Implementing Shared Leadership: Practical Lessons from the Field

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]good afternoon everybody welcome to today's webinar sharing leadership practical lessons and active questions my name is jean bell i direct the advancing practice program here at non-profit quarterly and this webinar is part of that program we have a number of guests with us today that i'm very excited about teams from change elemental and fractured atlas which are groups that we've been in dialogue with and learning from for multiple years now around leadership generally and specifically their experiences inside their organizations and guiding others around sharing leadership so this is a treat and we welcome them all and you're going to learn who they are and what's going on with their structures in a moment let's get grounded for today's conversation this is a 90-minute session many of our webinars are 60 minutes but this is 90 minutes so we hope you'll you have planned for that there's a lot of wisdom in the room and we want to hear your questions and pull you on things you're thinking about so settle in for a good discussion as always you'll receive the slides and a recording within a few days so not to worry there we've discontinued the chat for groups of this size but we use the q a box and we welcome your comments and questions as they occur to you and there will be questions taken throughout the session and as always just as the session ends there's a pop-up feedback form that we really appreciate you completing it helps me and others and our guest speakers develop their programming we have a hashtag for today's session it's sharing leadership so please use that if you're sharing insights and thoughts on social media today we also have a sponsor i love it when harbor compliance decides to pick a session uh to be with us on if you've ever had to do state charitable registrations i have i worked in a nonprofit that was all individual giving based across the country and boy did i get a baptism by fire in state registration and then you add online fundraising which makes it even more confusing so that's where you go for peace of mind about fundraising compliance and we thank them for helping support the advancing practice program at npq so let me tell you how this conversation is going to go at least as we plan with so many great people and your questions this is a scaffolding and we'll adjust as we need to but as i said we're going to start by hearing from each group fractured atlas and change elemental about who they are who they brought with them today and kind of what their current shared leadership model is as i said in the marketing for this um event you know we're talking about often co-directorship and both of these groups do have that but it's much more than that from that spills a number of other structures and practices that is really what we mean by sharing leadership so these structures are dynamic which will be a theme of today's conversation so that's why we say we're going to learn their current structures and kind of what's in motion for them in preparing for today's discussion we met as a full group and we talked about well what are the cross-cutting themes of each other's experiences the groups are different in terms of their missions they are both intermediary groups but they have different missions different um stakeholder groups and different experiences and trajectories with their shared leadership practice so but we did want to focus on some themes that have been important to their work and see how they show up in each group we're also we also ask them each to pose their own active questions what's happening in their models now and what is what are they mulling over in terms of strengthening um the way they work together they also each have provided a number of resources which are live links at the back of this deck that we'll go over and as i said throughout there'll be junctures where we're taking your questions some were pre-submitted i thank you for that and where we're pulling you to find out what your reactions and experiences are so that's the arc of the conversation and again we're going to get into introductions as we introduce each group and so what i'd like to do now is uh turn it over to tim from fractured atlas actually i think we'll start with lauren um from fractured atlas and there's our first adjustment we'll start with lauren from fractured atlas and kick it off for us welcome lauren thanks thanks gene hey everybody um i'm lauren ruffin i'm one of the co-ceos of fractured atlas fractured atlas is an art service organization um that's national we have um about 40 45 000 members um across all disciplines um and we primarily help them um manage the back of the business and assist with charitable fundraising so gene when you were talking about a motorcycle um seeming you were talking about um you know chair registration i got hives a little bit um so i totally get it um we're in the midst of all of that but um tim you can you can take it away from here and talk a little bit more about about how you and i operate and about our current structure yeah you know and it started for us about four years ago at fractured atlas when the founder and then ceo was transitioning out of the organization into another entity and we started asking ourselves um what is the role of the ceo um we we in 2013 as an organization committed to becoming an anti-racist anti-oppressive organization and we were really looking at hierarchical structures sharing power and how we might use this opportunity of a ceo departure into creating a different structure that fit better with what we how we wanted to operate as an organization and our values and so then when the ceo left we created a four-person shared non-hierarchical leadership team with a quote-unquote no first among equals which try and explain that to um government bureaucracies and banks um and that just creates a bunch of board resolutions about who's who's this group and how can they make decisions um and no we don't have a ceo we have four um so that was really a lot a lot of work leading up to setting up this um and at the time we each oversaw one part of the four um parts of fractured atlas so we serve our ceo of our own department and coco together uh and then as of september one uh two of our colleagues have been with us for a number of years uh both transitioned into um outside consulting firms and and lauren and i uh get to continue the the adventure together um and our current um two-person co-ceo format wonderful thank you for sharing that and again um these are both very dynamic models so there'll be different details to track on but we'll get into more of what you're experiencing in a moment so let me turn it over to natalie uh to talk a little bit about change elemental hi everyone my name is natalie baumgard i'm a staff consultant and member of the chrysalis team at change elemental we work with individuals organizations networks movements to create conditions together so that power and resources can be shared in just ways and the story of our leadership our shared leadership evolution in a lot of ways mirrors that um that work uh currently we have two co-directors and they're here on the call mark and alyssa um and we've had co-directors for the past several years um and we still do that was a big um transition for our board or a big decision that the board kind of helped us make uh several years ago um uh what is different now is that our co-directors are part of a broader chrysalis team which is a group of several other staff who have increasingly taken on more roles and responsibilities the co-directors have historically held on their own um as chrysalises are want to do our chrysalis is evolving and changing into a hub and pad a pad model uh the hub is now responsible for most big strategic decisions and includes our co-directors and a few other staff the hub is supported by several different pads that hold leadership functions like finance hr which we call human sustainability external partnerships and the work of the pads is to really roll their sleeves up and ideate around potential solutions or pathways forward to organizational challenges that we're having or big questions to lift up to the hub and the pad also is responsible for implementing on some of those decisions that um they're making in partnership with the hub excellent okay and i love in your case the language it sounds like is is important the metaphoric language and i imagine that has sort of emerged and adapted to over this journey for you and we can perhaps hear some more about that welcome both alyssa and mark as well um what i'd like to do now just that we have the basics and i already see some questions so we'll get to those but let's do a poll now that you all have introduced yourself and find out um who's here with us anya would you uh do the roll poll please um and we've got options here of executive director staff board member capacity builder funder or other and you can choose as many are appropriate many of us wear multiple hats so you don't have to force yourself into one role here okay so let's begin to see the results here okay can everyone see that on our panel here great so we're about um two-thirds staff some executive and some non-executive and it's great to see so many board members here a number of consultants a few funders so that's great and again people wear multiple hats so we know that's a mix of of multiple roles uh thank you anya and i'd like to go right into another poll which is around the journey that you're on so we're curious at this stage how many of you would identify as being in kind of early exploration whether it's personally or organizationally around