forward. Because when you distribute leadership, you're going to have to pull on all those practices and really rely upon them in a more diffuse way. And so I think it's good to think about it. Is your organization already doing some things now that make you stronger organizationally as far as management, because then you can start to open that up and bring more people in and do it in a way that seems fair and inclusive.
Tim Cynova:
That's a good point. Yeah. If your organization doesn't already have those things, then it's going to be very obvious when you start to mess around with it that those will be problem points. It reminds me the point I read when I was doing some research in our own exploration around shared leadership. If you looked at sort of a tier, the leadership team tier, researched showed that the tier right below the leadership team often suffered maybe the most because it didn't have the same relationship that the leadership team had. It didn't often have the same trust and psychological safety. And so you saw this breakdown immediately below as they're trying to struggle with it, but hadn't yet done their homework.
Mike Courville:
Yeah. I think that's really important. I agree. And I think with almost all the organizations, there was some reference to the importance of trust building, even if it's a group of people who see each other regularly is maintaining that trust and understanding and listening. I can think of a couple examples to make this really accessible to the listeners. There's a group Terrain and Spokane, Washington. It was founded as a very community-based, community connected organization that would incubate arts and economic development in the community.
Mike Courville:
As they started to formalize and grow the organization, they got a little anxious that they might lose the collaborative ethos of the organization and the participatory ethos. But they also recognized there have to be some ways of helping those who come in who are new to the organization, know the rules and know how to participate, and know how much time it's going to take to do that well. This included their board having to understand that as well as the staff.
Mike Courville:
So the reason I'm lifting up Terrain as an example of kind of what you're alluding to, is that this was an organization that really had to figure out how to take the time to build relationships and ensure that the trust continues to flow as new staff come in, as they grow in size and they bring in new individuals to participate in decision making. Because they're kind of growing as they're simultaneously trying to continue to foster distributed leadership. So it's trust building is happening constantly as people come in. And you can't minimize the importance of that, whether it's someone coming in to do operations for your organization or finance or whether they're going to actually be a program director. How do you fold them in?
Mike Courville:
And then another organization that's been doing this for such a long time, which was Orpheus, they've been doing what they would describe as a form of shared distributed leadership since 1972. They recognized that they had to as they grew and developed and matured, everyone has to come to performances and rehearsals with some level of self-leadership and individual maturity to know how to manage time. So that you respectfully listen to each other, give contributions and ideas and make decisions in a way that's also timely. And I think that includes trusting that just because you didn't get to speak and say something about this particular issue or decision, you trust that others who weighed in have said something important and of value that you can kind of trust to follow that lead of others for the time being.
Mike Courville:
So it's not that everyone has to speak. But if you're building trust even within a large group, like in this case, an orchestra working together, they trust each other enough to say that, I don't always have to be the one to make a comment. Every time you bring new members in, they talk about how do we bring new members in and fold them into those practices that they feel like they're part of that. And they can share in that. So it is beyond just the leadership team. And if you are bringing people together, and you want to see them do more work, to distribute leadership within their teams or departments, or more broadly, they do need the time to build trust.
Mike Courville:
That can be simply a matter of making time on the front end of meetings to have conversations about what's been happening for you outside of just work, what else is happening, and how do you share and disclose a little bit about who you are and the way that people become to appreciate you. But it's also about realizing that you may have to take a little more time to connect with people around the table before you can actually take on a big project together. Because it might stall out if you don't build the trust.
Mike Courville:
There's a group called Thousand Currents that we studied. They're actually a grant making institution that works mostly in the global south. They talked a lot about moving at the speed of culture and the speed of trust. It's not about getting it done within a 30-day timeline. It's about building that arc of relationship that will sustain the work long-term. And then that makes them go faster and I think makes them smarter about the work they do in the future. And this would include executive assistants, admin assistants, all the way up to policy people within that organization, all of them throwing out how to work together with a way of trusting each other.
Tim Cynova:
A new different way of working that might seem ... It's an intentional new way of working, rather than just the way it's been done. You think it's good and you think it's fast, but then it's not.
Mike Courville:
You said intentional, I tend to call these things intentional actions. What you find within organizations that distribute to some degree is that more often than not, there's a cadre of leaders because we are building more leader-full organizations through this work, who are really making intentional steps to both listen, to be reflective, to solicit input, to inform individuals who historically maybe weren't informed about big decisions and bring them in.
Mike Courville:
So it's a really intentional effort. And it happens periodically and then it keeps happening over time. And that's something that we also noticed, particularly executive directors who've recognized that they got to change their way of operating from being just like the final decision maker at the top. It's sort of like, how do you intentionally keep engaging actions that let other people lead, that give people enough information to make smart choices and be part of the process?
Tim Cynova:
I want to come back to founders as it relates to this question, because the last time we spoke, I know you get some questions about this and I'm curious where you got with this. I guess there's that. And also, some of the questions I frequently I'm asked relate to those who are not at senior levels in the organization who ask, can we still do this? Or how would we approach it? It's usually, what if leadership or what if our board doesn't go for this? What do you say to organizations? What's your advice?
Mike Courville:
Let me take the first question from founders. I didn't want to come at this work with an assumption that if someone was a founder, they couldn't necessarily be distributed in their style and practice are shared in their orientation. We were open to that and I've been open to that. What has been hard is that a lot of founders came into the role they're in now during an era of a certain kind of organizational psychology of sort of the command control. And today, some people talk about this as sort of everything ... There's scarcity and resources are limited. And just like, we got to always keep our hands on the wheel, we can't share it with anybody else for fear that will lose out. That's a reality, sort of political economy of this that we have to keep in mind.
Mike Courville:
But I have seen some founders who have intellectually an orientation to wanting to share and wanting to build new leadership. And what I've seen, though, is that if those leaders don't feel like they necessarily have the time to be able to change the kind of practices that they would need to deploy in the organization to shift, if they will be willing to step either aside or let someone else step in. It's kind of thinking about stepping up and stepping back. Like, how do you move around the space. And I've seen organizations where founders have stepped back and said, it is time for someone else to lead in this organization.
Mike Courville:
And because I understand the importance of distributed, shared leadership, but maybe I haven't quite been able to practice it like I hoped, how could I bring in a new leader or a new set of leaders who are already oriented to that? Or are already practicing that to some degree. Who bring that reflective posture, who have demonstrated an ability to be very collaborative, and to kind of make sense of other people we call it collective sense making. Bringing in leaders who could succeed them, who can bring that forward more rapidly, would be one way founders, I think, can help this flourish.
Mike Courville:
So that's to say, there are some founders who have led organizations in a distributed manner. But I do think sometimes it's harder because historically, many organizations were being pushed to move away from that and to kind of centralize authority and so sometimes that's hard to see. And I think to your other question, which is when people work with an organization at different levels. We took lot of time thinking about positional authority because we thought it was important to make a distinction between that and leadership. So positional authority is sort of that tendency to confer upon an individual a set of responsibilities, a certain kind of recognition, whether it's to pay or titles, almost status.
Mike Courville:
Within organization, there's always going to be different levels of positional authority that are formal. But leadership can happen at any level. And with distributed and shared leadership, we're trying to ask people to lead in many ways and in many different circumstances. And so your position of authority doesn't always equate with your chance to lead, to help make a decision or to move some things forward. And I think that I would say to folks who are coming in, maybe they feel like they're at a mid-level organization or they're entry level, but they'd like to see more distributed leadership or more shared, would be to start a conversation with their immediate supervisor or with those who work with them on a regular basis. And just maybe explore how they actually make time within their group or with their supervisor to think about how they might be able to include more people in an opportunity. Just like one small opportunity to get started.
