What is Shared Governance?

Whether you practise traditional bureaucracy at your organization or you are into the new ways of working, shared governance is a concept worth your time.

Shared governance is a working model in which decisions are made collectively, at the level where the information sits, rather than passed up a management line. It rests on four things: explicit roles, distributed accountability, a shared purpose, and written decision-making processes that everyone knows.

In this article, we answer the following questions:

• What is shared governance, and where does it come from?
• How does it actually work, meeting after meeting?
• What are its benefits, its limits and the mistakes to avoid?
• How does it differ from Holacracy, sociocracy and Teal organizations?
• Where do you start, and with which tools?

       

What is shared governance?

Shared governance is a working model that allows its members to actively participate in the decision-making process. The methodology includes shared accountability, a shared vision and close collaboration across teams.

In practice, an organization running on shared governance rests on four pillars:

• Explicit roles rather than frozen job descriptions: everyone knows what they carry, and what everyone else carries.
• Distributed authority: whoever holds a role decides within its boundaries, without escalating.
• Written decision-making processes, identical for everyone, which make decisions predictable.
• Transparent information: without access to the same data, deciding together is wishful thinking.

It is commonly known within hospitals to facilitate collaboration amongst nurses. In the Benelux, the best known example is Buurtzorg, the Dutch home care provider built entirely on self-managing nursing teams with no middle management.

Video above: AOD Consultant, Michael West, outlines the role of team based working in creating collective leadership in health and social care.

The working frame is also popular in organizations that wish to move away from old hierarchies that no longer work, and to strengthen internal collaboration and decision-making.

Where does shared governance come from?

Shared governance emerged as a collaborative decision-making model in the 1970s and 1980s. Its purpose: to offer an alternative to traditional hierarchies, which tended to keep frontline workers away from the key decisions of their own organization.

The model gained traction in healthcare and higher education because it gathers the views of a wide range of stakeholders, and therefore produces better informed decisions. Nurses use it to improve the quality of patient care; universities use it to involve faculty, administrative staff and sometimes students in decision-making.

Over time it absorbed further ideas: sharing decision power, transparency, accountability and engagement. Today it is used across many sectors to improve employee engagement and satisfaction.

How does shared governance work in practice?

This is the question that separates intent from practice. Shared governance is not a managerial attitude, it is a set of written rules of the game. Here are the ones you will find in most organizations that practise it.

1. Roles, not job titles

The starting point is always the same: map who does what. A role has a name, a purpose, accountabilities and a decision boundary. One person holds several of them, and a role can change hands without touching an employment contract. That decoupling between the person and the function is what makes everything else possible. Our guide on how to clearly define roles and responsibilities applies directly.

2. Circles instead of a pyramid

Roles are grouped into circles, and each circle owns its domain and its decision autonomy. Circles nest inside one another and connect through linking roles, so information travels both ways without going through a single apex.

3. Consent-based decision-making

This is the most distinctive mechanism of the model. A proposal is adopted not when everyone agrees, but when nobody raises a reasoned objection. You are not looking for the best conceivable decision, you are looking for one that is safe enough to try, and correctable afterwards. We walk through the full sequence in our article on how consent-based decision-making works.

4. Elections without candidates

To fill a role, nobody puts themselves forward. Everyone nominates someone else and argues the case in front of the group, arguments circulate, nominations shift, and the facilitator then puts a final proposal to consent. The method defuses internal campaigning and power plays, and it often surfaces people who would never have volunteered.

5. Two kinds of meetings, never mixed

Shared governance strictly separates operational work (moving current topics forward) from governance work (changing roles and rules). Each format has its own agenda, facilitator and written minutes. Our step-by-step guide to effective governance meetings describes the sequence.

6. Tension as the entry point

In these organizations a tension is not a conflict: it is the felt gap between the current situation and what could be. Everyone is invited to bring tensions to a meeting, and each one processed produces a decision, a clarified role or a new rule. That mechanism is what keeps the model alive rather than theoretical.

What are the benefits of shared governance?

Shared governance promotes:

• transparency
• accountability
• inclusivity
• autonomy

It also cuts two costs that hierarchical organizations pay without measuring them: the time spent waiting for an arbitration, and the energy spent guessing who decides what.

According to Marshall University,

"Shared governance relies on an atmosphere of mutual understanding, respect and trust that can foster honest communication and consideration in decision-making."

Gallup's work on the state of the global workplace ties disengagement to a lack of motivation, recognition and autonomy at work: the three levers shared governance acts on directly.

The link with quiet quitting

Quiet quitting describes employees who are filling a seat and watching the clock. They put in the minimum effort required and are psychologically disconnected from their employer. Although they are minimally productive, they are more likely to be stressed and burnt out than engaged workers, because they feel lost and disconnected from their workplace.

So how can you keep team members engaged and connected at work? The answer comes down to two moves: give your employees autonomy, and make them part of the decisions that concern them. Easier said than done, and that is precisely the problem shared governance gives you tools for.

