Utilizing masculine and feminine energy to enhance leadership capabilities.
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Currently, I’m co-chairing two boards of fairly sizable all volunteer organizations. Each organization is growing and thriving at an unprecedented clip. In both organizations, we have set up a committee structure to provide leadership and direction and divide and conquer the work of running different slices of the pie. What is unique about each committee is that instead of one chair at the helm we have two co-chairs sharing each senior position.
The two co-chairs of each committee are charged with recruiting committee members, crafting and vetting a clear strategy for their term and getting the projects they initiate across the finish line. If you are the chairman of a board you are probably thinking it would be a royal pain to recruit and manage twice as many board members. I can assure you, in the end it’s completely worth it because not only is the team twice as productive, you will also have twice as much fun.
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Advantages of having Co-Chairs in charge of each committee
- Having a co-chair means you don’t always have to be “on,” one can take a breather while the other carries a little more.
- It’s a lot more fun to craft a strategy when you have someone to brainstorm with.
- If one co-chair leaves the other co-chair can keep the lights on and is there to onboard a replacement co-chair.
- Many hands make light work, so project work becomes less heavy for both.
- You get seen. Your co-chair is always there to celebrate and commiserate over wins and losses.
- An expanded diverse leadership team provides more advice, talents and resources to the organization.
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How the Co-Chair Structure Can Support Gender Equity and Inclusion
We invented a metric called the Versatility Factor (V-Factor) to help teams grow a balanced set of both masculine and feminine strengths and skills regardless of their gender or gender mix. A powerful way to improve your organization’s V-Factor is to setup whenever possible a leadership team with male/female co-chair pairs leading each committee. Because mixed gender pairs are directing the efforts for most slices of the pie, masculine and feminine blended approaches emerge for all aspects of the organization e.g. strategy, marketing, programming, community building etc.
Male/female co-chairs immediately achieve true gender equity in leadership and also dynamically shift process, attitudes, ideas and outcomes that maximize both masculine and feminine strengths. This is an easy way to bring the under-represented gender of your organization into positions that influence the strategic direction of the organization. This approach shapes the organization to be inclusive and taps into the full suite of talents of a mixed gender group.
We are experimenting with this co-chair structure with an organization called Denver New Tech (DNT). DNT is a community of technical entrepreneurs that meet monthly to support technical innovation and startups. Women in tech are relatively few and far between. This is also true of the DNT community. Most meetings have been about a 30/1 male to female ratio. So rather than have a board with men in charge of most things and a token woman or two in charge of others, we have set up a co-chair structure with most committees having male/female co-chairs. This influx of women in leadership is bringing fresh ideas to the table and mixing things up. The desired outcome of this approach is to both attract and retain women to our community, and to also create hybrid designs for our meetings that will be more satisfying for everyone.
It will be interesting to see if this approach to synergizing masculine and feminine energy into leadership in a male-dominated community will in fact increase the number and success rate of female startup entrepreneurs in Denver. If so, that will be a bonus, but in itself, that is not enough, what we are hoping to show is that our approach improves the success rate for all startups in Denver. This model of a leadership team comprised of male/female co-chairs is a simple, powerful means to build truly balanced and inclusive outcomes. It also resolves the power struggle that ensures when forced to choose either a female or a male to be in leadership positions. The answer becomes “both.”
What would the world look like if every business had male/female co-CEOs, every board had male/female co-chairs, every school male/female co-principal, every country male/female co-presidents? Could this be a short cut to a better world?
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Photo credit: Wayne Kessler