Mike Courville:
Like, how could you practice bringing in more people to a process of decision or making opportunity for more people to have their voice heard in a decision that's coming up? And the other would be to kind of use like, there's a quiz that I created working with William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program, we created a quiz to help organizations start that conversation about whether or not they're even oriented towards distributed leadership, and how that happens across generations. And that's available on their website. And that might be something you could use, a simple quiz. And then you could have a conversation and discussion about it very informally, to kind of get the ball rolling and open up a conversation about the language of distributed leadership.
Mike Courville:
Which is something else we've learned from doing this study, that a lot of organizations don't always know how to describe what it is they want to do, and they're not always crystal clear what it means. So that may be a first step. I will say that it's hard for organizations to practice distributed leadership to a deep degree. So I'm using degrees here to distinguish between there can be a modicum level of sharing leadership. That's like you had talked about co-leadership model. Vary a certain amount. But then to get to a deeper degree like what we saw with Orpheus, where like literally everyone, there's no conductor. They're all making the music and deciding things together. And then people from the orchestra are actually sitting on the board. That deeper degree of distributed leadership does require board orientation and awareness of why it matters to have the process of inclusion, and why it matters to have that kind of collaborative effort within staff and among staff.
Mike Courville:
The other organization we talked about, which was Terrain, which is a small organization, their board took a little while to figure out why would it be important to maintain the distributed practices that we can have a board with as we grow. Eventually, the board recognized the value of that and how it also made them better at responding to staff, and how it allows them to be more inclusive with what the community continually wants to see happen within the organization. So it was a benefit to the board, I think, recognizing that if we support this, then we also become more responsive to our community. And so I think it can be more valuable when every level is understanding it to some degree. But not every organization has a board that fully embraces and understands distributed leadership in practice. But the staff may have figured it out to a certain degree and it's working. But at times, you recognize where it could be more robust if everybody was kind of on the same page around that.
Tim Cynova:
Well, there seems to be things that any organization can take from this. Think about the different types of decisions that you make, command, consult, consensus and vote. And just being direct, as a leader or being open as a leader say, this is the type of decision I'm coming to you with. So everyone understands that this is what they're being asked. And this is how much their feedback or input or ... Actually, feedback and input. Those are two different things. So you could have more of a hierarchical traditional organization that still benefits from this in being intentional and being clear about what are we asking what are we doing. Even if you're not sharing leadership, being a leader-full organization, there are still waiting For you to tweak and hone even the most traditional hierarchical organizational structure.
Mike Courville:
Yeah. I think that there are always opportunities within any organization to begin to try on some of these practices to a degree or to the right size for where you are. I've had executive directors work with me from a consulting vantage point will say, I want to shift this organization to be a distributed leadership organization. What do we need to do? It's as if overnight, we're going to flip a switch and we're going to shift what is essentially a set of cultural practices and a set of intentional actions that are not yet in the repertoire of how to do things. And so I think the smaller incremental steps you can take can be really important and impactful for helping people understand what it might feel like if they tried to do it differently.
Mike Courville:
I think what was really compelling for me and for my colleagues when we looked at this was that, when a decision was collaborative, and it was truly collaborative, meaning multiple voices came together, there was some compromise, you synthesize the input into one decision. We kind of called it collective sense making. It's not the same thing as saying that it's a consensus. I think that was something we also walked away with. I want to throw this out to the listener, because I think it will be interesting what your other guests will talk about this at all. But there's this notion that consensus means we're all 100% in agreement on every point in every way. And getting there is not an always a clear path for folks. And they spent a lot of time trying to build towards that unless ... If they can't get there, they think that they haven't been collaborative. I'm not sure about that.
Mike Courville:
I'm more of the opinion that collective sense making is learning, and this is the democratic moment in this. This is what helps us as a society be better as a democracy. How do we refine what we already think is the right answer or the best path forward and reconcile that with each other's perspectives and input? Because I think when organizations have done this well, what we see as they come to rest on an agreement that's shared, meaning, it's not exactly the one thing that one person said, or it's not just the one thing we all exactly agreed on every point. But we come to embrace it that it's inclusive of all of our good thinking. And we've actually now test it out. And if it goes really well, we take shared responsibility for that. And if it doesn't work out, we take responsibility for that.
Mike Courville:
So there's a learning to it. Its to say, it may not be that we were all 100% lined up on every point here, but we came to agree and rest in this space so we could take action. And now we're going to learn from it, and we may have an incredible success from it, but we're in it together. So this is why I think you're building trust as well. Every time you do this, you build deeper trust. I think we saw several organizations demonstrate this process. I think it's an important part and can't be overlooked. I wanted to lift it up because we get a lot of questions like, does this mean we have to have consensus? When I always say, I don't think so, some people get really anxious. Like, wait, what? Isn't that one of the most important parts of building something that's shared?
Mike Courville:
Well, it also means having to learn how to build some compromise into your conversation, but not in a way that excludes or historically negates individuals who haven't been heard. That's the other thing. By bringing more voices in, really finding collective sense making solutions, you are actually reconciling with groups or individuals who may feel like they haven't been heard or haven't had their perspective understood. And that was something else we saw as people actually felt heard. That's important.
Tim Cynova:
We borrowed from Patrick Lencioni, the Disagree and Commit, where we have healthy debate. And because we built trust, because we have psychological safety, we're willing to really bring it to have those hard conversations. But at the end of the day, recognizing that the decision that we ended up with is probably much better than had one of us done it individually. And sometimes we just have to disagree and commit on whatever it might be. But you're right, that we put our voice into the pool and move forward with whatever's best for the organization.
Mike Courville:
And in a way, that's sort of also demonstrating, I think, in distributed leadership, it seems like organizations become more ... This was a concept that became more popular for the last decade of being adaptable. Some of that has to do with responding to external factors, but it also to do with internal factors. You can adapt and adjust how you do things so that others can participate, who historically may not have been able to participate. This includes people within different positions of authority, but I'm also talking around lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, other forms of identity.
Mike Courville:
That if you're going to practice including more voices, including more people, and for thinking through the best decision, with all that informed opportunity you have among yourselves, you are building trust, and you're going to possibly shift and adapt a little bit to do things a little differently. It's when you start carrying it out. And that seems to be good for organizations. Organizations have to have a way of changing and adjusting. I think in distributed leadership, what you are seeing and observing is organizations are trying to figure out, we need to have some space to adapt and make some change. How can that look differently if we bring more people into that process? So the changes and the adaptations are more beneficial to more people and make more sense to more people, not just to a few. I think that's pretty powerful.
Tim Cynova:
I'm curious. In your exploration of distributed leadership, leader-full organizations, what are the big questions that you're still wrestling with that you still want answers around? What's next in your research lineup to dig into?
Mike Courville:
I think that we have a lot of questions that I still do about the timing at which people adopt distributed leadership practices. So the timing within the sequence of their own sort of organizational trajectory, like when did this organization decide that this makes good sense? And individual leaders like, when do they arrive at the awareness or the recognition like, I want to try to do this differently. I think that timing question both for organizations and for individuals is really important to understand, because it could ultimately help advise and guide others in the future on when and how to pick this up and really put it into practice more deeply. And that may shed some light on the degrees of practice, like why some organizations go really deep and do a very deep dive on distributed leadership. Why others only find they're able to do a small amount of this on a certain level. So we're interested in that.
Mike Courville:
The other was, and I think I lifted this up earlier, but I'll come back to it is, as we've seen organizations who distribute leadership become more aware of equity and questions of who's included, who's been excluded, and how do we bring more voices in, we think there's something there between that recognition and understanding of equity. It's fertile ground to kind of have deeper discussions and further conversation about racial equity, gender equity, other types of equity that we want to be able to address and think about within organizations and in practice. And so I think we're really interested in what are the relationships and connections. And right now it's kind of, we're hypothesizing a little about this, kind of, theoretically, it makes sense, but we'd like to see what it really means concretely with some data. So we're really wanting to dive in on that more deeply.
