In today’s rising authoritarianism, exhausting distraction tactics, and organizational contradictions, the question of how we lead is as important as what we fight for.

Across movements and organizations, we are witnessing a crisis not only of politics and policy but also of leadership. Many organizers are asking hard questions: Are we playing it too safe? How can we engage and energize more of our team during these times? Why do so many of us feel alone as leaders, or disconnected, as staff, from the internal decision-makers who impact our work? 

Collective leadership, especially in this moment of crisis, offers a way to strengthen our organizations, expand our movements, and deepen our commitments to shared values and actions. It can help us move past the disconnect and disillusionment and ground us in purpose. 

However, to fight back against authoritarian power grabs, we must be willing to move past our own power-hoarding tendencies and instincts to centralize power and decision-making when the going gets tough. Finding leadership models that support this expansion is integral to our success in movement organizations, as it offers us the opportunity to rehearse the type of power-sharing and liberated world we want to build. 

Breaking Free from Hierarchical Norms and Either/Or Thinking

When I first started studying collective leadership, I was resistant to the idea. I’m a Gen X latch-key kid, raised to be hyperindependent and self-reliant. I carried those characteristics into my 20 years of executive leadership in social justice nonprofits. I eventually stepped away from senior leadership, feeling burnt out and isolated, deeply frustrated with myself for not knowing how to respond more effectively to my team’s needs and meet the demands of the moment. 

Additionally, in the many organizations I worked with, as well as in the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements where I was primarily focused, I observed again and again the distance between professionalized staff and frontline activists, as well as between frontline staff and organizational decision-makers. Some of the best ideas were not making it across these divides, and the relationship between leaders, staff, and activists seemed increasingly transactional. 

I was stuck in binary thinking. Leadership came either from one person or an amorphous consensus-based collective; it was formal or emergent; it required exceptional heroic individuals or “everyone is a leader.” We had to focus either on internal dynamics or external crises. 

My research, Beyond the Leadership Binary, challenged all those assumptions. It turns out that collective leadership can encompass all of these options simultaneously: it can include individual hierarchical leadership with collective decision-making, formal leaders with titles alongside emergent leaders who have influence without titles. Moreover, it can flourish precisely in those moments of maximum external disruption and crisis. Moments like those we are confronting today.

Prioritizing collective models of leadership is about sharing the power of decision-making and building leader-full, aligned, and committed organizations and movements. It is a resistance to power hoarding and a rehearsal for the world we are trying to build.

Collective leadership is neither new nor overly complicated. It involves groups of people working together across organizational and social hierarchies, positions, education, status, titles, and roles to share decision-making, responsibility, and accountability in achieving shared goals. It can be practiced within our organizations and in our movement spaces. 

It’s helpful to think about collective leadership in two contexts – one is in movement organizations, and the other is in social justice movements. Movement organizations are the backbones of our movements, and there is an important feedback loop between being more inclusive, expansive, and democratic in our organizations and in our movements. When our movement organizations rely on elite, hierarchical, and power-over models of leadership, we tend to replicate that in our movements, to our detriment. 

I observed this in the work of CoreAlign, an organization I founded to bring leaders in the reproductive health, rights, and justice movement together to develop a 30-year strategy to counteract the 40-year anti-abortion strategy. We began by mapping the social networks and issues within the movement. Throughout our 13-city tour to share back the information we gathered, we heard that movement organizations were making assumptions about others’ needs and wants without consulting them, often based on the notion that what benefited or made sense to top leadership benefited everyone in the movement. 

Staff and grassroots leaders expressed frustration with organizational hierarchies that hindered their ability to inform organizational strategies with their frontline experiences and ideas. Larger, national organizations often helicoptered into Red States during ballot initiatives, expecting boots on the ground, and then disappeared once the election cycle was over without listening to or trusting local leaders. This over-reliance on hierarchical, coastal leadership that excluded on-the-ground perspectives contributed to anti-choice advocates building powerful momentum in the south and central parts of the US. 

Over time, many of our organizations have evolved to a level of professionalism and managerial elitism that inhibits widespread people power and innovation within our organizations, and, by extension, within our movements. 

Collective leadership can provide an antidote to this distance and disempowerment, specifically by structuring work so that people collaborate across organizational hierarchies to address problems together. Through collective forms of leadership, organizations can tap into collective wisdom, meet people where they are, and deepen staff, activist, and member engagement, empowerment, excitement, and involvement. Collective leadership flattens elitism and hierarchies, and engenders more small “d” democratic participation in organizations and movements.

Facilitators Not Gatekeepers: Rethinking the Role of Hierarchical Leaders

Collective leadership is not about removing senior leaders or organizational hierarchies; it’s about reframing their role from decision makers to enablers. In “leader-full” organizations, senior leaders can act as facilitators, not gatekeepers, by creating enabling conditions, authorizing experimentation, and ensuring broad-based participation and inclusion. They can expand the circle of who is responsible for the work and who is accountable for the outcomes. 

Throughout my research on social justice organizations, I found that the most effective leaders shared decision-making, delegated authority, and modeled vulnerability. They created legitimacy for new leaders to emerge without losing their own role and responsibilities. 

We didn’t give up leadership. We expanded the circle.

