Transitioning to Shared Leadership

The House Is on Fire, but We Don't Have to Rebuild It the Same Way

Institutions are crumbling under the weight of inequities they once upheld. Nonprofit theatres are struggling amid arguments about "risk mitigation." Artists and cultural workers—the lifeblood of our communities—are scrambling for sustainability in a system never built for them to thrive in. The house is on fire for all of us working in the theatre in the United States. Yet, this fire isn’t new; it’s just compounded. As Sonya Renee Taylor reminds us, "We will not go back to normal. Normal never was... We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature."

At this very moment lies profound opportunity. As a facilitator and architect of process who has been inside more than thirty leadership transition processes, I've witnessed firsthand how structural change can transform organizations—or how it can fail spectacularly when humans aren't centered in the process.

My journey toward shared leadership didn't begin in institutional boardrooms. It started in sunlit rehearsal spaces at Teatro Luna (now Studio Luna), which was at the time Chicago’s all-Latina theatre ensemble, where I joined as an intern in 2007. Our collective governance wasn't rooted in academic theory, but in urgent necessity, born from lived experiences of marginalization. Shared leadership wasn't a management strategy; it was survival.

At Teatro Luna, shared leadership was messy, emotional, and often tricky. We stumbled, hurt each other, reconciled, and tried again the next day. Every decision required patience, vulnerability, and the courage to confront our egos. It taught me lessons I've carried into every institutional transition I've guided since. Teatro Luna was one of the most harmful places I have ever witnessed or experienced. And I was absolutely part of that cycle. But, with the help of many women of color across this field, across a ten-year transition period, we were able to change the trajectory of Luna’s future. It took many hands and minds. It always does.

The kind of pain that comes from intracultural harm is different from that of majority-minority harm, but I use this example to share that change is possible. Repair is possible. Shared leadership, in and of itself, answers nothing if it is not backed up through healthy, transparent, lived practices.

When White-Led Institutions "Discover" Shared Leadership

Let's state the obvious: Shared leadership is not new. It's not revolutionary. Theatres have operated under different iterations of shared leadership for decades, particularly theatres of color for whom distributing power has been both an economic necessity and a structural resistance to white supremacy culture. It has also been the predominant ethos and structure within the cultural collective, ensemble, and collaborative practice ecosystem.

What's new is the broader field's belated recognition of these models. We are witnessing a wave of predominantly white-led legacy institutions adopt alleged "new and bold shared leadership frameworks" to save their asses. Whether they are used out of necessity, from genuine desire for change, or due to pressure to appear more equitable, these practices have roots that will not be erased and should be honored and named.

In the Rooms Crisis Management Takes Over: What I've Seen (and Felt)

I want to encourage anyone in the throes of change—the messy middle is the site of possibility.

Each room I am in as an external consultant, facilitator, board member, or leader has revealed something sobering: structural change without cultural transformation is merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Each experience in the room of shared leadership transition profoundly grows my capacity for centering grace, trust, and faith in people and the change process. One room in particular was a lesson on the role of patience and sticking to the slog of showing up repeatedly regardless of the tension, the discomfort, and the energetic drain. In this virtual room, a service organization required external mediation and long-term strategic facilitation to move into a co-executive director model. This followed much internal and public strife between staff and board. The outcome was a long-fought alignment between the staff, board, and community; what I hope to shed light on is that “alignment” sometimes looks like certain people letting go and acknowledging that they aren’t the best person to be engaged in this change process right now.

A shared leadership title without shared power is performative at best, harmful at worst. When legacy institutions adopt shared leadership models with the intent of inclusivity, innovation, and organizational sustainability, but fail to reckon with entrenched power dynamics rooted in their social positioning, they often perpetuate gatekeeping and a lack of accountability.

In one particularly stark example, I was brought into a large regional theatre to facilitate their leadership transition. At the same time, their staff released public statements about the lack of follow-through with their commitment to change. The board chair assured me they wanted a new structure "reflecting their commitment to equity and shared power."

The conversation in the first closed-door meeting with the search committee quickly revealed the deep-seated fear that always lurks when change is called for. One board member finally just said what everyone else was tiptoeing around: "But who will have the final say?" Another worried, "Won't multiple leaders slow down decision-making? Our size requires a singular leader with full authority." A third questioned, "How will donors feel if there's no singular visionary they can connect with?"

These questions weren't malicious; they were honest expressions of a cultural mindset steeped in their cultural norm: a fear of open conflict. The idea of genuinely shared governance was nearly incomprehensible within their existing framework.