Mike Courville:
What is the promise that this might hold for creating more inclusive organizations where people truly belong. And that's something that I think is really important to a lot of us right now in the field, and it's something that's important to me and to others I work with. We see within the practice of distributed leadership, some potential conditions that maybe if they're kind of cultivated in foster in the right way, they will really deepen our practices around racial equity and other forms of equity and inclusion.
Tim Cynova:
What are your closing thoughts on the topic on distributed leadership? Maybe it's something we haven't covered yet.
Mike Courville:
I think we're at a really important juncture in the nonprofit sector and in the world of work more generally. We are seeing a need for smart, thoughtful, complex problem solving in nonprofit sector and workplaces more generally today. We live in a very complex world, things move quite rapidly. And we have a lot of blind spots as human beings. It is near impossible for a small number of people to really see something that complex with the potential for that many blind spots well. I think distributed leadership is up a practice that has been identified in the past as useful and meaningful because it's participatory and collaborative.
Mike Courville:
But now I think in a way, it's actually probably necessary for the sector to adapt and to stay responsive, whether it's to communities who you're providing services to, or whether it's to a complex world where you're trying to deliver and produce something that's very eclectic or requires a lot of moving parts to get it done. I think we're seeing that need now. And so I think distributed leadership can be promising in that regard. But I also really think that we're at a point where more people are coming to work with an expectation that they have something to say that, they have significant value and they have a higher level of education. This is true nationally right now. More people are finishing their bachelor's degree than in the past.
Mike Courville:
We also have a lot more diversity within our workplaces by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and other forms of human difference. And we are at a point where we need to figure out how to bringing all of those experiences and those perspectives into that sort of decision making process, because we don't want to continue to miss those blind spots. So I think organizations are at a perfect location within history to now really leverage all of this leadership possibility, all this leadership potential, and we don't want to lose that. And if we lost that opportunity to bring more people in, we may be missing the opportunity to solve some complex issues and complex problems, both as organizations and as individuals.
Tim Cynova:
Terrific. Mike, thank you so much for making time today to be on the podcast.
Mike Courville:
Thank you so much for having me join you. It was really great. I appreciate it very much.
Tim Cynova:
Our next guest is Kelly Kienzle, Founder of Open Circle Consulting. I first had the pleasure of collaborating with Kelly about a year ago when we worked to create an assessment process for the Four Person Leadership model at Fractured Atlas. We've since gone on to work together on several other things, and I'm always excited to chat with her. Kelly, welcome to the podcast.
Kelly Kienzle:
Thank you. Thrilled to be here.
Tim Cynova:
So the first time the two of us met and had an opportunity to work together was when we created the structure and process to evaluate our own Fractured Atlas, four person shared leadership team. Before we dive into that, because there's a lot of stuff that came out of that, there's a lot of stuff you helped us learn about that. Let's just take a step back and ask, how do you define shared or distributed leadership.
Kelly Kienzle:
I would define it as when more than one person shoulders the responsibilities and authority of an organization. So by this definition, frankly, most organizations have some form of shared leadership. But the scope of their responsibilities and authority gets gradually larger as you go up the ladder of senior leadership until you get to the top where the CEO typically sits, and that is where the greatest port of responsibility and authority rests. What's unique about Fractured Atlas is that your shared leadership does not have that variance in scope of responsibilities and authority. But at the top, the four of you each sit there and have the exact same amount of authority and responsibility. That's how I would define it traditionally and how I see it for you guys.
Tim Cynova:
When you came into the project with us to figure out a system and a structure for assessing our shared leadership team, what were your initial thoughts? What were you maybe hoping to get from it, hoping to learn, maybe some things to real life examples of backups and research and maybe hunches about shared leadership?
Kelly Kienzle:
So what I was hoping to learn was whether this ideal that I talk about a lot with my clients and hundreds of articles have been written about was possible. And that ideal being a true shared leadership model where people in an organization have equal voice to help shape the future of that organization. So that's what I was ultimately hoping to learn from it. I was also curious just to get under the hood of Fractured Atlas and see how operations had been working since you'd been in it for a year or a little more at that point. And answer questions like, can non-experts in a particular area contribute meaningfully to a decision making process outside their area? For instance, you sit in the seat of operations, yet you have equal voice in IT decisions. Can you contribute meaningfully? Because part of that answer leads us to answering, is the single CEO model, in fact, a strong one? And the answer we found was resoundingly, yes. That was exciting to see.
Tim Cynova:
Before we get to what you found during the process through your interviews and research, what was the process like for you?
Kelly Kienzle:
It was fascinating to go through the process. It was a mental exercise for me in that the key question I was trying to answer was, how effective is this model? Not, how effective are these four individuals as leaders? And it's that latter question that I'd always been answering in all my previous work. Any performance review in the organization goes through that process, and they're trying to evaluate the performance of a person. Here, I was trying to evaluate the effectiveness of a model. So for me going through that process was trying to, sorry to say Tim, but kind of dehumanized you and the other three of you and instead ... Every time I would start to picture you as individuals, I would instead try to picture you as a four-headed piece of art and evaluate that. So that was what it like for me.
Tim Cynova:
Nice. I imagined the leadership team will now commission a four-headed piece of art or a piece of art that has four heads for our next assessment.
Kelly Kienzle:
That'd be excellent.
Tim Cynova:
Actually, we should have asked the board for that as a momento from this last assessment, having known that.
Kelly Kienzle:
Yes.
Tim Cynova:
Well, that's a challenge to separate those things. Because it is such a natural thing, we're evaluating a person, how well they did and then maybe we roll it all up together to see how well that group is doing. But not from sort of maybe reverse engineering to the model into the people. And then what are those traits and skills and the knowledge that's necessary to make that a success?
Kelly Kienzle:
Yeah. And then the challenge got even trickier when I started talking to people in the organization, board members and staff. And they started telling me how the success of the model was largely because of the personalities of the people. No.
Tim Cynova:
It’s not at all helpful here.
Kelly Kienzle:
Right. Yet, going into this as objectively as I can, I had to take in and absorb that data, that input from them, and understand how personalities affect the success of the model. That was an interesting intellectual exercise too.
Tim Cynova:
Well, you have a master's in positive organizational development from Case Western, where you focused on how to build resident leadership and achieve positive organizational change. You also are a graduate of Georgetown University's Leadership Coaching program where you studied adult development, communications, somatics, and behavioral science. So based on a lot of research and work, what do you feel like are the qualities and traits that need to be present in this type of model to be successful?
Kelly Kienzle:
It did come down to several factors and one of them is the nature and characteristics of the people in those positions. Interestingly, none of the feedback from this process said that there were any particular environmental factors or organizational characteristics that had to be present. Which reflects what you read in the research. The research says, shared leadership is the ideal. It's effective, it's efficient, it allows to have an expert in every decision. Yet, it's just so hard to sustain. So when organizations think about what needs to be present for this model to be effective, they do need to look at their people and which people have the characteristics that would work in this model.
Kelly Kienzle:
At the top of that list of characteristics that people should have for the model to be effective is trust. Trust of one another, trust in the organization, trust in their staff. But what was interesting was for that first type of trust, trusted one another. So in this case, trust across the four of you. What was interesting was that people, both the staff, the board, and I think the four of you weren't sure whether the trust that you felt for each other was the product of having worked together so closely for over a year, or it was the prerequisite that you had going into it. It was interesting, you guys couldn't even quite remember what your levels of trust were to for each other before you became a four person leadership team. You felt that it was strong and that it was good and the staff felt that also. But it was uncertain whether, again, it was something that existed beforehand, or something that resulted afterwards.
