Thinking about hiring two or more co-CEOs? Here are a few things to consider from organizations that have already made the move:
Choose co-CEOs who already trust one another.
Vanessa Kirsch and Tulaine Montgomery had known each other for more than 20 years before teaming up as co-CEOs at New Profit, a venture-philanthropy organization based in Boston.
“You’re looking for chemistry,” says Steve Jennings, the organization’s board chair and a former executive at Deloitte. “Do these two people get along? Do they trust each other?”
At Greenpeace, Ebony Twilley Martin and Annie Leonard “disagreed on many points” during their two years as co-CEOs, but they worked through the differences with the help of the board, says Jakada Imani, Greenpeace’s board chair.
“You can’t do this without profound respect and trust for the other person,” Imani says. “If there’s any ‘I know better than you’ or ‘You don’t trust me,’ this blows right apart.”
Plan carefully before moving to a co-CEO structure.
Both the Young Women’s Freedom Center and New Profit spent a year planning for their co-CEO arrangements. Common Future, which has three co-CEOs, spent months detailing who would be responsible for what and how the leadership team would proceed if one CEO disagreed with the other two.
“Figure out your management process — who’s covering what, who’s leading what,” says Sandya Nakhasi, one of the Common Future co-CEOs. “Try to do as much as possible up front to minimize the challenges that might come from the co-leadership structure.’”
Get outside help.
Many charities moving to co-CEOs work with consultants or coaches before and after the move to co-leadership. Jennifer Njuguna, a co-CEO at Common Future, says the consultant that she and her co-CEOs worked with was able to “raise issues objectively” and keep the group accountable for progress as the start date for their appointments neared.
Abigail Richards, a co-CEO at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, says her leadership coach told her: “You all are entering a marriage. There’s a lot of intentionality that goes into that.”
Don’t take it too far.
While several charities have had success with as many as three co-CEOs, that might be about the limit. The La Semilla Food Center, a charity that works to improve the food system in southern New Mexico and El Paso, Tex., was founded as a shared-leadership organization, with three co-directors. But the leadership structure broke down when the charity moved to four co-directors a few years ago, says Krysten Aguilar, a former co-director at the organization.
“The four of us had different perspectives on what it means to carry the mental and emotional weight of the organization,” says Aguilar, who has since left the charity. “Two people were thinking about every single aspect of the organization, and the other two were thinking about 30 percent of the organization and not considering the rest.” The charity quickly moved back to just two co-directors.
Regular check-ins are important.
Nearly all the co-CEOS interviewed by the Chronicle said they meet in person or virtually with their fellow chief executives at least once per week. At the Project for Public Spaces, co-CEOs Nate Storring and Kelly Verel started out with a Tuesday meeting, but they found the sessions ran too long. Now they have a Tuesday meeting where they talk about programs, strategy, and fundraising, and save financial matters for a Thursday meeting that also includes the finance manager.
Salaries should be similar
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Salaries for co-CEOs may vary a bit based on experience. For example, Verel has been with the Project for Public Spaces much longer than Storring, and she makes more as a result — a board decision that Storring says he is “very happy with.”
But too much variation in salary sends the message to employees and others that the more highly compensated CEO is really in charge, says Mandi J. Stewart, an associate professor at North Carolina State University who studies nonprofit leadership.
“If it is about equity,” Stewart says, “the equity trickles to the paycheck, too.”
