Laying a Healthy Foundation for a Fieldwide Transition to Shared Leadership

We are frequently reflecting on how our identities and our shared leadership inform accountability…This requires deep listening, agreeing to disagree, radical support, and transparency. In a world that emphasizes the solo leader and ‘genius,’ and that wants to attribute credit (or blame) to one key person, the trust and buy-in that is required for shared leadership is palpable. It is a daily exercise, a commitment, and like any living thing, requires care.

—David Howse and Ronee Penoi, “Decolonizing Arts Leadership Through Shared Black and Indigenous Leadership”

Preamble

The idea for this series predated the United States presidential election of 2024.

Even so, it’s safe to say that notions of leadership and power—and how they can be so grossly distorted and abusive when mishandled—have been on our minds a lot lately. In some ways, what is playing out in our federal government is a macro-level case study of the irreparable and acute damage caused by inappropriately shared leadership and by sloppy, exceedingly urgent processes of assuming leadership, distributing power hastily, and then attempting to enact transformational change on a larger scale. “Moving fast and breaking things” has no place in our government. Nor does it in our theatres.

There are ongoing generational leadership changes in the theatre field. Organizations are also undertaking new leadership structures as our sector tries to innovate at the pace of turnover. We’d like to think that the patriarchal, authoritarian visions of leadership prevailing at the top of the US political food chain are not likely to trickle down to our industry. If anything, maybe the hot mess of the current administration will inflame the growing fieldwide distaste for single-leader models, staving off what might have been a coming backlash to the sweeping shared leadership trend. That may be overly optimistic, but we can at least hope it won’t fuel such a backlash…

Right?

Devon’s Story

From 2012 to 2024, I was the lead producer of Theatre Communications Group’s (TCG) National Conference. When I left my post last July, I was TCG’s director of fieldwide programming, and in my twelve years there I curated and shaped many gatherings of theatre people in countless forms and across a spectrum of affinities. For the last several years, conversations of “shared leadership” were in the highest demand.

Shared leadership can show up in different ways across sectors and disciplines. Al Heartley of Evolution Management Consultants offers a helpful summary of what it often means in theatre:

For over 60 years, leadership in theater has frequently been a partnership between two individuals: one focusing on artistry (the Artistic Director) and the other managing operations and finances (the Managing or Executive Director). Yet, even this two-leader system has its challenges… Now, as conversations around equity and collaboration grow louder, some propose going further: adopting leadership models with multiple artistic or executive directors.

In this series, “shared leadership” refers to models that deviate from the artistic-managing director pairing and distribute the functions of these roles among multiple individuals. In fact, some models we lift in this series involve multiple leaders who share both artistic and managerial duties. My series co-curator, Miranda Gonzalez, digs deeper into the different interpretations of “shared leadership” below.

If the organization’s staff, leaders, and board aren’t aligned in terms of what is working and what isn’t, then how can we say these major institutional changes were successful and worthy of replication?

As more theatres—mostly predominantly white organizations—have invited more leaders to their executive tables through new shared leadership structures, for some as an extension of their commitments to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the curiosity around these experiments has grown. Boards and practitioners alike have been eager to learn more from those actually engaged in these structures.

With my fellow programming leaders at TCG, I designed and hosted sessions at many of our convenings featuring theatres at the forefront of this wave, like City Theatre Company, Crowded Fire Theater, Ping Chong and Company, Cornerstone Theater Company, American Shakespeare Center, Soho Rep, and the Wilma Theater. With our colleagues at American Theatre magazine, we tracked the transitions happening, noting shifts in power-sharing practices at larger theatres like Syracuse Stage, Virginia Rep, Kansas City Rep, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We brought in facilitators from Flux Theater’s Sharing Power podcast, and we assembled models of distributed leadership in boards for a governance retreat. Still more theatres made radical leadership changes, like Steppenwolf Theatre and the Alliance Theatre; we discussed and read about them, hoping that they would document their journeys for those considering similar paths, like TCG itself recently did. TCG’s 2024 conference in Chicago featured a workshop on decolonizing shared leadership led by my series co-curator, Miranda, with her co-leaders at UrbanTheater Company (UTC). I could go on and on.

I started my career in a small theatre company that practiced shared leadership without knowing what we were doing. These days I consider myself a deeply collaborative practitioner and a skeptic of singular, “I-alone-can-fix-it” visionaries. So listening to leaders tell their stories of shaking up the traditional model has been inspiring, as was working at an organization starting down a similar road. However, some reservations about shared leadership in theatre have also surfaced for me.

First, some of the most raw and vulnerable—and therefore helpful—presentations on shared leadership that TCG hosted were behind closed doors at conferences, typically neither recorded nor discussed beyond the sessions themselves. This is understandable, as these leaders needed to protect themselves from funder scrutiny and, in some cases, the potential disapproval of their own trustees. It also drastically limited the number of people exposed to these stories, which means the public record is incomplete.