It was in this room that I learned another lesson. For some leaders, my white skin experience generally overrides my “otherness” as a Latina, which leads to a mistaken assumption of kinship that is not extended to my co-facilitators. They exercise this in overt and covert ways. I have learned to interrupt this by calling it out, saying things they might hear from me, not from deeper-skinned people on their staff or my team. It also looks like sharing why a co-facilitator might not return to their space. This work is not easy, and this muscle needs consistent exercise. I am not always as brave as I want to be. My blood still goes cold more often than I would like to admit. I still circle or soften conflict more than I like. 

In another transition at a mid-sized theatre, I watched as two newly appointed co-artistic directors—one white, one a person of color—struggled under unspoken expectations. The board gave the white co-leader implicit authority and consulted privately with them on major decisions. In contrast, the co-leader of color was expected to handle "community engagement" and diversity initiatives. Their titles suggested equality; their experience told a different story.

Both situations illuminate the gulf between structural change (new titles, new organizational charts) and cultural transformation (new values, behaviors, and ways of relating). Bridging this gulf is where the work of dismantling white supremacy culture occurs. It goes beyond policy work; it must show up in daily practice.

The Work of Tending to People in Transition

How do we create transitions that genuinely center humans and align leadership with anti-racist values? Based on my years guiding organizations through this process, here are the practices I've found essential:

1. Just Transition: Decomposition Before Rebirth

Every leadership transition is fundamentally about life, death, and rebirth. As Annalisa Dias powerfully articulates in her work on decomposition, transformation requires deliberately allowing outdated structures and practices to die, creating fertile soil for new growth.

This means acknowledging that parts of your organization may need to die for new life to emerge. The most successful transitions I've facilitated begin by understanding transformation as ecological, not mechanical. We aren't just rearranging parts; we're cultivating a new habitat. This means starting not with organizational charts but with values excavation. At one organization where my firm, Culture Change Lab, facilitated the hiring process for a new artistic director, we began by spending weeks in dialogue about core values, not just with the board and current staff but with the community of artists served by the institution. What kind of community are you trying to build your future around? What does power look like when properly shared? How does decision-making reflect your commitment to anti-racism?

This values-first approach shifts the conversation from positions to principles. Structure follows values, not the other way around. One organization I worked with ultimately decided against co-leadership because their values excavation revealed that their specific situation, resources, and community needs might be better served through a clearly defined hierarchy with transparent decision-making protocols and multiple accountability mechanisms throughout the organization. The shape of change you need to thrive may look very different from others.

2. Your Budget Is a Moral Document

I often hear beautiful language about equity and shared leadership in transition conversations. Then I look at the proposed budget and see a different story—one leader budgeted at twice the salary of another, programming funds that contradict stated priorities, or resources allocated in ways that reinforce rather than dismantle oppressive power dynamics.

Your budget reveals your actual priorities, not your stated ones. If you claim to value equity but fund inequitable structures, your values statement is merely performance. Material impacts tell the real story.

Leadership transitions ask us to pursue what might be possible beyond our inherited structures. This imagination work is not a luxury; it's essential to meaningful transformation.

3. Design for Trust and Accountability

Leadership in right-relationship functions on trust, and trust requires accountability. In every successful transition, we've built structures for sharing or clarifying power and holding each other accountable to organizational values.

This meant creating new feedback loops between staff, board, and co-directors at one service organization. It required establishing clear decision-making protocols that clarified which decisions were made by whom, through what process, and with what form of consultation. It meant developing metrics for evaluating outcomes and processes, measuring how decisions were made, not just what was decided.

This accountability extends to consultants like me. If the consultant doesn't center humans in the process, who holds them accountable? Build this accountability into any transition support you engage.

4. Create Space for Grief and Imagination

Leadership transitions are emotional processes. There is grief for what is ending, anxiety about the unknown, and excitement for what might emerge. When we try to rush through these emotions in service of "getting things done," we undermine the very transformation we seek.

Likewise, we are imagining and then creating a reality that doesn't yet exist. Leadership transitions ask us to pursue what might be possible beyond our inherited structures. This imagination work is not a luxury; it's essential to meaningful transformation. Budget for it and plan for it.

5. Slow Down to Go Far Together

Nothing undermines transformation more effectively than rushing. The false urgency embedded in white supremacy culture pushes organizations to implement new structures before they've done the cultural work to support them.

Slowing down doesn't mean stalling out. It means moving at a pace that allows for genuine inclusion, meaningful dialogue, and careful dismantling of harmful patterns. We hear it all the time, but sometimes the simple advice is the best: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

The question isn't whether to have a hierarchy but what values your leadership structure, whatever its shape, embodies and reinforces.

The Pitfalls of Process Without Substance

As I advocate for these principles, I acknowledge a painful truth: I've watched organizations invest in elaborate transition processes that ultimately reinforced the hierarchies they claimed to be dismantling.

