Co-Management and Shared Leadership: How to Make Co-CEO Structures Work

El Hassane Ben Ahmed has worked inside and alongside co-management structures at different points in his career. Each time, the initial framing was the same: two leaders, complementary capabilities, stronger together. And each time, what actually played out was more complicated than the design suggested.

Good intentions rarely caused the tension, he writes in Chapter III.1 of The Lessons That Stayed. The source was structural. Decisions requiring agreement slowed down. Accountability became contested. Direct reports received conflicting signals.

“Co-management does not reduce the need for leadership. It raises it. The standard of clarity required to make shared authority functional is higher, not lower, than the standard required for individual leadership.”

Why organisations choose shared leadership

Co-management at executive level is increasingly common. Organisations adopt it to handle complexity, to combine complementary expertise, and to share the load of leading at scale. It takes many forms: formal co-CEO structures, joint venture leadership teams, and the growing practice of co-leading major programmes with explicitly shared authority.

The model that worked

What Procter and Gamble understood as business instinct, governance research has since confirmed: the arrangements that work are those where the governance design was explicit before the pressure came.

The governance of shared authority

Robert Monks and Nell Minow argue that accountability is only meaningful when there is a direct, transparent link between authority, responsibility and consequence. Shared leadership puts pressure on every part of that link.

Decision rights are the foundation

Michael Jensen and William Meckling argue that any organisational structure works only when decision rights are aligned with knowledge and incentives. In practice, that means each co-leader should own the decisions where they have the best information and bear the consequences.

The escalation deficit

When two leaders disagree and there is no defined way to resolve it, the disagreement grows. Research by Afzalur Rahim finds that the absence of a defined escalation path strongly predicts conflict escalation. The worst time to design that path is during the conflict it is meant to resolve.

The psychology of shared authority

Structure is necessary but not sufficient. Co-management also depends on trust between the co-leaders: trust in each other’s competence, intentions and reliability.

Amy Edmondson’s concept of psychological safety applies to a pair of co-leaders as much as to a team. If either one feels it is risky to disagree openly with the other, disagreements go underground, and teams start receiving two different versions of the leadership’s intent.

Common failure modes

• Assuming shared values make explicit governance unnecessary. This is the single most common failure. Alignment on strategy does not settle who decides what on a Tuesday afternoon.
• Waiting until stakes are high. Samuel Bacharach and Edward Lawler documented that authority conflicts become much harder to resolve as their stakes rise.
• Sending mixed signals. Direct reports quickly learn which co-leader to ask for which answer, and the organisation splits along that line.
• Never revisiting the design. Circumstances change. A framework that fitted the first year may not fit the third.

A framework for designing co-management

1. Map decision rights before you begin. List the major categories of decisions and assign each one: leader A, leader B, or joint. For joint decisions, define what “agreement” means.
2. Define the escalation path. Decide in advance what happens when you disagree: a time limit, a tie-breaker, a board member or a neutral adviser.
3. Agree on how you communicate. Resolve disagreements in private. Present decisions jointly once made. Decide who speaks on which subjects.
4. Practise disagreement deliberately. Borrow the Wright brothers’ habit and argue each other’s positions on important decisions.
5. Review the framework regularly. Chris Argyris and Donald Schön argue that lasting effectiveness requires questioning the frameworks themselves, not only correcting errors within them. Schedule that review.

Clarity as the foundation

The Roman consulship lasted five centuries not because it always worked, but because, when it worked, it worked through clarity. From the Republic to the Wright brothers’ workshop in Dayton, from a Cincinnati soap factory to a Microsoft boardroom, the lesson is the same: the co-leadership arrangements that work are almost always those where the hard conversations happened early.

“Clarity, in the end, is not what makes shared leadership comfortable. It’s what makes it sustainable.”