sharing leadership maybe you've begun implementation or maybe like our panelists you're already into iterations 2 3 10 12 or something else so i'll give you a second to locate all right and we can just start to share the results there this is great it's a really nice mix so we have about half who are in early exploration who will get a lot of inspiration from this and then a number of folks who are somewhere on this journey like you are panelists with figuring this out and how it might look in their organization so that's great to see thank you all for participating in those and what i'd like to do now is move to the section of our conversation that's focused on some of the cross-cutting themes that we identified as a group really coming from your two organizations who have been at this approach or approaching leadership in this way for multiple years and i want to start with um alyssa because one of the ideas that came out and this was i think a word that you used in one of our brainstorms was that this idea of this being fractal and that we're trying to model inside our organizations what we want for the outside world and so i want to turn it over to you and just start off with some reactions and thoughts why do you use that word when you talk about sharing leadership sure you know um my how i sort of wound up in the world of thinking about um leadership as well as exercising it uh was from my background in education and as a teacher and you know not a revelation to us now but at 26 years old you know realizing that these 18 year olds were actually these incredible human beings and what was actually wrong was the systems and structures and adults around them so i got really interested in adult leadership development for folks who worked with youth and with systems change um and several years later you know came across this quote the you know the success of any intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener um and you know it's been talked about a lot so in many people's work um as well as in what i've experienced so the world we want out there if we want to actually be supporting its creation to be active contributors to bringing that world about to cultivating that kind of change we have to be able to create if we can't create inside our organizations like what makes us think we can do anything in the world you know um so yeah really trying to model in a way that is about alignment with our values that is about cultivating and sharing power differently that's what we want to see in the world that's what justice looks like that's what being in liberating practice looks like um really tending to mutual well-being not codependence but mutual well-being requires us to to be practicing that ourselves which means sharing leadership sharing power um having a different orientation to power and leadership and if i may was that something that your organization was born with that that notion or and or did that emerge out of the work and just shifts in in thinking and then you all decided decided over time that this organization explicitly needs to be a fractal um i will say yes and i'm gonna um pause and invite mark in because while i have lots to say about that question mark's actually been with this organization for more than 15 years so can say a lot more about the evolution yeah it's funny i would actually just said no alyssa i think i think um or questions so that's why yeah well the one about like has it been part of our dna the idea of being a fractal um no i think that's actually been in the last five years that that has that has come to pass and prior to that i think um you know we had very much of a a typical kind of non-profit social justice uh organization sense of ourselves as being like a player somewhere in an ecosystem but not going down to really looking hard at how our individual uh internal relationships and other things played out as fractals thank you for that um and and i think this is a question i i love what you just said i think implicit in what you just said as a social justice player um i i let me make sure i am hearing you right i heard a little bit of um you know soft but real self-critique in that that you know that we as organizations can be social justice players perhaps without necessarily doing this internal work or building personal and interpersonal practices that actually lead to social justice am i am i hearing you right yes okay okay um and i know what a lot of people are thinking or some people are thinking is that sounds like it's very time consuming and very confusing and i get i bet if i ask alyssa melissa and mark and natalie that they're going to say yes right [Laughter] is it time-consuming and confusing to be a fractal yes in some ways but i would also say no because it means that we don't get ourselves into messes we're more in alignment with things um and a lot of times when we're not modeling when we're not being a fractal we wind up causing harm or or if we're not causing harm not advancing opportunities in the direction of our vision you know of our vision and when we are causing harm we create messes that we then have to spend a lot more time and a lot more energy cleaning up than if we had actually done some of the hard work on the front end that gets to an important point i think a lot of times people say are we walking our values as if the only reason to attempt to be a fractal is a values reason and not actually also a practice and execution and relationship issue right that it's only because of what we believe as opposed to the effectiveness we could have so also not opposed to in addition to the effectiveness we could have by not causing messes and creating messes i love that that framing uh tim or lauren is there anything you'd like to add um i don't know if anyone at fractured atlas has ever used the term fractal with respect to your sharing leadership practice does it resonate did you have different motivations or additional motivations i i saw tim tim and i sort of shaking our heads at that whole conversation around messes like taking the time to get it right on the front end really does resonate i think that's a conversation we have um i don't think we've used the sort of framing of a fractal though tim have we not that we know of yeah not intentionally maybe accidentally yeah right but again i think the basic idea here is that and it's not a given i don't know and i'm going to pull the group in a second and see how people are feeling about this one that's why i wanted to start with it is is there a call to action um that if we are purportedly working on things in the outside world changing that we have to be working we ought to be working we are working on how those things change inside so that's one of the premises we know that that's not the only premise for sharing leadership there are traditional models in our sector of shared leadership that go back decades whether it's a medical director and a ceo in a clinic or an artistic director and a ceo in an arts organization or a publisher and an editor-in-chief and a journalism organization i mean we have lots of models of shared leadership in the sector that i would argue have nothing to do with being a fractal around liberation and justice they they have they're about sort of dividing work and seeing work as different spheres right and i know that that you know that may be part of the motivation for some folks is to make roles more explicit more sustainable more logical um and that's part of it too right so there's this whole continuum of of motivations and reasons um but it feels to me at least in my work that this idea is one that um more and more people are trying to figure out you know what do we want to be inside to authentically work outside um anya would you pull up this next poll please which asks our participants how they feel about this idea and um forgive me if i've worded this crudely hopefully you get from this conversation kind of what i'm getting at which is do you feel like there's a mandate to try to create inside what we want to see outside and we say yes i feel that or yes in some cases not necessarily or no i i don't feel that the organizations are a form that have to take on that charge so we have a lot of folks that sort of emphatically do feel that way and and a large large majority that feel that way in many cases i'm guessing that might be based on the mission of the organization or sort of its capacity or structures that would be in some cases but obviously this is a self-selected audience of people that wanted to talk about sharing leadership but i think i think it's important to make it explicit inside your organizations yeah i have some curiosity about um the not necessarily or the cases where it's not um and you know i want to hijack our direction right right and so it's just to i again the point is to to make it clear that people are coming at this with different assumptions and expectations and part of i think the work inside organizations creating the space to make it explicit um let's go on to the second cross-cutting theme and this is about um how relational these these models really are and how dependent they are on the relationships between people and hopefully how nurturing they are uh for the for those relationships as well and i wonder mark do you want to start us off here with how you express this yeah i also want to tie it back to the conversation we just had which is there's one way of looking at you know this is a mandate and somehow like resolving contradictions in our values and our practice but it's actually a desire i mean it's actually like why would you not want to live in a space of liberation and healing why would you not want to work in a place that has that as the thing we're trying to create every