Why My Nonprofit Has No Executive Director

In 2017, I proposed to my organization removing my title of Executive Director. Since I founded Pangea Legal Services in late 2012, I had set out to model it after the Buenos Aires factory cooperatives I witnessed as a study abroad college student in Argentina, where self-management, mutuality, respect, and dignity were the norm.

I felt both nervous and excited as my colleagues voiced their opinions and questions about removing the Executive Director (ED) title. Should we rotate the person in the ED role regularly?  Should we get rid of the title all together? I thought that having no ED would further our collective governance goals, as well as show the external world the work we were doing internally. Of eight staff, two colleagues and I leaned  toward removing the ED title. One of our board members, who was also present, nearly fell out of her chair. Most of our co-workers believed that it was important to keep the title because we were a new organization and still needed to build credibility with funders and partners. Funders tend to build relationships and trust with EDs at organizations, and they had just started to do so with me. My colleagues thought my title as an ED would safeguard these critical external functions. In the end, we decided to keep the title for the time being, and to my surprise, even though I had made the proposal, part of me felt great relief. I did not have to explain to my Iranian family why I wasn’t the big-shot ray-ees (boss) anymore.

That is when I realized that I had not reconciled my ego with my values and the values I wanted Pangea to uphold. I was raised by a working-class, immigrant, single mother who modeled how to work hard, climb the hierarchical ladder of success, and strive to rise above others. This hierarchical conditioning is especially prevalent among immigrants and BIPOC leaders like me, in part, due to the pressures imposed against us by colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. We often feel we need to overcompensate for the negative views perpetrated against us, and we work extra hard to do excellent work and integrate into society in a positive light. This is a kind of labor not required from people with race and class privilege. I had been conditioned all my life to chase the positive feedback of visibility and status. Attaching some of my professional self-worth to my title was second nature.

But this is not who I wanted to be. This was not who I really was.

I thought back to the workers at a garment cooperative I visited in Buenos Aires as a study abroad student. One worker, Alberto*, gave me a tour of his factory and invited me to meetings. I remember a group of Argentinian coop workers in jeans and comfortable clothes sitting in the middle of the room in a table-less circle. They were in a huge hall next to factory machines. Their conversation and treatment of each other were so humane and dignified.  Over delicious alfajores at a cafe, Alberto described how his co-workers made decisions by consensus and rotating leadership roles. They placed no importance on titles, personal gain, and status. Rather, they focused on people’s needs and their collective wellbeing. Those are my values.

This form of leadership, known as democratic or participatory governance, is proven to work, be more resilient to economic downturns, and be more efficient than top-down corporate structures. I wanted to emulate that at Pangea because that’s what I envision for the world. I did not want to emulate corporate structures where too often inequity, secrecy, and worker exclusion in important decisions are the norm.

Although we chose to keep the ED title, we explored other ways of implementing a shared leadership structure. We extended the ED title to an additional colleague, Bianca, who was already doing a lot of “ED” work, so the title was appropriate. We researched other nonprofits and political organizations that were democratically governed. Although we didn’t find any at the time that had no Executive Director, we learned about various ways that organizations distributed authority. Our key role models were AORTA, Sustainable Economies Law Center, and Fortify Community Health. Our work was also informed by the book, Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, which deconstructs the misconception that collectively managed organizations have no structure, no organization, and no leadership.

A year later, in 2018, we instituted a “hub” model of organizational management, where all staff self-organized to co-lead committees of our internal administration and development, including finances, communications, human resources, governance, and operations. Our hub model helped the organization become more high functioning, well-structured, and leaderful. The financial and operational outcomes of this structural transition strengthened our commitment to building a high performing, values-based workplace.

Two years later, we voted to remove the executive titles altogether. Leading up to the vote, we had multiple conversations that underscored our readiness to rightsize our ED titles with our actual authorities and processes. When I first returned from parental leave in 2019, our governance hub, comprised of two white men colleagues and myself, welcomed me with the invitation of removing my ED title. My first reaction was, “WTF?!” Hello feminist-POC-mother pride coupled with insecurities of losing organizational worth and value after being on 4.5 months of leave. Despite my push for this transition, I felt the sting of being devalued.