Second, as with many trends (I’m looking at you, DEI), it seemed like a lot of white-led theatres were getting credit for seemingly “groundbreaking” practices that Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) organizations had been doing for decades, often out of necessity and/or by default. As programmers at a service organization, we could have done more to counter that narrative.

In my observation, cancel culture made shared leadership famous.

Finally, while it has been compelling to hear from so many leaders in these newly divided executive roles, it would also be instructive (yet tricky) to hear from their staff members. How are these transitions going in the eyes of the people who work for them? Over the years of being both a participant in and observer of these processes, it became clear to me that the transitions have contained wildly varying degrees of care, transparency, and self-reflection. At the end of the day, if the organization’s staff, leaders, and board aren’t aligned in terms of what is working and what isn’t, then how can we say these major institutional changes were successful and worthy of replication?

These personal sticking points were the motivation behind this series, and some show up in the pieces that we’ve asked our colleagues to contribute—and even in Miranda’s story below. This series is a mirror and a rallying cry: Let’s create more access to these conversations and hear more voices. Let’s amplify organizations that are most authentically engaging in shared leadership and have the deepest experience with it. Let’s remember and build community around the cultural roots of these practices. And let’s learn from those transition processes that center humans at their core.

Miranda’s Story

What is shared leadership? Split responsibilities? Decentralized power? I mean, BIPOC theatres and smaller organizations have been practicing this model for decades. When some of us wanted to name the practice, many funders encouraged us to shy away from exchanging our traditional titles for unconventional “shared leadership” titles. Not because they didn’t support our innovation—on the contrary, they were inspired by it. However, explaining to the boards of trustees that the organization had a leadership council rather than an executive director would cause them to focus on our titles rather than our impact. At least that’s what UrbanTheater Company was told in 2017. Co-leadership, sure, but shared leadership where everyone is equally responsible for decision-making? No. Funders needed to know who to hold accountable should the organization mismanage its funds.

Now we’re in 2025, and the term “shared leadership” is all the rage. Suggested by consulting firms, hiring teams, and applicants, the model is considered revolutionary. Is it because larger organizations started to adopt the term? And why did so many organizations start to implement it so suddenly? Ah yes, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial reckoning that led to anti-racist statements, DEI, EDI, JEDI, and all the acronyms anyone could create in order not to be called out publicly. In essence, in my observation, cancel culture made shared leadership famous.

I’ve been entrenched in ensemble practice since I was fourteen years old, as a part of a youth performance group The Happiness Club and Teatro Luna, Chicago’s all-Latina theatre company. Both steeped in devised work, deep collaboration, and many harmful mistakes. This foundation came with a litany of learning experiences—some wonderful, some traumatic, all necessary. What I learned over time is that decision-making is a collaborative practice and anything that feels solitary is in misalignment. Solitary decision-making goes against my core values, and I create distance from anything that doesn’t align.

When Devon approached UTC to host a discussion on shared leadership for the 2024 TCG Conference in Chicago, she shared that there were many people who wanted to have this conversation. When our team expressed our model, there was clarity in our intentions and process that other organizations hadn’t touched on.

UTC has been in shared leadership since its 2005 inception. The organization had an ensemble of artists volunteering their time to pursue their passion. Collaborative decision-making was at the foundation of the organization. Before I said yes to being UTC’s producing artistic director, the organization’s co-founder and executive director, Ivan Vega, had a strategic meeting with me at the advice of my beloved mentor Diane Rodriguez (que en paz descanse). Over the span of three days, we discussed vision, purpose, core values, and structure. It was then that we realized collective input and collaborative decision-making is what made UTC thrive. However, the existing structure stifled processes and was brewing a toxicity that we both had seen before in previous ensembles. Over the course of two years, Ivan Vega, Managing Director Antonio Bruno, and I began to test models that centered our community. Through the piloting process, we landed where we are today. 

The TCG discussion gave our team the opportunity to synthesize our praxis. When we started to outline how we would frame the conversation, we engaged in a process of critical inquiry to clarify our approach:

• What makes our leadership model distinct?
• Why is this model most effective for the organization?
• To what extent is the team genuinely engaged in the introspective work it takes to embody and inspire shared power?
• How do our individually lived values and social conditioning affect our ability to engage in a shared leadership model?