day so i mean to me that's one of the greatest gifts of this and it goes to the relationship nurturing piece it's like we actually get to practice every single day how can we be better humans with each other and create more space and more grace and more equity in the way we are with each other so that's it's just fun i mean i can't imagine not wanting to have that yeah so so that's i so i know that gene had asked us to really focus on the how we do things and not so much on the y so what i just said was kind of a why and i just want to add one other why um of of this being relational um just that it really is the basis like of of the kind of trust that's needed to really share power so if the relationships aren't strong the trust isn't there if the trust isn't there then people aren't bringing their ideas their their wholeness and then the work suffers so i just want to underscore those as wise um some of the hows of how we deal with like building greater relationality one is relationship agreements and at every level every time we've had shared power and and the dynamics or the structures shift whether that's somebody takes a sabbatical or there's a change in the team members or we develop a chrysalis we actually come up with relationship agreements for each of those and you know and they vary some and a lot of them would be familiar to folks but um let me just read a couple of them so what happens when we disagree or there's a lack of accountability we pause have constructive conversations with each other and if needed bring in our coach so that's a kind of an example of how we would you know work on relationality another one when when alyssa took uh sabbatical and susan mister and i were left and she's a south asian woman i'm a white man we wanted to hold ourselves to more accountability for raising the questions around anti-black racism specifically um and we've you know we like to think we've moved somewhat past the place where it's only the the black people in the organization who are raising those issues on a regular basis but it was an area we wanted to be more accountable so those kind of relationship things the other ways we do it i mentioned co-directors have always had a coach and we meet every three or four weeks and talk through issues that are coming up either between us or between us and other people in the organization when the chrysalis began alison lynn on our team suggested let's meet every single day for a half an hour anybody who can make it makes it and it was an incredibly fast way to start not only outlining our agenda of what we needed to share power around and decisions around but it also became a place where we could really start to understand who each other was what we brought our basic ways of working together and sometimes the check-ins eat up the entire time and helps build the relationships and the trust in addition to that you know the nurturing i think is really a key piece because as you share power more than more and more people are holding more risk more vulnerability more responsibility and you know they say that like single ceos have said you know it's lonely at the top but actually when you've got shared leadership at the top and good relationships it's actually incredibly joyful and you've got you know all this experience of having other people have your back other people kind of holding the load um which brings us to another practical thing we do which is called hold the whole meetings so we have one hold the whole meeting every week of the chrysalis where it's a longer period of time it's like 75 to 90 minutes and that's where everybody on the chrysalis gets to kind of really look at what are we holding together as a team and going to depth on some things so i'm going to stop there there's more i could say but we stop and see if my teammates have anything they want to add natalie would you like to add something yeah i think the the other piece around relationality and building strong relationships is that it has helped us step into more conflict and conflict is really good for aligning internal organizational practices with our values and the change that we want to see in the world um and it takes a lot it takes deep relationship and deep courage to be in conflict with folks who've been like co-directors for the past three years especially as someone newly stepping into a leadership role to know that like i can i can raise like this challenge or this rub um and and and we can disagree about it but but we're gonna still be good and we can still move forward the other pieces of the work that need to move forward and and we're not carrying that with us um like in our bodies and um into other things yeah that's those are all extremely important points and just to kind of recap what i heard you all say are you hearing me all right i know we've had some sound issues okay relationship agreements are are formed and made explicit co-directors and maybe others have access to coaching you tried and i don't know if you're still using daily kind of stand-ups we might call them you know these optional opt-in short touching based meetings you have longer quote hold the whole meetings on a weekly basis and you're making room for conflict and and building relationship in that way too it's not just a culture of niceness in these relationships so those are all hugely important my understanding is that none of these are forced relationships these are relationships that people agreed to am i right about that nobody said nobody said you two now either become co-directors or we don't have a job for you or something like that right no and we made proposals to folks that you know we we're thinking about this what do you think about it right and so some of that happened also some other folks stepped forward and said i really want to learn more about this area of work and for some folks they're into it and they love being in that area of work and are stepping even farther into it and for other folks they're like you know what i tried that i never want to do that again that's happening and the only other practical how piece i wanted to add gene is um really tending to folks professional development um both in a formal way like that you know folks have access to that and not just the co-directors but like across our team and then the other piece is um when we first shifted from having a model of a single you know executive director a single positional leader to co-directors we were really clear that it wasn't just shifting the the positional structure of the top you know the most power but in toward a culture of shared leadership which meant re-imagining supervision um and we started defining supervision as how we grow and support each other's superpowers in service of our shared vision so that in all of our conversations when we're learning about how how to do feedback and we talked about we talk about you know constructive um uh or constructive tensions and like generative tensions generative conflict yeah that piece is key as well yeah and we're going to keep talking about this and we have a whole slide on it about how once we start to hold power differently our traditional structures come into question and supervision is one of them they just start to need to be reimagined because power isn't being held over which is how most of our systems instructions are designed to work right um so supervision being one of any number of processes that get re-examined right in this context and that doesn't mean we figured it all out we've no no no no we still mess up we'll probably mess up tomorrow right okay um i'm gonna move us along because we have a lot of questions and i want to get through these four themes and then really do some q a about the things that you've raised um so let me go to natalie i believe is up on this other cross-cutting theme which is how dynamic you all have experienced these structures to be experimental iterative and also resilient um do you want to start us off and then we'll get some comments from fractured atlas on that as well sure yeah when alyssa mentioned earlier the difference between codependence and interdependence i was thinking i i was thinking about like this metaphor of like leadership being like holding like this bowling ball and you know sometimes you might have like a personal crisis and you might like let the ball go and then like the co-director model that means that like someone's holding like your ball in their ball um whereas like in in like this more dynamic model where there's more interconnection more people involved um like dropping a bowling ball means that there are like five other hands that can like shoulder that weight and so we're all kind of stretching and no one's breaking um as no one's really like breaking under that weight and i think right now like given kovid like we've all had a lot of personal crises um and uh you know in those moments we have been able to like step back and know that several people are stepping up and not feeling the weight of that guilt and you know that that happened you know a couple of months ago when i was preparing for a board meeting and then couldn't make it um and you know i knew that five other folks had all been co-creating this agenda together um and could step up in that space the other the other practical thing that i would say about like this dynamic structure is that we've set shorter time horizons and like milestones to lift up and re-evaluate and so the question of like um you know can we be on the chrysalis for five months is really different than will you take this role on chrysalis in perpetuity um and so it's given people the opportunity to try especially people who like me who are newer to leadership in this way the opportunity to try on different roles