According to the Gallup study, employees need three things to stay motivated:

✅ Clearer goals and stronger guidance

✅ More autonomy at work to stimulate everyone's creativity

✅ Recognition for everyone's contributions

What are the limits of shared governance?

Anyone who has watched a transformation stall asks this question, and dodging it helps nobody. Shared governance has a cost, and five pitfalls come back again and again.

• Mistaking it for the absence of rules. It is the opposite: less hierarchy demands more explicit rules. The teams that fail are almost always the ones that removed the pyramid without putting anything in its place.
• Underestimating the learning curve. The first governance meetings are slow and laborious. It takes months before the formats feel natural, and that dip is normal.
• Leaving managers without a role. A transition that says nothing to the people losing their hierarchical position manufactures its own opponents. Their new contribution is named before the change, not after.
• Stacking processes. The model does not have to be adopted in full on day one. Plenty of organizations keep only role clarity and consent-based decision-making, and do very well.
• Keeping information locked. Deciding together without access to the same numbers is a façade. Transparency is a starting condition, not a happy consequence.

One last caveat: shared governance removes neither power nor disagreement. It makes both visible and gives them a route to resolution, which is already a great deal, but excuses nothing.

Shared governance, Holacracy, sociocracy, Teal: what is the difference?

Shared governance is the umbrella term. Holacracy and sociocracy are codified implementations of it, while Teal describes a broader cultural family. Here is how they sit next to each other.

To dig into each model: Holacracy, sociocracy, Teal organizations and self-management. Our overview of 5 organizational governance models compares them in the field.

Who already runs on shared governance?

The model is not reserved for small activist collectives. A few examples documented on this blog:

• Viisi, the Dutch mortgage advisory firm, which held its Holacracy practice through successive crises, the most formalized variant of the model.
• QoQa, which rolled out Holacracy across a fast growing e-commerce business.
• Decathlon France logistics, where shared governance structures the work of entire warehouses: read the expert view.
• The French Association of Diabetics, which rebuilt its nonprofit governance with Talkspirit.
• Early stage companies, which sometimes take the logic all the way to capital allocation with Slicing Pie.

Want to join the movement? Read our call to accelerate the transition towards shared governance.

I want to give shared governance a go, but where should I start?

Going from a traditional hierarchy to a more collaborative and transparent system can be daunting, especially if there are many managers in the organization and power plays between departments. A transition that holds usually follows five steps.

1. Clarify the purpose. Without a shared direction, autonomy produces drift. This is the prerequisite, not the packaging.
2. Map the roles that already exist. Before redistributing authority, you need to see what each person actually carries, including everything written down nowhere.
3. Pick one decision-making process and apply it everywhere. Consent is the best candidate: simple to explain, immediately visible in a meeting.
4. Start on a small perimeter. One willing team, three months, an honest review. A failed pilot in one circle teaches you something; a failure across the whole company costs you.
5. Give it tooling and visibility. Roles, decisions and minutes must be readable by everyone, otherwise transparency stays declarative.

To structure the journey, working with a coach is highly advised. The transformation can be scary, so going in steadily is best.

🏆 Article pick: 9 best practices to facilitate and engage internal communities

Which tools support shared governance?

A methodology needs a platform to live on, otherwise roles, decisions and minutes end up scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets. With a coach you build a solid strategy and the steps to implement it. With a solid platform, you practise what you learn and collaborate with ease.

With Talkspirit, you can put transparency, collaboration and decision-making into practice, through a few key features:

• the dynamic org chart, to map every role in your organization,
• the OKR module, to set objectives and key results at company and team level,
• the meeting templates, which bring structure to your governance and triage meetings,
• the project management module, to follow your teams' work.

If you would rather start by equipping the decision itself, our pick of the best collaborative decision-making tools is a good place to begin. And since the question now reaches every organization, we devoted a guide to AI governance: the same principles of explicit roles and traceable decisions apply there.

Read our customer testimonials to see how they unlocked these benefits, or share your project with us and the challenges you are facing inside your organization.

Are there other organizational models I should know about?

Shared governance isn't the only organizational model out there. There's also Holacracy, sociocracy, Teal, Agile, and many more. So what's the difference between all those models? Should you rather choose shared governance or another one? And how can you implement it in your own organization? That's exactly what we address in our white paper on organizational models. Whether you're looking to get started with shared governance or just explore what else is available, we guarantee it's a must-read. Click on the button below to access it 👇

Access White Paper

In our white paper "The Ultimate Guide to Organizational Models", you'll get: a comprehensive overview of innovative organizational models (like Agile, Teal, Holacracy and Constitutional Management), testimonials from pioneer organizations that have successfully adopted them, best practices for choosing, implementing and measuring the effectiveness of your model, as well as the digital tools that make the transition smoother.