When there is a question about where decisions should be made, collective leadership pushes decision-making down and out. Instead of consolidating decision-making and responsibility at the top of organizational hierarchies, it moves decision-making downward to include more voices, perspectives, and load-sharing. The challenge for most organizations isn’t in the core value of power sharing, but in how to practice collective leadership. How can they find the time to include more perspectives and responsibility, without losing momentum, in times of crisis and urgency?

From Possibility to Practice: Small Bids for Big Wins

One common fear about collective leadership is that it’s impractical or unwieldy. In times of disruption and crisis, it can feel like we don’t have the time to flex and build this muscle, to trust the people and structures that can hold the urgency of the moment. But organizations and movements can take small-bid steps to experiment without overhauling everything at once.

We don’t have to wait for the perfect moments to try out collective leadership; in fact, times of uncertainty and change might be the best time.

In my research, I found organizations that, instead of moving decision-making up the organizational hierarchy into executive teams, moved decision-making down to task forces, advisory groups, and committees for deliberations, recommendations, and proposals. They created short- or limited-term shared leadership projects or committees. Rather than consolidating power, they intentionally disseminated power throughout the organization. Instead of defaulting to a few, they defaulted to many or more, prioritizing those most impacted and most responsible for the work. In some cases, this included more community participation. While not always perfect, this broader participation has created space for more perspectives and needs to be considered and included, rather than relying solely on the analysis of the few at the top. Collective leadership can create the trust needed to give voice to the unspoken and visibility to the unseen. It can flatten power differences enough to lead to more inclusive, equitable results. 

Organizations committed to using more collective forms of leadership also intentionally prioritized third spaces. Instead of considering these spaces as distractions from work, they resourced affinity groups, learning circles, book clubs, team sports, and dance parties as essential components of the work. As organizers have long known, you cannot skip the step of building the relationships and trust needed to take risks together and lean into the uncomfortable work of challenging the status quo. Organizations and groups hosted spaces for reflection and vulnerability, where individuals could share and process traumatic emotions, heal from the collective trauma of external events, learn about differences, and bridge to deeper solidarity and care. 

At the Center for Law and Social Policy, this looked like creating organization-wide space to share people’s struggles and reactions after the police killing of George Floyd, and their feelings about the immigrant family separation policies under the first Trump administration. As a part of their racial equity journey, all staff visited the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which covers the history of slavery and racism in the US. The visit included discussions and learning spaces by affinity groups, creating a shared emotional touchpoint throughout the organization.

The organizations that adopted collective leadership created cross-cutting structures that included both formal and emergent leaders. In these spaces, they committed to rotating leadership roles, hosting, facilitation, and other tasks. They shared the work in different ways to build empathy and understanding, allowing different styles and perspectives to be showcased. 

Collective leadership can take many different forms and look very different along a spectrum of power-sharing and decision-making. The defining factor is an intention and commitment to share power, not in the abstract, but in the actual decision-making, responsibility, and accountability. It is through these kinds of small actions that we can shift culture, redistribute power, and build readiness for deeper transformation.

Likewise, in movement spaces, as Hahrie Han and Dani Negrete note in these two Block and Build podcast episodes, small groups are the secret to scale, as the “crucible where people can rehearse behaving differently with each other,” and where their agency and strategies drive their work. These small groups and chapters essentially operate in a form of collective leadership, where people build the trust, commitment, and sense of belonging to stay in the struggle, reimagine different possibilities, and take action together.

How we organize and take action is just as important as what we are working toward.

Leadership as Resistance and Rehearsal

In this time of authoritarianism and deepening despair and fatigue, collective leadership can be both a strategy and a stance. It resists the individualism, elitism, and hierarchy that has produced our current crisis and reproduces some of those alienating practices within our organizations and movements. And it offers an opportunity to rehearse the world we want to build: one of shared power, mutual accountability, and radical imagination. Like the Block & Build framework, it offers options for blocking exclusive, elite practices and builds by creating space for leader-full organizations and movements.

Collective leadership is not perfect. It is not always fast. But it is what resilience looks like in practice. It is the connective tissue we need to meet this moment and to build what comes next.

Through intentional collective leadership practices, movement organizations can demonstrate ways to expand participation and buy-in without compromising effectiveness, sustain commitment without reinforcing hierarchy, and build democratic capacity through relatively low-risk organizational practices. 

Collective leadership isn’t aspirational; it’s a practical and necessary strategy for resilience, equity, and systems change. 

Systems are often resistant to change because they have many separately functioning parts and complex interdependencies. As in the parable about different people feeling different parts of an elephant, in complex systems, we tend to generalize about the whole from the separate parts, which never gives the whole picture. Collective leadership brings the whole elephant into the room, enabling people who touch different parts of the system to puzzle together the whole system and address it collaboratively.

We witnessed significant shifts and windows of opportunity to do things differently during the massive disruptions of COVID-19 and the racial reckoning of 2020. The current political and economic crises are similar disruptors, raising challenging questions and creating pressures to change in ways that people feel more included and heard. The comfort of the status quo is no longer sustainable. We need to transform to meet this moment, not only in what we are fighting for, but in how we are fighting together to build what is next.

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