with support um and and without like uh an eternal commitment um and in a way that's like lowered the stakes uh and and allowed for a lot of flexibility and a lot of opportunity yeah that reminds me of how big a insight it was when i was trying holacracy the distinction between a position and a role right and we've so packed job descriptions with these permanent responsibilities and traditional frames as opposed to what i hear you saying is i can step into a role for three months and see if in fact i thrive in it or no it was too much or it doesn't tap my strengths and i don't to change my job description right that second necessarily uh to activate that role that's great tim um is there something you would add around the dynamism of these uh models now that you've lived through as you said in your introduction multiple iterations yeah you know and i think as a how attaching the word experiment to to this frees you to make those mistakes to be like yeah that didn't work so let's back up and go a different way or like that's you know rather than saying like we have to get it right the first time how is this four-person team working with the board what has the board communicate with them um to just any in any ways we we we work as organizations uh as we were starting this journey realized like you know so we were we adopted this when we were forty person organization 30 million dollar budget and you know most organizations most nonprofits have a structure to run their organizations that was built for the military and massive corporations and most organizations have 10 people and say like why do we have this strict hierarchical structure we're like 10 people we could fit in a small conference room around a table and and talk about this and but yeah we need to have all these different processes and structures and it was really freeing for us to say like let's just like do something that we think fits us and how we want to work that's fun that's supportive when we end up in places like global pandemics we have other people who who are sharing the the challenge with us and then continue to to iterate off of that we've mainly been talking about um our organizations um well for fractures we mainly focus on shared leadership at the top not um as one of my friends who sort of consulted says consultants consults in this space calls it leader full organizations how can we we build leadership and and share power throughout the organization um and for us that fracture analysis has been one of the the things we've been looking at you know your shared code ceos work well but then how does this work in other teams and across the organization um and well i know we we to be touching on this a little bit later about how do you seed or seed i know you say that doesn't matter you can't see the spelling change in my mind when i say those two words um so c-e-d-e and s-e-e-d power throughout the organizations and so i feel like this this is what's exciting right we have the opportunity to create places where we want to work in and and that that really that fit us in the times in which we're living in our missions and sort of just tearing stuff apart and being like well that's not what we want um is why it's exciting for for us to have this opportunity and then you see it throughout the organization other ways of of creating different ways of working like like we all have been doing since you know march of this year like how can we create other ways of connecting as human beings to serve those who we serve um when we can't all be in the same place or we're you know and so i think that for us the the dynamism is is really exciting it's also as we'll touch on later it's really exhausting um even with the sharedness that's there it can be really um tiring and sorry i just also i said i dropped the f-bomb uh i'm really proud of you tim i thought the first one i'm so proud i know lauren i saw you looking at me and all of a sudden yeah i did it i should point out that research research shows people who curse are more likely telling you the truth but um yeah so there okay well and i mean to be fair yes it's tiring and i i did a little bit of research on co-directors maybe five years ago and one of the big takeaways is it's not less work what what i hear you saying and what natalie's saying is it's not less work but it's not lonely work it's more collaborative work it's more resilient work it's more joyful work so it's if anyone thought this was going to be easy or like reduce your hours or something that's this is the wrong webinar for that we're trying to make the work richer and and more reflective of how we want to be right in most cases it's not less work unless you're literally taking a job and cutting it in half but that's not typically what we mean by by sharing leadership right um okay let's move to lauren and this is a big bucket and it is going to encompass a number of the questions that we already have and i remember in our brainstorming lauren that you kind of started off with saying you know this goes right at even our charity identity and uh some of the ways we think about non-profits we end up that gets surfaced as well so why don't you start us off with how you think of sharing leadership in your organization has been pushing on the status quo yeah i mean i'd start by saying um you know i've been with fractured atlas for four and a half years as long as i've been anywhere i'm an entrepreneurial person who needs a lot of variety and a lot of ambiguity um and fractured atlas's culture has always been one that is iterative and experimental and really innovative and risk tolerant um and that goes with sort of the way that our board approached leaning into um a shared leadership model when we had a founder transition um the conversations were really really generative there were questions that were designed to push us and push our thinking to make it the most i think strong and nimble um you know configuration of of adults leading an organization as possible but you know for us it's you know that sort of i think the organization has always been one that challenged the status quo um from becoming you know sort of quickly using technology to scale um and becoming an organization that's primarily supported by our own work as opposed to donations so we have a history of doing that um you know one of the the things that you know what we've been thinking about a lot is how do we take that push even further to thinking about what does it mean for people to work at fractured atlas um and so you know to that question we're getting to around seating power versus seating power um i would also say that um some of the things that we've been open to are how do we encourage our staff to be entrepreneurial um you know so you know i have a business tim and i have a podcast and a brand that we work on um and all that's related to our work at fracture atlas and enhances and augments that work but it's not work that can necessarily fit squarely within our mission of being an art service organization um and and so you know as we push that is how can your non-profit become a springboard for whatever its employees want to do you know how do you really use an accelerator incubator approach there um to begin to shift the form of what a nonprofit is which for some organizations is we value long tenure we value people doing the same things repetitively over and over again we love people who work in departments and teams and groups so really beginning to flex outside of that i think has been really important to us with regard to governance you know the question we get probably more than any other is around accountability and decision making that's something our board spent a fair amount of time like granularly like who do we email for this thing um and we were like send it to the four of us and we'll figure it out and get you an answer probably quicker than we would if you were emailing one of us um you know so i think those questions are on decision making and you know the real practical like who's responsible for this thing um you know oddly enough you get a lot of insight into people's personal relationships when they're asking questions around decision making and i'm like well i spend as much time with tim and with my three you know we were four persons with my three colleagues as i do with my wife and like we're able to make decisions as a two-person team so you know and as a family so why couldn't we do this within this organization and the folks who sort of have the hardest time getting over that hump um you learn a lot about their interpersonal relationships which has always been super interesting to me um right now we're really playing around with compensation um and and this is um you know tim and i have a fair amount of healthy conflict around compensation openly because you know we have a fixed tier compensation model um which i push against a fair amount because i really people should be compensated for the value of their labor um and that can be really rigid sometimes um but we're also thinking about like you know what could it look like if we just threw our entire personnel budget in a pot and split it against everybody in the organizations everybody's the entire organization's making the same thing what does that say about the value of our labor at various levels um and not just the value you know externally but internally do we value um the person who's supposedly doing you know we don't have a custodian but like how would we value a custodian's work at the same level of a ceo especially in a time when we're thinking about you know cleanliness is really important in office environments so whose work is more valuable um so we're playing around a lot with sort of you know ideas around compensation um