Tim Cynova:
It seems like the chicken and the egg of shared leadership models, where trust fits and how its developed, because it keeps coming up again and again. And really for any team, trust, psychological safety, these are traits that all high performing teams exhibit or all teams need in order to perhaps be "high performing". But yeah, it was this weird thing where we're like, I can't remember that time and maybe even what we did to create that trust, because we were all individuals when we started. It wasn't like we came in together. It wasn't like we founded this company. We all joined the company at different points and did different things, and just happened to all end up on this team together.
Tim Cynova:
I mean, still to this day, I'm not sure. And it's frustrating because you want to grow more in different shared leadership teams and this is a prerequisite, I think, for that. And so how do you recapture that thing or build that thing? And maybe even faster. Not everyone has the luxury of three half years together to get to this point. That's still an outstanding question for me about shared leadership.
Kelly Kienzle:
My theory on it is that it's both chicken and egg, right? You guys have now moved from being a piece of art to being a chicken and an egg, where the trust did exist, beforehand, and it grew deeper as you guys worked together. So what I would say to other organizations is, do the people that you are looking at for this leadership role, do they have the propensity for trust? Are they inclined to trust the others of this group? And if you have that propensity, then that starts the relationship off on a positive, hopeful note. And then the trust can deepen as the group works together, debates with each other, kicks ideas around, fails together, succeeds together, and then that deeper trust can grow.
Tim Cynova:
You mentioned a little while back that this kind of model is so hard to sustain. Why is that? Why do you feel that way?
Kelly Kienzle:
Yeah. Because it's exhausting. Right? I should turn this question back to you, Tim. Right? You're the one who lived this. But again in the interviews that I did with the staff and the board, no matter how close or far they were from the leadership team, they could see how exhausting it was. It's exhausting for some interesting reasons. One is that this model is exceedingly efficient. You guys can work at four times the pace, four times the scope, because you are a four person team, than a single CEO. And so your factory is a 24/7 factory that is just inherently exhausting. It's also tiring because every decision does go through debate and vetting across the four of you, which in the end, it's also a great thing like efficiency and broader scope. It's wonderful that ideas get vetted so well because they are rock solid when they come out at the end. But the process, again, as you know, is extremely tiring. It's kind of a bittersweet revelation that something so good does have a high price to it.
Tim Cynova:
When you first gave us the research that you had pulled from the assessment, it's like a 31 page document. And you sat down with us and our board chair, Russell Willis Taylor, and just walk through it. One of the slides was, the model is exhausting for leaders. And I'm going to totally have to bleep this, but a sound was like, no (beep), Kelly.
Kelly Kienzle:
I think it was important to bring that out because it is something that is so enticing. I think that other organizations see it. They're like, we can do four times as much work and we can be so much more effective and we can have an expert in every decision. Let's do it. I think it's good to put up a great big caution sign. Say yes, and watch out for this. And that frankly, that's the second horizon of this work with this model is answering the question, how do we make this sustainable? Because even with a marathoners pace, this is still not sustainable long-term. Right, Tim?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. There's a flip side to this where ... I've been a CEO, before I've been an executive director, a sole executive director before. And to me, that's a really lonely place. No one else in the organizations where I worked had been in that role before, and understood what that was, and the weight that you hold. Especially, when money gets tight and you're trying to make payroll, and you don't have anyone else really inside the organization to go to. And while it is an exhausting model, there are three other people with you in that journey, who understand exactly what's going on, and that you can turn to. And for us, we have a weekly tactical meeting every Wednesday. And that hour is the most important hour of my week. That I look forward to because we wrestle with a really challenging things.
Tim Cynova:
We have really tough conversations. But it's the one time I'm in a room with people who totally get what is going on, and will challenge and make better the things that we're trying to do by going through that leadership team process. So it is an exhausting thing. But on the flip side, a lot of other executive positions are exhausting as well and you oftentimes don't have that backup. You have to look to mentors and executive coaches and other people to help bring some of those things. While, those are still really important things to have for any leader, it's not always that you have something like that inside of your organization.
Kelly Kienzle:
Yeah. It's true. One element that does exist, though, within every organization is the rest of the staff. And this is another discovery that came out through the research, which was by having this shared leadership model, you guys inspired the rest of the team to think more collaboratively. To consider how they can enact shared leadership at their level of the organization and with their teams and in their departments. And because it created that kind of culture shift, I think that's where the opportunity lies for the leadership team to offload some of its work. To again, live the mission of bringing equity to all by thinking and constantly pushing yourselves to identify what responsibilities and tasks you can share with the rest of the staff.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things that came up related to that is, we saw this in the research before we adopted the model. Is that rather than just one line of succession, it's X times how many leaders you have, because you need ... I mean, we need four lines of succession. Because the person or people who might replace me, are likely not the same people who will replace our chief technology officer. It's even more exhausting because you're looking for all those different things in the combination, while you're trying to take what exists on this leadership team as it spreads to the organization so that more people understand how it works and that they would be ready to slide into these roles. But it's even more exhausting because it's just not, that person will take over if the leader leaves. That's a really convoluted way of saying something. So I hope to God that I can edit that one slightly more concise.
Kelly Kienzle:
No. I think it touches on the point about how having the shared leadership model, yes, you do now have to have four succession lines instead of one. Yet, there are also a couple benefits of that. One that the staff pointed out, and I think the board did as well, is that it will be less traumatic when one of you eventually leaves as compared to a single CEO model. When that CEO leaves, that creates significant anxiety and stress within an organization. Here at Fractured Atlas, it wouldn't create about a quarter of that. I think another piece of it is that the responsibility of filling in the gap when one person leaves can be shared, again, by the other three, because all of you are so intimately involved in every decision. You do have, I believe, far more knowledge in IT now than you did 18 or 24 months ago.
Tim Cynova:
That could be a very dangerous thing, Kelly.
Kelly Kienzle:
It could be.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. When working well, the shared leadership model is much more resilient for that team, for the organization. Because Yeah, you're not reliant upon one person who holds a lot of information that may or may not be shared in various ways with the organization more broadly. Let's look more specifically at some of the themes. I shared these in a blog post about the assessment process that we put together. So for those who really want to dive into this a bit more, there's a blog post that has sort of four different stages or four different components of our assessment process, and then the 17 themes that came out of Kelly's interviews with staff. Why don't you take a moment to explain sort of how this actually worked? What did you do? How many people did you talk to? Where were they in the organization? And then how did you pull your themes together for us?
Kelly Kienzle:
Sure. So the way the process worked was, we interviewed every manager in the organization. I interviewed them. And that was six managers and then I interviewed all, I believe, eight board members, and ask them all the same series of questions with a few additional questions just for the board. I ensured that all of those interviews would be kept completely confidential so that people could speak freely. So the output of this process included no direct quotes, no attributed comments. So people felt safe to speak frankly and plainly.
Kelly Kienzle:
After I conducted all of the interviews, I went back through my notes and pulled out the common themes. I defined a common theme as the same idea or sentiment shared by at least three people. And I put just those common themes into the summary report, which I then shared directly with the four of you plus the board. The reason I do those common themes is so that you would know when you got the summary report, everything in there was real and substantive. There were no one off comments. There was nobody's bad afternoon when they were feeling grumpy. It was something that had been reiterated by others. So that was the process for it.
Tim Cynova:
Was there anything that came up that didn't fit the three time theme that you're like, that seems pretty significant, but only one person said that.
Kelly Kienzle:
No. I mean, in my mind, then it's not significant. [crosstalk 01:01:17].
Tim Cynova:
This is the way it works. Three people say, actually ...
