What is Collective Governance?
Staff of Pangea Legal Services, May 2022
In the context of a workplace, collective governance systematically distributes power, ownership, and accountability to all staff. It enables and empowers workers to exercise non-hierarchical, shared leadership. The goal is to decentralize power with transparency while increasing shared ownership, efficiency, performance, and impact.
It may be helpful to also describe collective governance by what it’s not: it’s not a hierarchical structure that follows a top-down “chain of command.” Modeled after the structures of for-profit corporations, most nonprofit organizations are led and governed in a pyramid-like structure inherited from monarchies, feudal societies, the military, and colonial power structures. Decision-making power, responsibility, accountability, and ownership rest largely at the top of the pyramid and diminishes as you go down. Money and other resources are also concentrated at the top and reduced as you go down the pyramid. Power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few, with the promise or hope that everyone can rise up to the top of the pyramid with hard work. But the promise is false because the pyramid is never intended to lose its shape or structure.
A FEW KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PYRAMID POWER STRUCTURE
Lack of dynamic thinking and action: When dissent and principled disagreement gets easily silenced by the few at the top, traditional and dominant ways of thinking and doing prevail.
Vulnerability and instability in the leadership structure: A good leader at the top can be taken out and replaced easily, against the will of the majority; or there can be a vacuum of power at the top
Exploitation and extraction: these models tend to produce power and wealth at the expense of the workers who produce them.
Collective disempowerment: Because hierarchical organizations depend so heavily on direction from the few at the top, they don’t get to benefit from the collective brilliance, skills, and experiences of all of its members.
Alternatively, a collective governance structure is defined by the distribution of functions or powers. In contrast to the pyramid model, collective governance can be visualized like a circle, or series of overlapping circles, made up of staff. We can think of the circles as hubs or as committees. The circles may represent related sets of skills, a work area, a field designation, etc. Decision-making power, responsibility, accountability, and ownership is distributed to circles and teams of staff. They become the leadership teams. How staff are organized into circles, for how long, and in what capacity is the subject of worker-developed policies. As in any workplace, policies are by nature iterative, and should evolve and adapt with the needs of the organization and its people.
THREE KEY PILLARS OF A COLLECTIVE GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE
Collectivized decision-making bodies. These can be circles, hubs, or committees.
Equity-based salary structure and benefits. This can look like creating a pay scale that aims for a living wage for the lowest paid workers, applies a cap for the difference in the highest and lowest paid staff, compensates for lived experiences, or aims to work toward redressing harms for historically oppressed groups.
Voting or in-depth feedback mechanisms for decision-making. These can be consensus based, or they can also rely on a super-majority or a majority.
To illustrate the first concept, let's look at the example of Rooted in Vibrant Communities, a nonprofit that promotes social justice by activating leaders of color, strengthening organizations led by communities of color, and fostering collaboration between diverse communities.
RVC staff are organized into five programs: 1) capacity building, 2) operations support, 3) development, evaluation, and communications, 4) general operations, and 5) fellowship — with four co-executive directors.
Authority in RVC’s structure is delegated to every single person in the organization in some way. They have four executive directors. Authority comes with a budget, the ability to make decisions for the organization, the responsibility to seek feedback from individuals, groups, or the collective at large. RVC’s advice and listening process is rigorous and thorough when developing policies and it allows staff to be heard and for work to flow efficiently.
I have experienced the transformative power of this kind of structure first hand at my own organization, Pangea Legal Services, which focuses on legal representation, community empowerment, and policy advocacy for immigrants. Our ability to govern ourselves collectively makes it possible to be nimble, start new projects, develop diverse and sustainable funding streams, maintain a healthy culture where staff feel heard and valued, and retain staff at very high rates.
Collective governance is an invitation to create the kind of organization your team actually needs to do its best work and be well.
There are many organizations at different stages of developing democratic or collective governance structures. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There is no step that is too small, and it is never too late to try it out.