in addition to like not just you know the the monetary compensation but you know how are we spreading power throughout the organization people the freedom to make decisions because you know tim will you can sort of cite research off top of his head about like how long a salary bump gets you in terms of employee morale it's not very far maybe one or two pay periods um so what are the other ancillary things that go along with compensation that are thinking outside the box be able to make people happy and then you know to to what tim's point around you know identity you know so many organizations are wrapped up in the ego of a founder or the ego executive director or ceo um and they become the face of an organization their ideas carry more weight but you know for us it really is you know how does it look like to to openly have you know a cisgender white guy and a queer black female identifying person working together in partnership and how does that partnership begin to change how the organization which you know fractional has historically been you know a single young tech guy founder um how does that transition to an entirely new way of working actually shift the identity of the organization shift the way we see our mission shift our risk tolerance and what we think are acceptable norms and behaviors within the organization thank you that was hugely helpful insight into a number of these issues and i i really think this question of identity and you're making a connection to you know as we see turnover and transition generationally in the sector from founders and long-time single executives how much this has an opportunity or poses an opportunity to shift organizational identity and sort of co-ownership is almost what i hear you saying um i wonder uh mark or anyone from your team i know you've been there the longest mark do you want to address the question of governance and how governance is unfolding as you continue to evolve your model yeah um briefly and maybe even uh prefiguring a conversation we're gonna be having with our governance team about this so they may be hearing it for the first time if they're on the call but um when we start sharing power differently internally um the board's been we actually call it a governance team because we are shifting we have shifted over the last many years certain level of trust uh that the board is now you know very comfortable with us leading in areas that they used to think were theirs and which you know by legal rights some of them are theirs but there's a whole lot of stuff that's just this just um history you know it's just it's just the way it's been done so so we're really inviting the board into kind of this reimagination of power sharing in a number of different ways so we have this there's a board leadership reconfiguration committee that we've been meeting with for over a year to keeping them really apprised of what's happening in the internal shared leadership stuff and the more we've been uh the more we've been looking at that the more the board has gotten really interested in well first of all we've got an incredible board that is already experimenting with power sharing in their own worlds many of them so some sometimes we get you know great great information from them about how to be um [Music] but but like we're in this funny space of how much do we codify these changed roles and and risk killing it by actually like stabilizing it and writing it down and how much we just kind of ride this this wave of goodwill and experimentation that seems to be working really well and evolving on its own so i don't know if that's a very coherent answer but i would say it's an experiment it is always in flux we're moving more and more towards challenging the traditional role and you know the board seems to like that too i mean they love to come to meetings and be in conversation about these things so it's getting to be a rich two-way street yeah and this is so interesting because as you all know i mean there's been writing that i would consider academic writing mainstream writing if you will um you know about what governance really is and how external to the boardroom it really is right and we so this is not a radical idea that the boards are not in charge of governing right that the practice of governance of setting direction expressing mission uh you know ambassadoring to the community building relationships managing risk these are things that are done by staff board major donors who are very involved stakeholders etc right so we already know as a sector that governance is not the sole proprietary you know uh area of the board and yet what i find is that when we get into conversations like this that feel a little more radical people start to kind of close in again and pretend they don't know that right and and so i think it's really helpful that what you're saying is involve the board in this there isn't a board version of this and a staff version of this there may be some different very specific roles of course but they're both invested in governance and making sure the organization is setting direction and expressing its mission and they always have been you know well if anyone was interested in the um oh sorry listen go ahead good go tim oh on our site work shouldn't suck dot co is a link at the end of the webinar uh but we have an entire section about our shared leadership journey that includes four pieces that were written by our board members uh about about this and there's also a podcast where we interview uh the board sharon board vice chair at the time that we um started this experiment so for anyone who's really interested in diving deep in deeper into that there's a couple of pieces from the board perspective um and active questions that they have about this role and how it intersects with their governance role that's great and i and again i think one of the practical things i hear you both saying is don't do this without your board don't get way ahead of your board right and i heard mark saying that there's a committee called the um [Music] a leadership reconfiguration committee yeah that leadership that they're involved in right so obviously you have to attract at least some people to your board who want to be experimental and iterative right if this is going to be a way of being you can't have such radically different cultures in the two spaces probably to do this you have to have some people who are genuinely interested in being a fractal or being part of a fractal but once you have that then what we're saying is there can be this joint learning space and really that there has to be uh in order for this to work from a governance perspective am i overstating that i think by example when we first made the shift from a single uh executive director to co-directors it was about a two-year process and it required some board members to leave it required some board members to come on and start advocating for the the value of that um it was not it was not a short or quick process but i think it needed to be done in a way that did build ownership of the eventual solution [Music] and that gets to that first question that you were honest about about is this in your dna and and that was an expression of for some folks it wasn't right and so um if there was enough momentum that being a fractal was going to be part and parcel of this work then there will be some transition right yeah one a quote from a no longer board member was i want one ass to fry oh dear that would be a different mindset yeah that's going to be a tough one to incorporate we could try to put our arms around as wide as we can but that's going to be a tough one to incorporate um okay so let's shift now so those were those cross-cutting themes that i think especially this last one got into a lot of some of the practical questions um and you know yes um sharing power challenges power structures there's no doubt about that and so what i what these groups have both done is say okay let's get people who want to experiment in that who want to be accountable uh who want to be explicit about their relationships and accountabilities and begin to experiment with the model what i want to do now is pose a question uh from that was pre-submitted from the audience but is very concurrent with some of the questions i see here already in our q a box and this question is about getting funder buy-in so we've talked about boards and their resistance or excitement or both about sharing power um so let's let's look at this question so the question is my organization is currently designing a co-leadership model and will have our co-ceo on board early next year and they're struggling with how to communicate that to their funders and we've all had this experience especially if you have foundation funders i would say in particular who have opinions about organizational design and capacity um that they're worried and they're expressing that worry for the organization um and i'm curious just to get a reaction uh we'll go back to you mark for a second and then open it up to others how have you communicated this to funders have you have you experienced resistance or concern i have to say not much actually from funders alyssa you may have had different experiences of that you know being the first i mean i wasn't a co-director initially um but it it raises more questions for me um which is what's the nature of the relationship with the funders that they wouldn't understand the values base for which you were doing that and could open the door to more conversation about do we actually share values around this and a chance to bring them along in your thinking i think it also you know there may be roles for the board in this uh in terms of talking with funders and also anybody that's asking