We build schools around a quiet assumption: one adult per classroom and one principal per building. It’s so familiar that we rarely see it as a design choice. Still, it shapes nearly everything about how we work, from who we call after a hard parent meeting to who gets to question a decision before it reaches the whole staff. Shared leadership in schools begins with noticing that the one-leader default is a choice, and that it costs us more than we tend to admit. It’s lonely. It narrows what any one person can see. It also quietly removes the people who might ask us to own our impact. Shared leadership, which researchers often call distributed leadership, spreads those decisions across more than one educator. What it asks for is smaller than a new org chart: a handful of relational skills anyone can practice with one trusted colleague.
Why We Default to One Leader
The single-leader model is woven so deeply into school life that it barely registers as a model. A teacher closes the door and runs the room. A principal signs off on the schedule and the budget. Accountability travels upward in a straight line. Plenty of educators like it that way, and they have good reasons: clear lines of authority make decisions faster, and nobody has to negotiate every call with a partner.
That preference has evidence behind it, and it deserves a fair hearing. In a study of 71 co-CEO pairs at U.S. public companies, firms performed better when one co-CEO held somewhat more power than the other (Krause, Priem & Love, 2015). That research looked at corporate financial returns, so it can’t settle the question for schools. It does name something anyone who’s sat on a committee has seen: shared authority without shared skills tends to stall. Even Dr. Ilana Nankin and Michael Fenchel, co-founders and co-CEOs of Breathe for Change, agree that hierarchy has its “time and a place.”
So the more useful question is whether leadership has to belong to one person. Shared leadership means two or more educators genuinely sharing the thinking, the hard calls, and the repair. It’s also why schools need leaders who are as skilled with people as they are with operations. A partnership only takes hold when someone at the top models it.
What It Costs to Lead Alone
Leading alone costs something at every level of a school, and the pattern repeats each time. Isolation narrows perspective, wears down confidence, and loosens accountability. Michael put the accountability problem bluntly: in a single-leader model, “you don’t really have to be accountable because you’re the boss.” Dr. Ilana described the perspective problem from the inside. She remembers facing hard situations from “my own isolated classroom or my own isolated boardroom,” with only one person’s knowledge to draw on.
For the classroom teacher. In many schools, a teacher can go an entire working day without another adult colleague in the room. In a survey of 426 Australian teachers, feeling connected to colleagues was linked to lower intentions to leave, while time pressure and leadership that undercut autonomy were linked to higher ones (Collie, 2023). That study measured intentions, though, not actual departures. The upside shows up when collaboration gets serious. In Miami-Dade schools, teachers and schools with higher-quality collaboration in instructional teams posted larger gains in math and reading (Ronfeldt et al., 2015).
For the principal. Among new principals, job isolation significantly predicted lower self-efficacy and lower job satisfaction, and it was an important predictor of whether they intended to stay (Bauer & Silver, 2018). The survey can show prediction but can’t prove cause. Even so, it gives “lonely at the top” a measurable shape: isolation wears away the very confidence a principal needs to lead.
For the school as a whole. This one’s for anyone who sets a budget, builds a master schedule, or decides who sits on the leadership team. A multi-year national study for the Wallace Foundation found that collective leadership had a stronger influence on student achievement than individual leadership, and that principals didn’t lose influence as teachers, parents, and students gained it (Louis et al., 2010). The link was correlational. It ran mainly through teachers’ motivation and working conditions, and that’s exactly why it matters when you’re deciding how to spend scarce time. Influence in a school, the data suggest, isn’t a fixed pie that one leader has to guard.
Eleven Years of Learning to Lead Together
Breathe for Change’s founders learned shared leadership the hard way. They met in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 2013, after four different people texted Dr. Ilana within a few hours to ask whether she knew Michael Fenchel. She launched Breathe for Change in December 2014 to support the new teachers she’d watched burn out in her dissertation research. Their first real collaboration came two days before a 450-person event she’d planned with no logistics plan at all. Michael had no contract, no salary, and no role. He took the event over anyway and told her she had nothing to worry about. The next day, he asked for “a two-month trial period.”
The road from there was bumpy. As trainings spread from one city to 11 in roughly 18 months, the two fell into a power struggle they both describe candidly. Dr. Ilana held on to control because she feared Michael would leave. Michael pulled back whenever he felt controlled, and that only confirmed her fear. Their titles, CEO and president, made outsiders read a hierarchy neither founder wanted. In 2019 Michael stepped back to a mostly board-level role. Dr. Ilana remembers “a sense of both relief” and “complete utter fear,” and says she was “too proud at the time” to tell him she missed him.