I had worked countless hours and poured all of my energy and heart into building up the organization. For years, I researched, read, strategized, and talked about our organization with everyone I knew. I gained many valuable skills and tools in a short amount of time. As an immigrant and woman of color, I had built power and authority. But I reminded myself that I had started this conversation to begin with, and it was based on my values of shared or rotational leadership. Shifting my ED title was a logical next step because Bianca and I no longer had any default executive power or final say over matters unless they were delegated to us in the hubs. Our ED titles had become merely symbolic. My role and work would continue as before.

It took me working with a trusted therapist to normalize my ego feelings, and not feel so ashamed of them. With help, I confronted my relationships with success, achievement, performance, authority, motherhood, and self-worth within the context of U.S. culture and the counterculture I was creating in my organization. As I moved through my ego, what remained was a strong feeling of pride and accomplishment in my organization, my co-workers, and myself, for pushing ourselves to the next level of democratic governance.

Even at this next level, however, we needed someone to keep a bird’s eye view of the organization that wasn’t necessarily seen as a need. There was a significant amount of unnamed labor that Bianca and I did that did not get a place in any of our hubs. This included holding staff needs and proactively addressing them, identifying gaps, acting on them, frequently researching and presenting proposals to make the organization better, fundraising (advocating in white spaces), and a great deal of other relational work. Ours was a clear example of the invisibilized yet crucial labor often carried out by women and gender non-conforming people of color to help organizations run well. Bianca and I continued to do some of this invisible labor outside of hubs, and we finally formalized it by hiring a full time employee to take on this work for our organization in May 2022. All that invisible labor was essential in helping Pangea transition to a decentralized structure and it will be key to maintaining it.

Pangea formally became a nonprofit with no ED in March 2020, and all staff took on the title of Co-Director. Although our roles, duties, and distributed leadership structure remained the same, staff ownership and accountability to the organization was elevated. For example, one employee who had never been involved in fundraising, was empowered to secure a sizable grant for Pangea. This, at the time, was the equivalent of one year of salary. Distributing authority and living by our values has gone hand-in-hand with reaping economic benefits. Pangea’s financial standing and reserves are well over the industry standard for nonprofits.

Organizations don’t have to get rid of their ED titles to be inclusive and leaderful. But we should question and push back against traditional power structures and valuations of human time, labor, professional experience, and education. We need to do this structural push-back to live in a freer, more inclusive, mutually respectful, and equitable world. As adrienne marie brown says, “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.” At the small scale at nonprofits, we can put resources into creating a culture of respect, equity, and inclusion to model the kind of world we want to see in our larger communities and governments.

In the next ten years, I envision inclusive and participatory governance practices becoming the norm in the nonprofit industry, and hopefully beyond.

Here are my top 12 tips for any ED or leadership team curious about pursuing a similar journey:

1. Honor your personal feelings and internal conflicts. Follow kiran nigam’s advice to “examine your personal relationships to structures of authority.” For me it was the ego. And it was real. Taking time to process it all helped.
2. Try fully transferring a few major organizational responsibilities to another staff. Give them final decision-making authority (over your own vote) and let the rest of the staff know about it. And give them structures and resources to support their leadership.
3. Research some of the different ways shared leadership and horizontal governance can work in practice. Talk with staff at organizations like Pangea Legal Services, Community Resource Initiative, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance: AORTA, RVC Seattle, and Fortify Community Health.
4. Read this NPQ article and consider talking with the leaders referenced in it about how they share their leadership and titles.
5. Facilitate a conversation about power in your organization. Involve everyone who is directly impacted by your governance structure including yourself, staff (at all levels), and board. If your organization is larger than 12 people, consider conversations in smaller breakout groups.
6. Write collective governance and shared leadership in as goals for your organization’s strategic plan.
7. Don’t try to do it all overnight. Give yourself and everyone involved time to process and talk amongst each other and with others outside of the organization.
8. Try a step-by-step approach. For example, try removing the word “Chief” if you have C-suite titles. Try out ED. Or try out a shift from one Executive Director to a team of two or more EDs.
9. Consider a pilot project for six months rather than a permanent change.
10. Recruit two people with democratic governance experience to your board.
11. Hire an experienced coach or facilitator to guide you in your journey. There are many excellent coaches within the Nonprofit Democracy Network.