Co-CEOs Need Regular Feedback—and a Process for Getting It

Even if you’ve never flown an airplane, you know the importance of calibrating over time. A good pilot keeps checking navigational metrics throughout the flight, adjusting to weather, traffic, or other changes, rather than just setting a course and relying on the autopilot to complete the job. Sometimes the pilot gets lucky and makes hardly any adjustment, but they check and recheck anyway, just to make sure. Compared with other forms of travel (such as trains), flying is unstable and unpredictable. Even the biggest aircraft is vulnerable to strong winds, but we fly anyway because it gets us where we want to go fast. The same is true of putting two people in charge of a company: It can bring big returns, but the arrangement can be less stable than having a single leader. More companies are naming co-CEOs to leverage complementary skill sets and handle organizational complexity—Oracle and Spotify are recent examples. When done right, appointing co-leaders can create synergies by bringing together different strengths, making a crucial difference for firms operating under complex pressures to grow and innovate. The arrangement requires committed leaders willing to share responsibilities for the entire operation, not just their area of expertise. As a leadership advisor, I’ve worked on dozens of CEO and C-suite co-leadership appointment situations at leading global companies across industries—and I’ve seen many of these arrangements succeed. As when piloting a plane, however, frequent calibration, feedback, and redirection is necessary—and this can be a part of managing co-leadership that companies overlook. Why Giving Feedback to Dual Leaders is More Difficult For co-leadership to work, an organization needs two talented executives willing to share responsibilities for the unit or company. When setting up these arrangements, boards focus on making sure the two leaders are aligned, that the boundaries of their responsibilities make sense, and that the organizational structure follows from that. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of boards stop—and those steps are only part of what’s necessary. Boards focus too much on building the foundation, and not enough on the day-to-day process of making the partnership work—recognizing that co-leaders face special risks of derailment. One of the key opportunities boards often miss is to give co-leaders ongoing feedback. There are three reasons why: First, giving feedback to co-leaders can be perceived as having to do double the work. It may require the board to have significantly more feedback conversations than with a single leader, and it is also trickier to get both co-leaders together to have these discussions in one meeting in person. Often, I have also seen that board chairs prefer to maintain their individual relationships with co-CEOs, perhaps to hedge their bets. (As one co-CEO recently said to me, “we never do meetings together with the chair.”) Some boards or chairs may believe that when dealing with thorny issues such as succession and accountability, dealing with co-leaders one-on-one makes sense. Second, boards are mostly in an operating mode that focuses on what one chair described to me as “outward oriented results”—financial performance, market share expansion, adaptation to technology, or retention statistics of key talent. When an organization has co-leaders, it can be hard to attribute these results to one leader or the other, and discussing each co-leader’s impact in driving towards these goals without hard metrics to hold on to can feel uncomfortable and unproductive. Third, most companies have ongoing feedback processes for leaders, but these primarily focus on the individual level. These initiatives miss out on adapting the processes for the co-leaders and the dynamics of their collaboration. They might give you great data on how both leaders do individually against the same set of competencies, but don’t provide any data points on whether both of them together as co-leaders are able to generate extra value against shared priorities. This is particularly tricky since most co-CEOs maintain additional individual fringe priorities on top of their shared focus areas. To be effective and relevant, the feedback processes need to focus on the co-leaders’ special interactions and ways of working in service of their primary task. Calibration for Co-Leaders in Practice When companies shift to co-leaders, they need to create a practical system that creates the right oversight, feedback, and accountability for the leaders individually and as a pair. Start by figuring out who is going to run the feedback process. You don’t want the two leaders just having regular check-ins with each other or assessing each other; that can turn into a power play, create conflict, and fail to let both leaders benefit from more objective data points. Putting a third party in charge shifts the conversations because each co-leader needs to frame decisions or concerns according to what the company needs. For that reason, that third person should be someone who is neutral to their dynamics and only cares about what is best for the company. I’ve seen companies assign this role to their chief learning officer or someone from HR who knows how executives work, such as a senior leadership development professional who gets air cover from the global chief people officer. If you draw on an outside leadership advisor, which some companies do, make sure it’s someone who can quickly build trust with both executives and is not viewed as being assigned by and beholden to the chair. How often this feedback process happens will also depend on the company. I recommend structured check-ins every six to nine months for new co-leaders. After 18-24 months, it can shift to annually. Even seasoned co-leaders need annual check-ins (like a “health check”), because stagnation can easily lead to missing out on capturing opportunities in these partnerships. These check-ins require extensive preparatory work. You don’t want the leaders to treat a check-in as just another meeting they have to show up for. The third party interviews each co-leader individually prior to the check-in and generates a collated report. This report captures their individual reflections on how the arrangement is going relative to the