He came back in 2020 on a three-month trial. Before it ended, she told him, “Michael, you’re never leaving again.” They worked with a coach and divided ownership by strength instead of rank. About a year and a half ago, they went public as co-CEOs. Dr. Ilana’s arithmetic is simple: each of them brings 10 points of strength, and together “it doesn’t add up to 20. It adds up to 100.” The Wallace research doesn’t prove that multiplier, but it points the same way, since influence in the schools it studied grew when people shared it. Today Breathe for Change counts 20,000+ certified educators and 750 district partners, and both founders say neither could’ve built it alone.
The Skills That Kept Them Together
You can’t borrow the co-CEO title. The skills are another matter. The ones that kept two strong-willed people working together map closely onto the Relational layer of the Human Intelligence (HI) framework, whose competencies include Empathy, Repair, and Connection.
Mindful listening. Dr. Ilana describes staying fully present while a colleague speaks. She doesn’t form opinions or drift to her to-do list, and then she reflects back “the essence of what I heard.” In a set of experiments, high-quality listening lowered speakers’ social anxiety and defensiveness and led them to hold more nuanced, less extreme views (Itzchakov, Kluger & Castro, 2017). Most of that evidence comes from the lab. Still, it describes exactly what a hard conversation between colleagues needs.
Desires, fears, and requests. Michael taught Dr. Ilana a simple structure for conflict: say what you want, say what you’re afraid of, and make a concrete request. She taught him nonviolent communication in return. Both practices turn a vague grievance into something a colleague can actually respond to. As Michael put it, an uncomfortable feeling is “information that we need.”
Repair that owns impact. This is the hardest skill, and it’s the one the founders credit most. Here’s how Michael describes his own version: “I’ve acknowledged and taken responsibility for the fact that… how I showed up led to you being afraid.” Research on apologies backs that emphasis. Of six components tested, acknowledging responsibility was rated the most effective, ahead of an offer of repair (Lewicki, Polin & Lount, 2016). Those experiments used hypothetical scenarios, so they don’t capture long working relationships. For Dr. Ilana, hearing Michael own his impact meant she could finally “rest easy and exhale.” These three relational practices for working with a colleague come with scripts you can adapt. All three start from the same idea: owning your impact is what makes room for that exhale.
What Shared Leadership Looks Like on an Ordinary Tuesday
You don’t need a reorganization for any of this. Michael’s the first to say that for most people, “a co-CEO title isn’t the right thing.” Any teacher or principal can build a relational version of shared leadership, and it starts small:
- Find one colleague. Michael’s advice for teachers alone in a classroom is to find “a peer, a colleague that you can sync up with even just once a week.”
- Protect a weekly check-in. Even twenty minutes on the same day each week builds the trust that harder conversations will need later.
- Divide work by strengths, not rank. Dr. Ilana says trying to do everything herself “spread me so thin it actually made me a micromanaging annoying person to work with.”
- Treat feelings as information. Frustration you name early is a signal to adjust. If you bury it, it tends to come back as resentment.
- Own impact before intention. When something lands badly, start with what happened to the other person. The explanation can wait.
Students feel this too. As Michael put it, their “nervous systems will basically be able to handle whatever the educators can handle.” A colleague who helps you stay steady is a resource for every student in your room.
Shared Leadership in Schools Starts With One Colleague
We’ll keep building schools with one adult per room for a long time, and that’s fine. What can change is the assumption that the adult in each room, or the principal down the hall, carries every hard decision alone, with no one to call after the hard parent meeting. Dr. Ilana and Michael still lead Breathe for Change as co-CEOs. They still disagree, and they still repair in small moments nearly every day. Dr. Ilana sums up what changed in one line: “It’s not lonely at the top when you’ve got Michael Fenchel.” Most of us won’t find a co-founder, but nearly all of us can find one colleague, and that’s where shared leadership in schools actually begins.
If you’d like to build these skills with support, these relational practices are part of the coursework in the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change. William Jewell College, accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, awards the degree. The M.S.Ed. is designed for working educators who want to lead with the full range of their Human Intelligence. Learn more about the M.S.Ed. here.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Michael Fenchel on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They cover the four text messages that introduced them, the year Michael stepped away, and the practices that brought them back together.