that question now like hasn't been keeping up with a lot of what's been happening it's like i'd be saying well there's actually a lot written out there already now about this and here are some things you can read also and they could also talk to you know talk to co-directors where it's actually working or to to board members in organizations or or funders who are like literally like falling all over themselves to try to support and publicize new models of shared leadership so they they could talk within their own group so i think there's lots of different avenues there but but the sharing of core values would be to me to be the most important question to be raised by this what would you adolescent um it's it's a it's complex so one in one aspect of it is that uh our budget is probably i don't know i don't want to give percentages but i'll just say a large chunk of it is actually earned income um and that earned income though from a lot of folks our foundations but they're hiring us as contractors to actually do a piece of work as opposed to giving us a grant we do also have grants um to do specific pieces of programmatic work so our relationship to funders is a little different we're not as dependent on um grants and the ways a lot of other nonprofits are and um it was challenging not and i don't think just because we were sharing leadership susan and i um but because we were also two out queer women of color um and with many of our funders you know that didn't matter and i could feel resistance um trying to move into funding relationships for the organization that were previously held by a white person and i can remember one funder in particular who i described what we were going to do next and why and the principles and what we had learned from our client base many of whom this funder also funded and um she just kept saying i don't get it i don't get it i don't get it i don't get it so i sent her a link to a webinar that mark had done for a client explaining a concept that used literally the same language i had done you know that i had used and and she got it right so there were those kinds of challenges as well and then it just i realized i've been talking for a minute but just one more thing it's also made it um easier in some ways because um you know marco mark sometimes will say well would it be more helpful for me to have a conversation with this person or someone else might say that right um in the organization so we can really think about it's like we're all um if you think about the the difference between a a representative or a delegate um and a trustee it's like we're all trustees we're all trusted to be telling change elemental in the world as opposed to represent and parrot something not just um a single person in a single role who has to accomplish these things or be in these relationships and there are differences between susan and i and the way we interact and the way we talk about and approach work so there were some funders that were like you know susan worked for tcc group for a long time she can speak that language like those are susan spunders relationships and there were some that were mine right right yeah yeah i appreciate you framing that as an advantage too and it allows you to do more relationship specific fundraising uh that people are empowered to have those relationships directly where they're going to be most resonant and now and now natalie is developing a lot of those relationships too great yeah thank you um so i think this is a really good area of exploration and it's you know so much of our interactions with funders who have opinions about what we do internally whether you know has to do with owning our own story um and i love that the practical tips that you gave both of you about owning that story but also delivering it as effectively as you can let's go to another question i'm going to go to tim this was a two-part question from a participant what are some recommendations for phasing sharing leadership in um if you were to look back on it and think about something that you might adopt earlier rather than later that can kind of set the stage what might you point to does anything come up for you on that first part i think part of it is starting to talk about what is the role of a leader what is the role of the ceo how do we make decisions in this organization who's in the room what's that process look like how might we again have the the questions you know what if and how might we what if we didn't have a ceo how might we go about um doing that um again if we didn't have a confidence room how would we uh how might we connect um as community if if we if if we couldn't access our check stock how might we move money uh and all the questions people have been thinking about a lot since you know covet arrived and um i i think asking those questions you start to to develop um what is that thing that we're trying to to do and at the same time i think it's it's come up time and again in the comments uh already it's really important to look at those or characteristics of quote-unquote high-performing teams we've talked about trust already we've talked about psychological safety healthy conflict the ability to engage in healthy conflict healthy egos not big egos uh all the things that support um teams to work because if those are absent god help you because trying to share leadership that's gonna be a mess and so how do you cultivate that in your organization um it will be the the foundation will be foundational for for this work and then one practical thing i think early in when we started to think about this i pulled together a lot of research that existed around shared or distributed leadership um all of the stuff that i i sort of read and looked at and watched is in a blog post on work shouldn't suck um and one of the pieces that came up is shared leadership works best when the the the venn diagrams of areas of of expertise don't overlap a lot so gene you already said like artistic director and executive director those are pretty distinct things in sharing leadership that's not a lot of overlap but if you have program director one program director two those are almost like directly overlapping circles and so um questioning like how might we divide work and what does that look like so we can share it but that we're not being duplicative i think it's an interesting way to to start to see how this can show up in your organization in a way that fits you and not necessarily change elemental or fracture atlas or countless other organizations who are experimenting with this framework thank you very much i love starting with decision making um and then looking at those those functions and strengths of people where it's funny i'm in a situation right now where i'm thinking about recommending a shared leadership model because there's so much talent and i don't want to lose it there's that's another reason is you know i think when you have talent that is either going to leave because it can't move anywhere right how can you explore uh shifting functions a little bit so what i hear you saying is examine the decision-making processes and then really look at the functions and where there are gaps and overlaps and how you might structure that work specific to what's going on at your organization um and that gets to the second question let's see where am i going um i'm going to stay with you tim for a second but let's add other people too um the question is around structuring in a way that's clear to people and i'm sure the people that are maybe a little more resistant to this on our even on our call today are thinking how do you explain this to anybody what's the decision tree what's the org chart how do you orient a new staff person to where they should go are org charts and those kinds of tools less helpful what have you done to actually make this clear or clear for now to the people on your teams i i i liked uh i think mark you said like don't don't codify this because then it can't be flexible in what you need um i think part of it is hiring for people who have a comfort level with ambiguity and and constant change if you if if that is not there are plenty of high performing people however you define high performing who who do not work well in in environments that there where there's constant change and a lot of ambiguity um so figuring out if you have that those team members who can like all right we're not sure where we're where exactly we're going to land but we're going in that direction um and we can adjust along the way for us some of the practical things is we just have an email address i'm not going to say it out loud because i think maybe people could email out externally but there's an email address that our board and staff can email that gets to the the co ceos and then we can take it from there that's there's also the difference between like domain expertise like software engineering people aren't going to come to me for the question about software engineering they might but the next time they won't because i'm like i i don't know i don't i don't know that but if you have a question about operations or finance or people that would have been me lauren extra relations uh our former colleague paul pollavi programs and so there there's some of that there so it just sort of naturally occurs um also i i love the idea of you know a lot of people might not be um comfortable going to the ceo for something but when there's four four different people you might be more comfortable that now there's four different people that you could go to and talk to so having more opportunities for for staff to engage with those serving this function i think is really important and so that's that's what i think um well i'll put a period about four words back