opportunity set that they are solving for. It also includes their views on forward looking priorities. The third person can work with each co-leader individually on their vision of success, broken down by business impact, organizational impact, stakeholder impact, and co-leadership impact (i.e., personal leadership style when working together). Then this person can overlay the individual data from both in the report to highlight areas of alignment and differences for both the co-leaders to see. During the debrief meeting with both co-leaders and the third person, the discussion then focuses on how each co-leader can help to deliver on shared priorities and overcome the challenges identified. As a follow-up, the third party can send the report to the board or CEO (if the co-leaders are not the co-CEOs). The report should present the feedback with analytical rigor, structure, and practical implications, becoming a tool that the co-leaders and board can refer back to over time. This calibration requires ongoing support and encouragement from boards, which ideally treat it as another key metric to track. In one recent situation I was privy to, the board chair and the head of the nominations committee sat down with the newly appointed co-CEOs and said they expected regular feedback reports on their effectiveness in working together—particularly in how the co-leaders would adjust their actions based on what was learned. They added that this was important information in their discussions with the largest shareholders, who had doubts about shifting to a dual leadership structure and therefore wanted to closely track the evolution of management performance. Working with Feedback One of the key benefits of the check-in process is that it can lead to a stimulating conversation between the two leaders about how they might work more effectively together to achieve what’s needed. That conversation, in turn, can help each one think through what needs to happen next. The third party can encourage the following, circular actions: The co-leaders refresh the metrics they assess to identify the ones that matter the most. They give each other feedback on their effectiveness in advancing these metrics. They hear and discuss feedback from the rest of the organization, including C-suite colleagues and directors. They structure their takeaways to reinforce the needed changes in behavior, including rules of engagement. As appropriate, they communicate back to the board and the organization what they are implementing. Although all of these actions and communications can add value, it’s the substantive, focused conversation between the co-leaders, facilitated by the third party, that matters the most. As one co-CEO told me, she is so busy with daily concerns that one-on-one discussions are consumed by current priorities. She can carve out time to have strategic discussions, but it’s different when someone gathers input individually first and then puts it in front of them, removing any possibility of being biased by hearing each other opine. Sometimes these conversations give an early warning that the co-leaders see a problem differently—and, in provoking a conversation, help speed the path toward a solution. Here’s an example: The board of a company in the technology sector decided to go with co-CEOs because the two candidates had broadly aligned ideas of where the company should go. But when these leaders got into details on the company’s activities, they diverged. One wanted to drive sales growth in the AI space by restructuring an important business unit and combining it with another part of the company to create a unified external interface with clients. The other wanted to leave the organizational structure of those two groups as is, but pull out super performers from both and create a new agile structure, beefed up with some senior lateral hires. Thanks to the calibration process, they realized this disagreement early, worked through the risks of either step, and unified on data points to get and questions to work through to get to a joint outcome in a cohesive manner. The board was impressed. Some co-leaders also use these conversations to settle on rules of engagement. Continuing with the current example, the co-leaders of the technology company decided they would always agree on the specific data points, sources for that data, timing, and process for making a decision. They recognized that this requirement would take more time, but both believed in the long run it would result in better outcomes by drawing on each other’s strengths. The specific feedback areas will also vary by company and situation. To help identify the ones your co-leaders should focus on, I’ve also used these illustrative questions, which should be answered by a group of 20 direct reports with agreement ratings (from 1-5, from strongly disagree to strongly agree). Are the leaders: Handling decision-making processes in an effective and timely manner? Showing up as an “unified” front? Leading the business and important strategic matters together (versus staying in their lanes)? Contributing with new ideas that take the business forward? Comfortable with questioning the status quo and making bold moves to break through barriers? This input can be gathered via a confidential survey, with results only accessible to the third party. Quantitative results from the survey can allow for further calibration against the self-assessment of the co-leaders. Overlaying this data with additional qualitative feedback gives the co-leaders clarity on what action to take to maximize their effectiveness. Co-leaders often believe they are more effective than how others in the organization see them, viewing themselves as bolder or more creative. The third person’s quasi-objective collection of feedback also helps to address “elephants in the room”—topics that are too sensitive for colleagues to raise in person. . . . A feedback process for co-CEOs is essential to realize the special value they can create. With such a high-risk, high-reward structure, boards and companies need extra attention and oversight to prevent the co-leaders from veering off course. Using a structured process to keep the leaders aligned and working toward the same goals will increase the odds of success.

Co-CEOs Need Regular Feedback—and a Process for Getting It

Summary.

Partner Center