Implementing Shared Leadership
Shared leadership is more than an organizational chart. It is a commitment to aligning how decisions are made with the values an organization seeks to uphold. By distributing power, fostering mutual accountability, and creating meaningful opportunities for participation across all levels of the organization, shared leadership helps build stronger teams, reduce burnout, and increase organizational resilience.
​
Drawing on firsthand experience with co-executive leadership and participatory governance, I help organizations design structures that fit their values, ensuring that staff, leaders, board members, and community stakeholders have a voice in shaping the future. Through circlework, collaborative decision-making practices, and clear accountability systems, organizations can move beyond traditional hierarchies toward a culture where leadership is shared, expertise is recognized wherever it exists, and people closest to the work help guide key decisions.
Explore Co-Executive Models
Curious whether a co-executive model could work for your organization? Drawing on lived experience leading through shared leadership transitions, I help organizations explore, design, and implement collaborative leadership structures that align power, responsibility, and organizational values.
Share Decision-Making Across the Organization
The strongest organizations recognize that expertise exists throughout the organization. I help teams build participatory decision-making structures that give staff at every level a meaningful voice in shaping priorities, policies, and organizational direction.
Integrate Circlework As Daily Practice
Circlework is more than a meeting format. It is a powerful tool for building trust, strengthening relationships, and ensuring that every voice has an opportunity to contribute to decision-making. I help organizations embed circlework into their daily operations, creating consistent practices that foster collaboration, accountability, shared learning, and a culture of shared leadership.
Jake De Vera & Holly Henning, Co-Executives at Women's Advocates; Photo Credit Brittany Powell, 2026.
Case Study: Implementing Shared Leadership at Women's Advocates
by Jake De Vera
Â
As Co-Executive Director of Saint Paul-based non-profit Women’s Advocates (wadvocates.org), alongside Co-Executive Director Holly Henning, I helped lead our organization's transition toward a more intentional model of shared leadership. Women's Advocates, founded in 1974 as the first domestic violence shelter in the nation, has long been rooted in the belief the collective action and shared decision making are key to dismantling systems of power and control.
Â
Many organizations begin their shared leadership journey by implementing a co-executive or co-director model. While this can be an important first step, shared leadership cannot be sustained if power remains concentrated everywhere else in the organization. We found that lasting change required creating opportunities for participation, influence, and decision-making at every level of the organization, not just within the executive team.
Â
To support this transition, we expanded the use of circlework as a core organizational practice. Through our Foundational Circle and Listening Circle processes, staff create space for reflection, relationship-building, collaborative problem-solving, and shared decision-making. Rather than relying exclusively on top-down leadership, these structures ensure that the people closest to the work have meaningful opportunities to shape how the work is done.
Â
The result has been a leadership model that better reflects our organizational values, strengthens staff engagement, distributes expertise more effectively, and creates a more resilient organization. For me, the most important lesson is that shared leadership is not an organizational chart. It is a daily practice of sharing power, building trust, and creating structures where every voice can contribute to the future of the organization.
Women's Advocates Foundational Circle Presents at Minnesota Coalition on the Homeless 2026 Annual Conference