Kelly Kienzle:
I feel like I'm dissing on that one person. So just to clarify, so it's very real for that one person, then that's something that needs focused individual attention. It's not something that is relevant to the organization as a whole. And again, we were evaluating the efficacy of the model in the organization. So yeah, a one off comment, just by nature is not relevant in the context of a whole organization.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. I think that's a useful clarification too. It is a real thing for that person. But it might not be maybe real within the organization or-
Kelly Kienzle:
I heard someone refer to it once, slightly harsher terms than I would use, but as tyranny of the minority when you let one person shape the overall course of a much larger entity. No tyranny of the minority here.
Tim Cynova:
The other thing we had talked about going into it, because it was looking back, primarily looking back at a year in sort of change was how do we adapt for the recency bias? Because we all have it. It's like you get asked something and you remember immediately what happened or within the past month or so, and you forget that there are 12 other months that we're talking about. And because things at Fractured Atlas, specifically, in this instance, move so quickly and change, we often forget that, yeah, that happened in the same 12-month period. And so part of the process that you engaged in was that you were having the conversations and you would sort of help people adapt for that recency bias as they were talking, so that it wasn't just the immediacy of what they remember.
Kelly Kienzle:
Exactly, yes. So if they would give me an example from last week, all right, I would ask them, so how prevalent is that trend? How often do you see that? Would you consider that a minor or major theme? And get them to give me a little more context for the size of that issue. Because you're right, we do have that recency bias, and it's a natural way for our minds to go. But I would try to draw them out and get up on the balcony and see the broader picture of how the model had been working over the last 12 months.
Tim Cynova:
Well, there's also the negativity bias that you also just highlight. That as humans, this is something that we have. And so the questions that you were asking, were sort of reframing or giving the benefit of the doubt or whatever it might be. So what's the learning here? Because a lot of 360s, some of the reasons people don't like 360s is because people confidentially just offload all the stuff that's wrong, and then it's up to the person who's co-leading to make sense of it. And a 360 done wrong is far more harmful than a 360 well.
Kelly Kienzle:
That's absolutely true. So I use two things to combat that. One, I would remind them that we're not talking about the individual performance of the four of you. We're talking about the model. So to separate out behaviors of people from operation of the model, and it's the latter that we were focusing on. The second thing I did was to ask, instead of giving me feedback, give me feed forward, which is a concept that Marshall Goldsmith put forward a couple of decades ago now. About how it is far more effective for the recipient of input or feedback to receive that as feedforward, which means it's something that is phrased in the positive and phrased in the future tense. So it describes what they can do going forward. What is the positive behavior that the team would like to see from that person in the future? So I would ask feedforward questions about the model. To say, what would you like to see this model be instead going forward?
Tim Cynova:
We covered a number of the themes already that you pulled together, that the model represents encourage diversity, reflects specifically at Fractured Atlas, our values and mission, especially our commitment around anti-racism and anti-oppression. It's exhausting. It's better than a single CEO model. What are some of the other things that came out for you that you think are really important to highlight?
Kelly Kienzle:
One of my very favorite themes was how this model helped people be bold in their creativity. The model for the staff provided a kind of safety net for their new crazy, innovative ideas. Because they knew that if they took their new and crazy idea to the leadership team, that four people would be evaluating it, poking at it, debating it to determine how successful it could be. And so that made the staff feel that they could be as innovative as their imaginations would take them. And that's after building trust as a foundation in an organization, fostering innovation is the true magic fairy dust that every organization wants to sprinkle over their teams. So that was exciting to find out that simply the presence of the model created that.
Kelly Kienzle:
I think another theme that emerged that was exciting was how the model helped unsilo the organization. Because so many organizations struggle with silos, because we have to. We have to have departments across any organization of complexity so that the IT function runs effectively, the operations run effectively, et cetera. And so silos crop up. However, with this shared leadership model, where the four of you are the horizontal band across those four what would be silos, that created a very real connection across those. And so ideas traveled faster across the different silos is what the staff told me. It was easier to get input and perspectives from different groups on changes or ideas that were being batted around. And so that gave a vibrancy and cohesion to the organization that I think is just a wonderful byproduct of this model.
Tim Cynova:
We've touched on this a bit already. But for organizations who think, is this kind of leadership team structure right for us? What would you counsel them to consider?
Kelly Kienzle:
So in addition to considering the potential players and their propensity for trust, I think another characteristic is the mission. Asking themselves how strong is the mission in our organization and how deeply is it felt by the potential leaders we're considering to put in this role? And the reason that I say mission is that one, this role of being a shared leader is demanding, and so you really, really have to believe in the work that you're doing. That is the only thing that can drive you. And because if each person in the shared leadership model believes in that mission, then you are all ready and inherently tied together. You already have that common ground that is deep, and that can help you be that cohesive team from the get go.
Kelly Kienzle:
Because I think that also creates mutual respect for one another. Because you know if the other three people on the team believe in the mission as deeply as you do, that means you guys shared some of the same values. And if you share some of the same values, then there's respect there. Which means when you do bring up an idea, and it gets debated and eventually shut down by your colleagues, it's okay. Because you respect them. They have an opinion that you respect, it's also okay because you know they're shooting it down for the sake of the mission of the organization. And that's what you believe in too. So I think that sense of mission is another characteristic that an organization can look at to determine, are we right for this shared leadership model?
Tim Cynova:
So Kelly, do you have any closing thoughts? Well, probably not final thoughts on the topic, but closing thoughts on shared leadership?
Kelly Kienzle:
Yeah. I think shared leadership is a fantastic model that every organization can strive for. And if it seems like it's something that is too far out of reach, I would challenge you on that and have you look at your organization now and see where you already have shared leadership. Because I would suspect there are several ways in which any organization already does exhibit shared leadership. And so the question then just simply becomes, how can we make that shared leadership broader? How can we make it more embedded in the processes that we do? And how can we shape it so that it reflects the mission of our organization? And then you get started doing that.
Tim Cynova:
Kelly, it's a pleasure getting to work with you on this work. And thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Kelly Kienzle:
I've loved every minute of it. Thanks, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
To close out this episode, I'm now joined by two cultural sector powerhouses, Holly Sidford and Russell Willis Taylor. Both of whom I've had the wonderful privilege to work closely with over the last decade, who have served as mentors and friends, and also as members of the Fractured Atlas Board of Directors during our transition to a shared leadership model. I'm excited to get their thoughts on the topic. Holly and Russell, welcome to the podcast.
Holly Sidford:
Nice to be here.
Russell Willis Taylor:
Thank you.
Tim Cynova:
You've both served together for a number of years in the chair and vice chair roles of the Fractured Atlas Board. Holly, you initially were in the Chair role with Russell as Vice Chair before you swapped roles a year so back? As such, you both were in those board leadership roles working together when we started our exploration into shared leadership, an exploration that coincided with a founder transition. Holly, can you start off by describing what the process was like from the board's perspective? What was going on "behind the scenes" if you will?
Holly Sidford:
Be happy to. I guess I would start by saying, it didn't suck. It was a very, very interesting dynamic process. All the board members had been serving on the board of Fractured Atlas under the leadership of the former executive director, the single Executive Director, Adam Huttler, and had worked very successfully with him in that singular role. When he decided to leave and the opportunity to consider on a shared leadership model came forward, the board was very engaged with us. It was a very interesting idea to us. It was a challenging idea. It had a lot of risks involved. But also we saw great opportunity, particularly to advance some core values that the organization held. That is, distributed leadership, recognizing multiple varieties of talent, actually, affirmative placement of leaders of color.
