Co-leadership: when a leader needs a partner, not yet another consulting report

The diagnosis has been made, the recommendations are gathering dust in a binder, and the coach has helped the leader take a step back. Yet on Monday morning, the leader is still alone with the hard calls, facing a team that waits for them to decide. What is missing is often neither another analysis nor another session, but someone who carries the next steps with them.

What co-leadership covers, and what it is not

The word is confusing. Search Google for “codirection”, the French term, and you will land on co-supervised doctoral theses and on pages about the CODIR (comité de direction, a company’s executive committee). The French dictionary gets straight to the point: a codirecteur is a “personne qui dirige avec d’autres” (in French), a person who leads together with others.

Applied to a business, co-leadership means a leader sharing the steering of their company, or of a major project, with a partner from outside for a period of time. Three features define it.

• Proximity. The partner sits in the forums where decisions are made: the executive committee, project reviews, meetings with managers. They see the company at work.
• Shared responsibility for execution. The partner does not stop at the diagnosis: they prepare the decisions, run the steering and answer for progress together with the leader.
• A bounded framework. One objective, one scope, one duration. Co-leadership is not meant to become permanent: it succeeds when the leader and their team no longer need it.

So it is neither a CODIR, the permanent body of in-house directors, nor a pair of co-CEOs who each hold a mandate. The corporate mandate and the final decision stay with the leader.

Why so many leaders decide alone

The loneliness of the leader is not a cliché. In 2013, a Stanford survey carried out with the consultancy The Miles Group among more than 200 North American CEOs, board directors and senior executives found that nearly 66% of CEOs do not receive coaching or leadership advice from outside consultants or coaches. Yet according to the same study, almost all of them say they enjoy this kind of support.

When they are coached, CEOs work first on sharing leadership and delegation, then on conflict management. Asked about their main area for personal development, nearly 43% of CEOs name conflict management. The need they express is therefore less about ideas than about the ability to share out the load and face disagreement.

These figures come from North America. In Morocco, several common set-ups leave the leader especially exposed to this isolation:

• The founder of a family business has often built the company by deciding alone, and the people around them hesitate to contradict them.
• The managing director of a subsidiary of an international group, in Casablanca as in Rabat, reports to a head office that sets the targets without sharing the day-to-day.
• The head of a growing SME is still running sales, recruitment and finance as well.

In all three cases, the table lacks someone who knows the job of leading, has no personal stake in the organisation chart and can say: “no, not like that.”

Co-leadership, consulting, coaching, interim management: where the lines fall

These four forms of support are not in opposition, but they do not answer the same question.

Traditional consulting answers “what needs to be done?”. The consultant analyses and recommends, and the deliverable is a diagnosis or a roadmap. Execution then falls back to the company, and that is often where everything slows down, for lack of someone with the time to drive it.

Coaching answers “how do I go about it myself?”. ICF, which presents itself as the largest coaching federation in the world, defines it as a partnership with clients in a process of reflection and creativity that encourages them to make the most of their personal and professional potential (in French). The coach works on how the leader leads. They do not decide in the leader’s place and do not get involved in operations. The federation also points out that coaching can run alongside a consulting assignment, but cannot replace it.

Interim management answers “who holds the post?”. France Transition, a federation of the people and firms in this field, defines it as an organisation (private, public or non-profit) calling on external, operational management skills (in French), for a specific assignment limited in time. The interim manager takes a post and carries its responsibilities, for example when the post is vacant or nobody in-house has the skills to hold it.

Co-leadership answers “how do we do it, together, now?”. The partner replaces nobody and does not stop at recommendations. They steer alongside the leader, who stays in post and remains in charge.

The right choice depends on what is holding you back. If you do not know what to do, consulting will help. If you know what to do but have doubts about the way you lead, a coach makes sense. If a key post is empty, interim management meets the need. If you know roughly what to do but can no longer carry everything alone, with nobody to challenge you, co-leadership is the most direct answer.

Four situations where a leadership partner makes the difference

Growth

Revenue is keeping pace, the organisation is not. Every decision still goes through the leader, and the first middle managers arrive with no framework. The partner helps to build structure: who decides what, which steering rituals, which priorities for the next twelve months. The risk to avoid: the leader handing the partner what they should be learning to delegate to their own team.

Transition

A new managing director takes up the role, a subsidiary changes scope, a reorganisation reshuffles roles. The first months weigh heavily on the leader’s credibility. An experienced partner helps them read the organisation, choose their first battles and avoid decisions taken too quickly or too late.

Succession

In a family business, the handover between the founder and their successor, whether one of their children or a recruited executive, is a period when two sources of legitimacy coexist. The partner then acts as a third party: they help to divide responsibilities over time, to spell out rules that only ever existed in the founder’s head, and to establish the successor without erasing their predecessor. To make the choice or the development of the successor more objective, an assessment of skills and potential can complement the process.