period great does anyone on the change elemental team want to share any practical tips for expressing the current structure to people in a way that's clarifying uh sure i can start us off um we use a lot of actually metaphor and imagery quite honestly and it's a part of one of our um i don't know tenants if you will of what we think is necessary for making change in the world which is multiple ways of knowing right so how do we bring in imagery and metaphor and things like that to understand structure so though when we were moving from um co-directors uh to co-directors within a chrysalis structure um we were talking about chrysalis to butterfly right and we had images and we drew up things and we did um share those images and but shared them with uh the kind of stance a stance i try to have a lot i don't know if mark and matt can tell if it really works um can tell you that but of of like presenting things strongly but holding them lightly right i have lots of strong opinions but i actually hold them pretty lightly um so then we realized you know what butterfly means like we've gotten to a destination and that's it and we're a butterfly and then we die and that's not what we want so then that's why we started changing and we're in this process now of moving to a hub and pad structure and the pads we're actually thinking of as lily pads and there are stem liaisons so the lily pads that are dealing with mostly internal stuff you know there's lots of you know overlap there's um an internal stem liaison who is on the hub same for external right and then we also think of our governance team as mycelium as a part of the mycelium right if you're bringing an ecosystem perspective um and the kind of mosquito mycelium that's good not the parasitic kind but the ground are these risks with imagery you have to be very specific with these metaphors yes um but the the board is getting it like they're working with that they're actually reading about healthy mycelium and like thinking about what does that mean for our role and our relationship with the staff and our relationship with the wider field and all of that kind of stuff and um it gives staff the opportunity to play with things who actually may not be in client spaces may not be thinking about these concepts of shared leadership so instead of trying to explain it to them with theory um we use images and metaphors from nature and it brings a way for them to bring their brilliance and extreme wisdom from the roles they do have in the organization into impacting and giving feedback on the structure and participating in the structure i love that i mean i just think that's such good guidance for any practice let alone only sharing leadership we're so cerebral and um codifying in some pretty dry language of leadership and we know we know this that the next generation diverse leaders are not resonating with those terms and structures they're not you know and so again it's it it is absolutely values but it's also this isn't going to work um and it's not going to inspire people to to want to lead uh to just join and recreate these same systems that have created inadvertent oppression you know at best uh in a lot of organizations alyssa were you going to say something else yeah i just wanted a reminder you talked about um about uh age and as well you use the the term diverse um when we did were on that call five years ago that you hosted around i remember i'm remembering that it was a revelation to all of us that of all the pairs or trios you know groups of folks on the call um there was only one person over 50. um there were only two white people who were in these shared leadership structures um and it was pretty much like folks of color uh under 50.

[01:08:44]um i'd say about two-thirds of whom were queer who were trying these things five years ago you know and that's not necessarily reflected on this call but um yeah it's not working for a whole lot of people um so i think as we moved more towards justice and liberation and think about how we don't throw all of the babies out with the bath water right there's some useful things we want to keep from the practices but how do we expand and grow and like think differently and embrace different ways of being that aren't necessarily new um they just might be new to some of us that's right yeah i appreciate that a lot okay anya i'm ready for that poll i want to hear what our participants are thinking about in terms of what excites them um most about potential impacts of sharing leadership in our sector and i won't know if you did this but try to pick two um but some of the things that we thought about were advancing equity for our staff making work more joyful or as tim likes to say making it not suck um challenging these structures and mindsets of the sector that just are stale for a lot of people attracting more diverse leaders being part of reimagining how power is defined and used deepening our impact in our communities where this where our ways of being will resonate more or do you want does it excite you to be part of testing and creating new organizational models and of course there are many other things but i'm curious just to take the temperature of what excites our participants i don't know how you picked two of those things so that was a silly piece of guidance but um i'm not gonna worry about which one won they're all good things uh but let's see uh let's see anya what people said oh i love that um i just said i wasn't gonna see who won and then i ood and odd over who won so that was a quick turnaround um but being part of reimagining how power is defined and used i mean that's that's really fundamental really fundamental to this work even being conscious of power and how it's used i think is is a step forward in our organizational work um so great thank you for for sharing that on you so let's move now um to the questions that you're actively grappling with and lauren i'd like to start with you the question was um at fractured atlas what's top of mind um in where you are in your iteration yeah so i mean i think you know this question around you know seating power versus seating power which came up um you know tim and i regularly meet with with some of our colleagues to talk about things we might want to write about or talk about in our podcast or or whatever and um we had a clarification on a transcript that was when we said c did we mean s-e-e-d or c-e-d-e we were like oh it could be either one in both um so you know for us and and i spent a fair amount of you know half of my life at fractured atlas in the nonprofit sector the other half of my life running a cooperative of artists um and you know i keep sort of pushing us to think about what does it look like to move towards a model that is democratically governed um you know which is which is not always the fastest way to move but you often do get to better results um and you know going back to that question that someone posed from their funder i mean i can't think of bodies deliberate bodies that move much slower than foundation i mean what a rich question right nonprofit boards are the second slowest and then you get to everybody else um so like is speed really the goal or is coming to a decision that's like really important and that does distribute power throughout the organization um and we've started to see that happening i think you know moving from our four-person team to our two-person team um you know where we have staff members who you know are you know as much as i hate the hierarchy that's there that are sort of in the the sort of bottom portion of folks with autonomy in the organization um you know as we give them as we're intentional giving them opportunities with their own solutions to things they've um excavated on earth in terms of their process their workflow and their sort of way of working you know they're coming to really really great questions i mean really really great solutions that are solutions that like tim and i couldn't have come up with um and you know in the process of them forming their own networks and ways of organizing you know that becomes a stronger more resilient organization um absolutely 100 so you know for us it's about modeling you know the respectful conflict that tim and i have um as people who trust and love each other deeply i hope tim don't stop me now because we're in public and this is being recorded um but you know how are we modeling that for everybody on staff right did you want me to jump into the second question or yeah i think that's where we are it time-wise and so that's that's that was perfect like giving us a sense of what it means yeah yeah and then i think leadership models you know tim this side you i think you find shared leadership a little bit more exhausting than i do maybe um but i'm someone who you know loves the i love problems um and i think tim you feel it a little bit differently than i do yeah well i mean i i it's it's far better than being a single ceo having been in that role um you know to have other people there who who deeply understand the challenges that you're wrestling with um and especially now i mean god you know global pandemic social unrest revolution contested election all of the things um we're bringing with us to work to have someone else um other people to help you wrestle with this and and to as we talked about earlier help help with the burden help with the load um as it shifts around it is exhausting um one of our colleagues um uh paula v sharma who was one of our previous um co-ceos said in the same way that i find it um um uplifting and helpful to have other people who share that load she she pointed out and we also know each other's challenges deeply now and so when i go to bed at night i'm just not worrying about like my things in