Holly Sidford:
So it wasn't a slam dunk by any means. But it was a very interesting process of considering what Fractured Atlas needed, what these four individuals brought to the next phase of our development, and how we could support such an innovative model. Just say one other thing, which is, that at the time of the transition, we realized it would raise new questions for how the board functioned. And we knew that, that would take some time to iterate and develop. And I would say 18 months later, we're still engaged in that, but affirmatively engaged in it in a way that still doesn't suck.
Tim Cynova:
Russell, what kind of questions did you have about the shared leadership model when we first started talking about it?
Russell Willis Taylor:
Well, one of the things that I love about being on the Fractured Atlas board is that the default position is not to go to the default position. There's always, should we keep doing it this way? Under Holly's leadership, the board was able to stop and not just get on autopilot about how we were going to replace an outgoing leader. There was also a lot of interest in talent retention, if you don't mind my referring to you and your three co-leader's talent. We had really good people and we didn't want to lose them. And that's not the only or the main reason that we did it, but we were very lucky. We started knowing that we had people who were interested in this kind of experiment.
Russell Willis Taylor:
The questions with regard to how the board would perform is with what would we replace the kind of traditional pipeline of accountability and information that comes from a single person? Where you get to know that person and you begin to be able to communicate almost in shorthand about what's happening and about what their feelings are about the organization. Now, we were going to have four people that needed to do that. And I think we're still finding our way on that. But I also, what I liked so much about this adventure, is I really believe that this outdated notion that we have that leaders are supposed to look like and sound like and be like, it's actually much more kind of bred into our subconscious than we think it is.
Russell Willis Taylor:
By having a four person leadership team, all of whom are very different from one another, but who have complementary abilities, talents and experiences. It's a constant reminder that we shouldn't have an assumption about what a leader looks like or what a leader sounds like or how a leader brings an organization together. It's just this constant reminder.
Holly Sidford:
Could I add just one thing to that, which is, that the idea of a shared leadership model came from the staff. And to me at the time and still reflects a new generation or an upcoming generation of leaders who expect collaboration. It's not that they don't understand that organizations have hierarchy and need accountability and all that. But they are interested each in their own way in a different approach, a more collaborative approach to the role of leader and the advancement of the organization. So that was really, really an important thing. We wouldn't have come up with it on our own as a board.
Russell Willis Taylor:
I think that's true.
Tim Cynova:
Well, in this more collaborative approach is an experiment that is risky, and it's unfamiliar and not traditional and nonprofit boards are not often thought of as risk taking, cutting edge innovative bodies. Can you talk about what that was like for the board to wrestle with something that is more risky than just the status quo of here's another single CEO, and what questions might still exist for the board?
Russell Willis Taylor:
Well, I think the whole culture of Fractured Atlas since its founding has been one of embracing risk in a way that many nonprofits don't. And some of that has to seep through the board. So while we are in some ways risk averse, because our charge is to keep the organization going, not necessarily in perpetuity, but to keep it going, as opposed to the operational charge. So we're probably a little bit more risk embracing than many boards because that's part of the culture of Fractured Atlas, is to experiment and to do new things. Having said that, it didn't feel risky to me because the four people were so good at what they did. And I have to admit that there were some things that I hadn't anticipated. Touch we're very lucky we haven't had huge problems crop up.
Russell Willis Taylor:
We have realized the board needs to communicate, by which I mean, listening as well as talking in a different way with the team than perhaps we would with a single leader. But we haven't had something kind of yet blow up in our faces. But it didn't feel risky because the four of you were so good at what you did, and knew there was alignment between the direction we wanted to go in and the direction that you were already moving in. It would have felt unspeakably risky to me if we had brought in four new people to do this. I think that I probably would have had to label that reckless.
Holly Sidford:
I would only add two things. One that it would have been a bigger risk to go with a single leader. So we did debate this calculated risk or assessing risk. I think if we had said to the leadership team, no, actually we're going to go through a search. We're going to hire one individual leader. I think, if not one, if not all, many would have left the organization because they were themselves so committed to this concept of collaboration. So risk in whose eyes? That's one thing. The other thing is that once we decided, then we put into place staff and board some structures for how we would move forward.
Holly Sidford:
So it wasn't just, we have four new leaders, everything's going to be dancing and happy. We said, here's how we're going to define the roles. Here's how we're going to monitor progress. Here's how we're going to deal with the departure of any one of the members of the leadership team. We worked hard at the very outset in creating some parameters for how it would work. And staff was fantastic in this. Tim, in particular. Just giving ourselves some guideposts that we could rely on. So it wasn't a completely uncharted plan.
Russell Willis Taylor:
I think that, just add to that, we did have a map. What I really enjoy about being on this board is we were perfectly content with the fact that not everything could be mapped. That there were going to be places where maybe I would say there be dragons and we didn't really know what was there. And that I think is where the Fractured Atlas board compared to other boards that I'm on, I'm certainly not universally knowledgeable about all boards, but compared to a lot of other boards with which I've been engaged, the Fractured Atlas board was a little more comfortable with ambiguity than many boards. And I think that's good. I think in the current environment, having a board that's comfortable with ambiguity is probably pretty important.
Tim Cynova:
What do you think are the key criteria for this model to be successful?
Russell Willis Taylor:
We got to have the right people. It all comes down to have you got the right team? And is that team committed? If they don't come to it with the chemistry between them being healthy, are they committed to making the chemistry between them healthy?
Holly Sidford:
Are you talking about staff or staff and board?
Russell Willis Taylor:
Well, staff first and foremost. I think the board has to be ... You've got four people generating information, I think the board has to be more attentive and yet non-intrusive in perhaps more detailed information to understand what's going on. That can be tricky. Like many boards, we have a lot of people who've run organizations, I've run an organization and you have to know when you need to step back and go, okay, I'm not doing this. Someone else is doing this. So we need to be in receipt of information that helps us make informed decisions. But perhaps on a more regular basis than we would if there was just one person.
Holly Sidford:
I think people in the talent it's really key. But I think everybody has to want in, has to want to engage with the experiment, stay in the experiment, whether challenges that come up during the experiment. I mean, people need to want to make it work. And I think with that comes a willingness to be candid and a determination to work on candor and building trust. I mean, I think in a lot of cases, there's very little trust between the board and the staff of an organization, particularly executive director. Anyway, people are hiding certain kinds of information or protecting their territory a bit. Not that we've solved that but I do think that there's a desire on the part of board members and staff to be more candid than maybe truth in the conventional situation.
Russell Willis Taylor:
I think that's a really important point. Because one of the things that makes this work and makes it enjoyable and a learning opportunity for both board and staff is a radical form of transparency. Where the leadership team feels like they can tell us stuff that they don't want us to act on and they don't want us to overreact. Just we need to know these things. Where I think we still have some scope for improvement is how the board reciprocates that radical transparency. Not that we're hiding anything but that we regularly communicate sort of what we're thinking and how we're feeling about things. Because silence or the absence of information, we are hard wired to take as, I wonder if something is not as it should be out there in the environment. I think the will is absolutely there and the personal relationships are absolutely there. But we haven't systematically introduced a way of making communication rapid and a two-way street in quite the way that I think we need to.
Holly Sidford:
What you just said makes me think about another item, which is new in my mind. I do think that another thing that's required of a multi-member leadership team is a relatively small board. Now, if we had 25 or 30 board members-
Russell Willis Taylor:
Absolutely.
Holly Sidford:
I mean, we would be in the Hudson River right now. It would never have worked. So I think that scaling the size of the leadership team to the size of the board is important. We happen to have a relatively small board when this happened. But we're now thinking that we don't probably want to increase the board because of this communication issue.