The warning signs are consistent:

• Transition processes that center board or donor comfort over staff and artist well-being
• Conversations about shared leadership that happen primarily in closed rooms between board and executive leadership
• Consultants who are more aligned with institutional preservation than human-centered transformation
• Processes that rush to structure without addressing culture
• New leaders set up to fail without proper resources or authority

Rethinking Leadership: It's About Values, Not Just Structure

Leadership demands multiplicity. As I’ve shared, hierarchical leadership itself isn't inherently problematic. Many effective organizations thrive with clearly defined hierarchies. The question isn't whether to have a hierarchy but what values your leadership structure, whatever its shape, embodies and reinforces. Does it distribute power or hoard it? Does it create transparency or opacity? Does it foster accountability or evade it? Does it centralize wisdom in a few or recognize it in many?

I've seen nominally "flat" organizations rife with unacknowledged power dynamics, creating confusion and hidden hierarchies that were more harmful than transparent ones. One colleague at Studio Luna wisely noted, "I'd rather know exactly where the power is than pretend it's everywhere and discover too late that it was concentrated all along."

Weathering: The Human Cost of White Supremacist Leadership Models

For me, this work is about combating and interrupting the impact of weathering on women of color and all marginalized people. I am using the term "weathering," as coined by Dr. Arline Geronimous, to describe the corrosive effects of systemic oppression on marginalized people's bodies. I felt weathering up close when I lost Diane Rodriguez, a friend and mentor. Her passing is a stark testament to the physical and emotional toll inflicted by years of institutional battles, marginalization, and the subtle violences of white supremacy embedded within our organizational cultures. Did she go out on her terms, smiling, leading, directing, and mentoring as always? Yes. But she absorbed so much more harm than most of us know, and it took a toll on her health.

Leadership models infused with white supremacist values do not distribute the material burden of responsibility; they concentrate it, particularly on the shoulders of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) leaders who are often expected to transform institutions without the power or support to do so.

This is why rethinking leadership isn't just an organizational strategy—it's an anti-racist, liberatory imperative.

Shared Leadership as Anti-Racism in Action

This focus on values rather than structure is the crux of why shared leadership is anti-racism work. It's about deliberately dismantling the white supremacist underpinnings of traditional leadership models. The solo "visionary" or “auteur” framework we've inherited directly reflects colonial, patriarchal values that elevate individual genius over collective wisdom, competition over collaboration, and extraction over sustainability.

When organizations genuinely enact shared leadership values with anti-racist, equitable intent, they:

• Disrupt power monopolies that historically exclude BIPOC voices
• Distribute both the authority and the emotional labor of leadership
• Value multiple ways of knowing and decision-making
• Create structures that don't force assimilation to white professional norms
• Build models that honor lived experience alongside formal credentials
• Build systems that reflect the unique nature of the artistic process at their theatre, removing the arbitrary divide between administrative and creative processes.

The Promise of Genuine Transformation

Despite the challenges, I remain deeply hopeful about the transformative potential of shared leadership in theatre moving forward. I've witnessed extraordinary moments of change when organizations commit fully to the process. Previously silenced staff members have found their voices and leadership capacities. Artist involvement in governance brings new, creative approaches to institutional challenges. These models have created resilience during crises, as multiple perspectives generate more robust solutions. Decision-making processes have shifted to center those most impacted by the decisions, leading to more equitable outcomes.

There is no denying that organizations committed earnestly to this methodology become more responsive to their communities because power is shared more broadly.

A Call to Radical Imagination

The theatre field faces unprecedented challenges—financial pressures, audience shifts, cultural reckonings. We cannot address these challenges using the same leadership models that created them. Shared leadership isn't just a nice idea; it's an ecological necessity for our field's survival and renewal. It requires us to practice what adrienne maree brown calls "emergent strategy" by creating leadership models that reflect the world we're trying to build, not the one we've inherited. As brown writes, "What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system." When we practice shared leadership in our theatres, we're rehearsing ancient ways of being together in society.

What if our theatres were led not by singular visionaries but by communities of care? What if power were understood not as control but as capacity—something that grows when shared? What if we structured our organizations not for efficiency but for justice? For solidarity? For collective resourcing? What if our budgets truly reflected our values, becoming moral documents that allocated resources to support collective well-being rather than concentrating wealth and recognition at the top?

These questions aren't purely theoretical—they're being answered right now in theatres committed to transformation. It requires us to confront our own complicity in harmful systems.

The house is indeed on fire, but this fire also offers us choice: rebuild the same flammable structure or create something new from the ashes that is designed for collective liberation rather than individual glory. In the rooms where these transitions happen, may we have the courage to choose the more difficult, more beautiful path of genuine transformation.