sort of my department i'm worrying about engineering i'm worried about external relations i'm worrying about finance or people or operations and so we now so there's a double-edged sword here that we hold um and i think that's that's what we wrestle with um we did a um we had to help the with the board we we published this as well how we were going to evaluate our four-person shared non-high critical leadership team because part of the board's responsibility is to evaluate the ceo and so we created this structure had an outside person help us with it and one of the the things that they came back with was like 31 pieces about about this structure and one of them was um shared leadership is exhausting and we're like no it's like it yes and at the same point there's incredible benefits to it and and i wouldn't would not trade shared leadership for a single ceo model um having lived with this and seen the benefits that that come from it i'm curious at change elemental do you feel the same exhaustion what or is this just a fractured atlas thing natalie do you want to jump in on that do you guys kind of even jokingly say whoa this is a lot to hold or no not really i think sometimes it feels like a lot when we're like working through something and then we reap the benefits of the hard work and it feels really good um you know i think our hardest moments are when we are working through a decision and there are five people weighing in and and we're in a moment of so many people who are part of the decision it's actually happening because there's like a values-based tension um that's coming up and did you yeah my internet's unstable but hopefully and and that's what sometimes feels exhausting and like hard work like when we're parsing through um like a values misalignment and trying to figure out how do we work around it or hold the tension between legal structures that we need to that we are accountable to and liberatory structures that we are moving towards and and that feels hard and it feels hard with five people but i think i'd also feel hard just doing that by myself or doing it with two people yeah i mean like people are exhausting like and we have to operate with people so i don't know that this is more or less exhausting than running you know it feels better at least i know someone else is exhausted with me instead of sort of myself wandering through the desert on my own you know also ask the question like exhausting for who so it's it's not as if there was an exhaustion for people that were excluded from leadership and opportunity before and the emotional labor they put into trying to trying to you know make a space and so i think you also just have to ask exhausting for who and what levels i'm having five like the chrysalis and co-directorship is way less exhausting than just a co-directorship like my life has changed dramatically in the last year and i love it thank you for that specificity because a number of our questions have been like as you push shared leadership beyond co-directorship does it get you know more or less and what you're saying is again of course you have to come up with the formats but you feel less pressure less isolation um okay so we have um just about three minutes here so we're starting here with natalie so if you could be um fairly succinct but give us a sense of what this first active question means at change elemental yeah and the question is what are the conditions that enable us to show up fully and bring our respective strengths and gifts to leadership i think um before before making this transition um i personally held this myth that in order to do the things that i love like the in order to take on leadership roles that i love i also would have to take on leadership roles that actually drain me and that i hate and i the opportunity here in expanding and distributing leadership is i'm constantly surprised that there are people who love the things that i hate to do and people who hate the things that i love to do and it's just like i i don't know it's like it's like a constant revelation when that happens um and it i think that's another piece that's been really joyful and the question that's coming up for us is how how do we on how do we retrain ourselves or we remember how to do that and communicate really honestly about what's joyful um with each other and trust that like that that there's that someone's that there's gonna it's gonna balance out in some way thank you for that alyssa do you want to take number two sure um i'm reading number two um yeah i think some of the ways that leadership advances um shared the sharing leadership advances generative tension is diving into those points that natalie mentioned right so we're trying to pre-figure the world we want if you will in the husk of the world we're in right um as things are decaying falling apart you know being reformed what have you in some ways um so there's a lot of tension there's a lot of points of tension that are that are tensions that are not necessarily going to go away so we get to be creative with how we approach them and but that creativity requires us to have brave conversations to talk about things like um how the chrysalis was going to be compensated and include them in that process and actually ask them if they wanted us to make a decision so that they didn't have to do that work together or if they wanted to take the work and figure it out amongst themselves without mark and i um right so there were they were really generative opportunities um that were presented by sharing leadership so that's just one and i'll pause see if anyone wants to add anything mark anything to add there or sorry that was a head shake no okay right and you know i mean part of this is an old adage but part of what i hear you saying and it's an extension of the fractal idea alyssa is that is not not the work so i think people are like well wait but when do you do the work and and part of what i'm hearing you say is that is the work and and solving things like that for now allow you to solve other things for now right and so it's not it's not the you know it makes it if you talk about something arcane this is not the administrative work right it's not the overhead of the organization right i mean that's how outdated those modes are right i mean in terms of thinking about um why we do the work and what we're practicing and learning from all of these different spaces right yeah just just quickly the found the founder of aikido just once said that the the further you progress the fewer teachers there are um and you know we're trying to do things in a structure that are not common within this structure so one of our teachers is our own experience as we try to support organizations and networks and movements who are also trying to figure out leadership and sharing power as well as nature and art and artists you know as well as books and academia like that doesn't go out the window but that's just one of many other sources of our learning that's also the work thank you for that so um tim this and lauren this is a chance to um talk about this first resource that you're sharing with the group and again you're going to get these slides and the recordings so this will all be live for you but in a minute uh tim and lauren what is work shouldn't suck work should suck is a repository um and are sort of our consulting arm but it has a really deep resource around shared leadership around our anti-racism journey around alignment accountability um and transparency and so the resources on the shared leadership tab include those pieces i mentioned before with our board that they wrote i know a number of people have been asking for different resources to read i took a think week where i just spent time reading and processing shared leadership material and i have a post there that lists everything that i read so if you're really interested in going deep there's a lot of stuff there i don't think there's the resource the the hewlett foundation did some research and distributed leadership so if it's not there and you're you're interested in that just google hewlett foundation distributed leadership they also include a tool that says is your organization ready for shared or distributed leadership and so there's i believe six organizations that that each adopt distributed leadership in different ways but if if if this if if you're looking for more of the how we also include um posts about how we make decisions what that looks like um and and how often we meet and how we evaluate the team so this is um i guess the start of a deep dive if you have a thirst for shared leadership um you could go there great um mark are what are we looking here in these four resources are these all on your website is that changeelemental.org i believe they are all on the website great yep so these are all blogs and articles that you've been so generous in writing about your experience as it unfolds so the dynamism is captured and i've used all of these in my own teaching so thank you change elemental for the degree of writing and co-authorship you've done around this experience and i want to thank you all there are a number of questions about transition which makes me want to do a whole nother session about how the two people left and fracked at fractured atlas and what will happen when the next person leaves that change elemental um so i'm already envisioning a follow-up about how do we do transition in non-traditional ways but i want to thank all five of you for just being such fun co-creators on this and for sharing your experience as it unfolds um so here comes the three-minute pop-up feedback form that we're so grateful for you completing um and thank you all for being here and for your great questions we'll see you next time