Russell Willis Taylor:
Right. That then prompts another thought for me. It's easy to think about this staff talent was in place and that was all completely apparent. But it's also important to think about what conditions at board level had been in place for quite a while. Under Holly's chairmanship, we had already Ready devised a slightly different way of the board working. Board meetings work half the compliance and the work that a board has to do in law and that is expected of a board. And then half a kind of no judgment brainstorming or learning. So we had already rehearsed some behaviors that help with this transition.
Russell Willis Taylor:
The second thing is because this board is not required, although we all support the fundraising, and we want to be as engaged as we can, because of the financial model behind Fractured Atlas, this is not principally a fundraising board. So you don't need 30 or 40 people. And I think that Holly's absolutely right, the smaller the group, the more likely you are to be able to build a very high degree of trust. And that's important.
Tim Cynova:
When I was talking to Kelly Kienzle for the interview earlier in this episode, she and I were talking about the issue of succession planning. And it came up rather early when we started to study this model that you were no longer looking at one line of succession, you're looking at X number of the people on the team. So we were now looking at four people for succession lines, because someone who can replace the chief program officer might not be the same people who can replace the chief technology officer. And then she brought up something I hadn't thought about before, was that the speed at which a shared leadership team can work is almost times the number of members as well. I'm still processing this, but a single CEO can work only so quickly.
Tim Cynova:
When you have for people, it's not times for because there are switching costs and coordination costs. But you each can work faster than just a single person. And then she took that to say, it actually is that much more challenging to build trust, because a board is no longer building trust with a single person. You're building trust with four people and you certainly to build trust at four times the speed to just stay up with where you typically were. So it feels like shared leadership introduces some really big challenges between how quickly the board and staff and organization move and coordinate. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on whether you're skeptical of those multipliers or what that might prompt for you in your own thinking about board, staff collaboration when it comes to shared leadership models.
Holly Sidford:
I can I add one and one. So anything beyond that, I don't do times tables. So I'm skeptical of the multiplying factor. I don't think it's that simple at all. I think that there are, I can't finish the metaphor, but it's not a simple equation. And a lot has to do with the skill of a given member of the leadership team in their job. It's not just how fast they can run, it's how well they can do the work and how well they communicate and coordinate their work with the others. So you can have four members, but they could be functioning at a minus one in terms of effectiveness, because they don't have autonomy. Not that a single executive director has autonomy completely, but we don't have four countries, we have one country that's trying to move into the future. So that's kind of garbled. But the point is, I don't think it's as easy as a multiplication of members times speed.
Russell Willis Taylor:
I think you do. I agree. You have four times the ability to generate ideas and start new programs and all that. But actually, we had that before. We just had somebody at the head of the line saying this is what we're doing. And I think that any addition of speed is offset by the fact that the consensus based leadership that you guys have in place, there has to be agreement if there are implications for another program before you launch something new. I do think that one of the things that I've learned about that I didn't think through before is how positive if the four of you trust each other, I don't have to talk to everybody on the team. Because if I talk to you, it's going to filter through to the team.
Holly Sidford:
And what you say, what Tim says to you in response represents the others. Or he will say ... Actually, we need Pallavi in this conversation because it's her perspective. I can't represent her perspective.
Russell Willis Taylor:
Right. Exactly, right. And I think the learning for us as a board, now how do we replicate that on the board where you don't have to talk to every board member? Or I'm fastidious, I'm trying to be fastidious about when I have a conversation with the team, I share it with everybody. How do we absolutely bake that into the culture of the board? That we're sharing information in exactly the same way. At the moment, it's not a problem, but you can see how if we were to launch three new programs at the same time, and they needed resource, all three of them needed resource, and there were board members that were interested in each individual program. You can see how it could become a problem where one board member knows more about something than a ...
Russell Willis Taylor:
So we're trying to figure out how do we get aboard that encounters one is another episodically because we are a first board in the sense that we're not all co-located. How do we get a board that interacts with the organization episodically and encounters one another episodically, to have the same consistency and collaborative trust that you do when it's harder to form the habit, because it's not happening all the time. It's happening, and I feel optimistic about it. I would say that, wouldn't I.
Tim Cynova:
Kelly Kienzle helped us create the assessment process that we used last year, to help assess this specific model, not the individuals in the model, as part of the board's duty to evaluate on a regular basis the CEO. She gave us a 30 page document and there were 17 themes that we've all read and discussed in various meetings. I highlighted a couple words from the themes. I want to see what might resonate with you. But the things about the model encourages diversity, reflects our values and mission, effective, efficient, bold, frustrating, difficult, exhausting, better than a single CEO model, addresses vulnerabilities, reimagine how leadership and board work together. Those and beyond. When Kelly delivered this, what really resonated with you?
Russell Willis Taylor:
Well, I'm biased because I know her work and like her work. So I recognize my bias. I really respect her thinking on these things. I think I was really pleased that what we were seeing in that list and the discussion that was outlined in her paper, was something that embrace the complexity of what we're doing, but didn't make a meal out of it. It's like, yeah, this is great. But here are the pieces of it. I like the fact that in conversation with the team while we were going through Kelly's process, because I think I was probably more closely involved with it in the beginning stages than anyone else as chair of the board. What I really liked was we were recognizing that for everything that's good about this, there's something that could potentially not be good, but we weren't getting bogged down in the stuff that couldn't be good.
Russell Willis Taylor:
We were just saying, okay, let's recognize that. There is a pothole. How do we drive around that? As opposed to, oh gosh, terrible things could happen. I do think that this model is a model for optimists. I don't think this is a model for pessimists. I think you would find that Debbie Downer should not be part of a four person leadership team. Because one of the benefits is that you do bully one another up when necessary. But I think overall, there has to be the assumption of positive intentionality in making this work. Both in Kelly's assessment tools as you guys were building them and the way you were approaching it, there was the assumption. Not naive, but the assumption that there'd be positive intent behind most of this.
Holly Sidford:
What she said. And what I recall being hit by Kelly's report was that we were living our values and being brave about taking the next step on those values. We were willing to embrace something that was uncertain and certainly in our context, untried. What I was also struck by was the concern about the exhaustion the staff was experiencing. I wasn't completely sure whether that was actually the model that was exhausting, or just the transition that was exhausting, or what came with the transition, which was a reflection and review of pretty much everything that we were doing, and resorting about the priorities for the organization's next phase of work. But I do think that this is not easy. The decision to change the management of the first year, two years of the change, and maybe that's true into the future. But this is not for Debbie Downer. It's not for the tired and sleepy either. It requires a kind of energy on the part of all that are involved, which we may not have anticipated.
Russell Willis Taylor:
I think that relates to your question about succession planning, your comment about succession planning. We have the opportunity. We're hoping that we don't have any ... We don't have to deal with this on a practical level for a while. But when someone leaves, there's the opportunity to ask a lot of questions about the structure of the organization that you wouldn't if you have a chief executive, she or he leaves, you go and find another chief executive. We know if one of you, God forbid, were to say, well, it's time for me to do something else, that we would have as a team, a leadership team and board together as a thinking team, we would have a conversation about, should this still be for people or should we look at whether it's three people?
Russell Willis Taylor:
Now, again, something that I think a lot of people ... We live in a culture where there's the mythology of action orientation being always positive, which is not true. And the level of discussion and debate that needs to happen every time there's a change, some people would find it ... Some board member personality types might find that tedious. I don't find it tedious. I think organizations don't ask enough of those kind of structural and existential questions. We have a built in way of making sure that we have to stop and ask those questions, because our succession planning has to be a creative exercise, not rote memorization. I'm pleased about that.