Asking ourselves the questions above moved me to think of my experiences outside of UTC and the difficulty my clients had in collective values-based decision-making. Over the last five years consulting across both nonprofit and for-profit sectors, I’ve seen how well-intentioned processes of shared leadership and collective decision-making become entangled in over-analysis and buzzwords, distancing leadership from embodying the organization’s core values. Many times, I’ve seen the C-suite and executive leadership bewildered by the simplest question: How are your values manifested within this organization? Few can pinpoint the exact process where their values of reciprocity and vulnerability show up. I’ve witnessed many leaders perform professionalism and deflect responsibility with heightened vocabulary, sugary phrases, and a litany of excuses that blame other individuals and department processes. “Accountability councils” have popped up everywhere, resulting in more resentment and blame. Some processes have resulted in high attrition rates across all levels of the organization, some in public callouts, some in obsessive gossip cultures wherein everyone but the leader responsible knew they directly impacted the organization negatively.

Can you imagine moving to a shared leadership model within a culture of gossip and blame? How can an organization actualize their posted values while manifesting negativity and avoidance? How can they value collaboration when urgency is at the forefront of every decision? If solo leadership can result in a negative impact, why has shared leadership become the answer?

Genuine shared leadership is messy. It is full of mistakes and takes a tremendous amount of unlearning. The amount of ego death that occurs is immeasurable. The process of engaging in this work takes a profound restructuring of self. When fully immersed in collective decision-making, organizational dynamics become a reflective mechanism, consistently mirroring our patterns of communication and conflict resolution ideologies. Shared leadership fully leans away from individualistic vision, urgency, paternalistic tendencies, and an understanding of “bigger and better” as progress. It leans into heavy listening, centering community voices, and slower processes, and it requires individuals to relinquish the need to be right and all-knowing.

If BIPOC-founded and small theatres have been practicing this model for decades, then what does a “successful” model look like?

Our Story

Look, shared leadership is fashionable for a reason. We’d say that when it’s done well it’s mostly better than the traditional, hierarchical structures many of us buck against. There are two things it’s not, though:

1. An effective solution for deeper organizational and fieldwide issues and
2. Right for every organization, right now.

For some, shared leadership is a kind of structural resistance to cultures of oppression. Now we’re seeing more organizations adopt shared leadership structures without addressing their ongoing problems, which actually reinscribes some of the harmful practices they’re trying to leave behind, even with a diverse slate of leaders at the helm. In the aftermath, these leaders may be held accountable for inherited problems that were too entrenched to be fixed by a new leadership structure.

Shared leadership in theatre can take many forms and flourish. It can offer abundance where there was scarcity, open up new ways of working together, and disrupt patterns of dysfunction.

As two people who advocate for strong shared leadership models becoming the norm, we want to rigorously examine this trend in our field. We recognize that if more theatres decide to transition in this direction without intention and care, not only will the leaders be blamed, but the model itself will be blamed for their failure. With this series, we’re offering a new frame. 

Here are some starting questions to ask if you are in such a transition or consulting on one:

• Are you aligning your new model and transition process with the mission, vision, and values of the organization?
• Are you allowing a generous timeline with space for trust-building between the new leaders and among the new leaders, staff, and board?
• Are you ready to pause some organizational activities to make that space for everyone involved in this transition?
• Are you ready to lean into healthy conflict and to define what that looks like for your organization?
• Are you being transparent with yourselves, each other, and your staff and board? (Like, actually transparent?)
• Are you willing to name when things are messy and acknowledge to your people that there may be moments that feel chaotic? Are you holding that for them?
• Are you having honest conversations about how your identities and social privileges might affect power dynamics within the new leadership structure?
• Are you creating new processes, rituals, and other community-building touchpoints in your organization that might improve communication and workflow with the changing structures?
• Are you empowering staff to offer feedback without fear of repercussion, and are you adjusting based on that feedback?

In this series, you will hear from our colleagues who have been consultants and leaders in these processes, and those stories will illustrate how some of the above questions can play out in practice. Alexandra Meda merges her own experiences in shared leadership with her observations as a consultant on other organizational transitions; she offers a comprehensive case for authentic shared leadership as anti-racism work. The producing artistic team of The Movement Theatre Company busts some myths about shared leadership grounded in their experiences for the last fourteen years, and they discuss how they’re evolving the model today. The new artistic leadership team at HERE Arts Center lets us into their current process of building a new shared leadership model from scratch, generously sharing the lessons they’ve learned and the practices they’re building from a foundation of trust, care, and shared values. And our livestream conversation with three venerable field leaders–Leilani Chan, Lauren Turner Hines, and José Luis Valenzuela–delves into the cultural roots of today’s shared leadership practices and how power has operated differently in BIPOC theatre organizations for decades.

At the heart of this series is our belief that shared leadership in theatre can take many forms and flourish. It can offer abundance where there was scarcity, open up new ways of working together, and disrupt patterns of dysfunction. We can replace those old patterns with new ones, authentically engaging in collective decision-making, embodying our values, and sharing leadership with empathy, mindfulness, and love. We’re not the only industry headed in this direction, but as culture bearers we have collective power—and a collective responsibility to use it wisely.