Turnaround

Falling results, tight cash, a demoralised team: the leader has to take difficult decisions, quickly, while keeping people’s trust. The partner brings a cool-headed view of priorities, method in following up on actions, and someone to prepare sensitive announcements with. If the leader needs to be replaced, interim management is the better fit. If they stay in post, co-leadership saves them from going through the crisis alone.

Leading in pairs: what the co-CEO experience teaches

At the top of large companies, shared leadership is still rare. In a Harvard Business Review article published in 2022, Marc A. Feigen, Michael Jenkins and Anton Warendh note that, of the 2,200 companies listed in the S&P 1200 and the Russell 1000 between 1996 and 2020, fewer than 100 were led by co-CEOs. The authors do not hide the failures: some of these companies performed notably poorly, especially in times of stress, and among others they cite SAP and Research In Motion.

Unlike a co-CEO, a co-leadership partner holds no mandate. But both arrangements run into the same pitfalls: contradictory messages, grey areas, rivalry. Shared leadership only works if it is organised, hence the rules that follow.

Five rules for shared leadership that works

1. A written mandate

One page is enough: the objective (structuring the executive committee, making the integration of an acquisition succeed, preparing a succession), the scope, the duration and the indicators that will show it has worked. Without a mandate, the partner turns into a permanent adviser with a vague role.

2. An explicit division of decisions

The leader has the final say. The partner investigates, proposes and challenges. Write it down, decision by decision. Here is an example of how decisions can be divided:

The logic is that of a RACI chart, which we cover in detail in the article on the decision rules that align a team.

3. A rule for disagreements

A partner who always agrees is no use. Agree in advance how to handle a disagreement: you discuss it one to one, never in front of the team; the leader decides; the partner applies the decision and defends it as their own.

4. Legitimacy granted by the leader

It is up to the leader to announce the co-leadership to their team, and to say why and for how long. Otherwise, managers will see the partner as an auditor, a future replacement or the eyes and ears of head office, and they will close up. Confidentiality is part of the contract: what the partner learns in one-to-one interviews is not used to judge people.

5. An exit planned from the start

This is the paradox of the arrangement: it has achieved its aim when you can do without it. Plan from the outset what needs to be handed over: the steering rituals the team takes on, the decisions managers now make on their own, and a few check-ins spaced out after the assignment ends.

The first weeks of co-leadership

There is no single format, but a co-leadership arrangement that gets off to a good start generally goes through three phases.

1. Immersion. The partner sits in on meetings, meets the managers one by one and reads the figures. They ask everyone the same questions: what are our three priorities? Who decides when two departments disagree? What wastes most of your time? The gaps between the answers form a first diagnosis, shared with the leader one to one.
2. The first decisions. The leader and their partner pick two or three issues where a visible result is possible quickly: a decision left pending for months, a steering ritual to create, a role to clarify. These early results give the approach its credibility.
3. Cruising speed. A short, well-prepared weekly meeting between the two of them, and a monthly review of priorities with the leadership team. The partner gradually takes up less room in running things, as the managers take up theirs.

For the weekly meeting between the two of you, three questions are often enough:

• Which decision did I put off this week, and why?
• What did I do myself that someone else should have done?
• What am I not daring to say, and to whom?

Self-test: do you need a partner or a report?

Tick the statements that describe your current situation.

• I know roughly what needs to be done, but execution is not moving forward.
• Several important decisions have been waiting for more than a month.
• Almost every decision goes through me.
• Nobody in my professional circle really contradicts me.
• I already have at least one consulting report whose recommendations have not been implemented.
• My company is going through rapid growth, a transition, a succession or a turnaround.
• My leadership team waits for me to decide rather than putting forward proposals.

Five boxes or more: what holds you back is not a lack of analysis, it is the capacity to carry execution. A leadership partner will probably be more useful to you than another study. Between two and four: first identify what is blocking you, whether method, leadership stance or workload, so you can choose between consulting, coaching and co-leadership. Fewer than two: your organisation is holding up, and an occasional outside view will be enough when the time comes.

From the report to shared decision-making

Before you look for outside help, write down in one sentence what you expect from it: an analysis, a mirror, a replacement or a partner. That sentence will tell you which kind of support to ask for. If it is a partner, TakeUp Consulting, in Rabat and Casablanca, counts co-leadership among its services, alongside its human capital and organisational transformation consulting when the issue also touches on the organisation, roles and teams. A first conversation will show whether this is the right arrangement, or whether a consultant, a coach or an interim manager would serve you better: tell us about your situation.