Holly Sidford:
Earlier, you talked about the CEO function. I do think that this whole process has pushed us to think more about functions as opposed to job descriptions. What's the leadership function in an organization? What we've said now is that is not embedded in one person. That's an array of responsibilities and talents that can be broken up and distributed in different ways. And not only that, I think it's raised questions or suggested that some of the leadership function traditionally held by the CEO, can be distributed into the organization beyond the four members or the three members of the two members who are now the "top people".So this has been very interesting to me, as we think about functions. Because I do think that cultural institution generally are required now to think again about their function. What is it that they are here to do and how are they going to do that in a contemporary context?
Tim Cynova:
There's reflection and tension that came in this that also extended to, how do we become a virtual organization? In the same way, what is it conference room for? What do we do in that conference room? Are there other ways for us to do that thing if we don't have a physical conference room? And then going on to the next thing. It was a part of that same exploration into questioning what it is? How we do it? Is there another way of doing it than the typical way from the book about how to run organizations?
Holly Sidford:
Yeah, exactly. And what's the central now that we have to retain? And what did we used to think was essential, but is no longer so essential given that it's 2020? I think that's a continuous process that we're now engaged in much more consciously, which is good.
Tim Cynova:
So for organizations to think, is this kind of leadership model right for me? Is there anything else that we've not covered that you think, yes, you really need to think about this before you take the leap into a shared leadership model exploration?
Russell Willis Taylor:
Well, I'd like to introduce a few questions on that cosmic quiz that people should be filling out. First of all, if your board is dysfunctional, please don't do this, because you'll make four people unhappy instead of just one. So that would be number one. Number two is if communication is not good, you need to get that better before you embark on this kind of adventure. Number three, is if the board's not prepared to be really actively engaged in understanding what the operations of the organization are, without intruding on the operations of the organization, this probably is not going to be a smooth transition. And number four, if the board is inextricably linked to outdated notions of hierarchy, this is not for you.
Holly Sidford:
I would only add to that great list if the organization is in a financial crisis. Stay away. This takes some runway and a fair amount of financial confidence to be able to work out the details and make it work.
Russell Willis Taylor:
Absolutely right.
Holly Sidford:
What would you add to that, Tim?
Tim Cynova:
You need a reserve of energy. Kelly and I were laughing when we went down the list and I was recounting when she delivered the report. And one of the slides said, shared leadership model is exhausting for leaders. And I said, this is going to you have to get bleeped out. But no, (bleep). You're totally [inaudible 01:36:25]. It's a different way of working that requires ... With that intention, you need to be much more on top of how things are working. Autopilot doesn't work.
Holly Sidford:
Well, that relates to the speed with which ... I mean, that equation of numbers times ... Her equation about just a multiple of the number. Not true. In part because of that, if some people don't have that reserve, and can't draw on it, it's going to slow the whole thing down.
Tim Cynova:
There's a catch-22 in that as well though, because in having three other members on this team who understand what you're dealing with, it's a different place than I've had in other organizations that I've been the single executive director where, for the most part, I was just the only ... I had other people I was working with, but no one understood the level of the things that I was dealing with in that organization. So I had to find mentors and friends and other people outside of the organization. So at the same time it's more exhausting than just the regular model, you have that camaraderie and support and understanding in that group that makes it almost net equal or almost equalizes that. So there's pros and cons to that.
Russell Willis Taylor:
And how would you characterize ... Now we're going to turn and in interview you.
Tim Cynova:
We just run out of tape. So I'm not sure.
Russell Willis Taylor:
I'm sorry. We're out of time. Matt Damon cannot be on the show tonight. How would you characterize this as, be careful what you wish for or I told you I was right? I mean, as an experiment. Because there have been some revelations for this staff as well.
Tim Cynova:
I did a lot of research before we jumped in. Looking at a lot of different organizations and different models of shared leadership and criteria of high performing teams and what needs to exist. For the most part, pros and the cons, I remember talking with Kelly, yep, all those things were on our list and those are the pros. The things like trust, you have to have a great degree of trust. There has to be psychological safety in the team. And then the flip sides, all those things were there, it's a little difficult to separate our transition into entirely virtual organization from this. So to say this is specific to the shared leadership team, but at the same time, halfway through our time into shared leadership, we are transitioning the organization to become entirely virtual.
Tim Cynova:
Which added another complexity, more complexity around change and change management, to how people are adjusting to this different way of working at Fractured Atlas, where you start to have different conversations. Which might make it more exhausting if you just went to shared leadership model without transitioning the organization to be entirely virtual, I'm sure it would feel less exhausting. For me it's intertwined and it's tough to pull out, this is the shared leadership part, this is the entirely virtual transition, and then this is just business as usual for Fractured Atlas.
Russell Willis Taylor:
Success of either virtual working conditions or shared leadership puts some really heavy onus on communication, communication community all the time. So you're kind of doubling. I mean, you could say it was a really appalling piece of judgment by the leadership team and the board to do both at the same time, but it wasn't, we hope. Either one of those things would require stronger communication, more regular communication, a more intuitive way of communicating. And when you do the two of them together, you really are adding quite a lot.
Holly Sidford:
Could I add one more thing to that? Which is that we embrace the shared leadership model after you'd actually been working it for a year, more or less, while the then executive director was on a sabbatical. So you had already piloted it. And while you were piloting it, one member of the team was not in New York, was not in the office every day, was essentially virtual. And then another member of the team decided to move outside of New York. Two points I want to make. One, shared leadership model has to be based on trust and some prior collaborative experience.
Holly Sidford:
But also it enables organizations to tap talent outside of the location of the organization. And that that is really a virtue. Not only does it allow you to hire somebody who doesn't want to move to where you are, but it allows somebody who you already have in the team to move where they want to go. So it seems to me that that was one of the kernels of becoming totally virtual. Is in and of itself, you don't have to go totally virtual and you can still have some members of the leadership team which are basically off site.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. It was all very organic. It just felt like that was the next thing. As we close, any other thoughts you have on the topic that we haven't discussed? That you think, if this doesn't make it in the podcast, this would have been a waste of time.
Holly Sidford:
I would just say that it's an ongoing experiment, and likely to be so into the future. And that that's a good thing because it requires us to stay alert, sort of in the moment if you pardon the expression, and not default to old behaviors or old concepts of what the organization is, what leadership is, or what the board's role is.
Russell Willis Taylor:
I am as I often do, anyone listening to this who knows me will laugh hilariously, I like to compare this to quantum physics, which I never do, obviously. That will be like a sports metaphor for me. I mean, what is she talking about? She has no idea. But in quantum physics, one of the premises that's been proven is, by virtue of looking at something, you change the nature of that thing. I think that's what we've done here. By virtue of looking at the leadership format, if you like, and saying, does it have to be that way? We've changed the way the organization works just by posing that question because we said, we're going to test that assumption. Does everybody have to be in the same room? We're going to test that assumption. Posing the question changes the way you view the organization, giving board members and staff members the permission to ask those sorts of very basic questions.
Russell Willis Taylor:
The challenge is to not do that so often that nobody ever knows where they are and what are we doing. There's a joke in our field that you can always tell in art conference, because the first 20 minutes will be spent talking about whether or not the conference was properly titled. Is this really what it should be called? I kind of love that. It's a ritual of our field, where language does matter and we do want to make sure that we're expressing ourselves clearly. But you don't want to be reinventing things so often that it's just disorienting and dispiriting for people. But having said that, particularly if we want younger people in an organization to look at things and say, well, really is the status quo the most positive and healthy way for us to proceed? You have to create that environment in which it's okay to do that. This creates an environment in which it's okay to do that. You look at something and by asking the question, you change the nature of the way you do business.
Tim Cynova:
Holly and Russell, it's a huge privilege to know and get to work with you. And thank you so much for being on podcast.
Holly Sidford:
Thank you for asking us.
Russell Willis Taylor:
Thank you.
Tim Cynova:
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