We still have a remarkably persistent image of leadership as something exercised by one person.

There is the CEO, the director, the head of department, the team leader. One role, one name, one person ultimately responsible. Even the language we use tends to reinforce the idea that leadership eventually arrives at the top of a hierarchy and takes a seat behind a single desk.

And yet leadership rarely works like that in practice.

Decisions are shared. Influence moves around. Expertise sits in different places. One person may hold the formal authority while somebody else has considerably more influence over what actually happens. And, increasingly, organisations are experimenting more deliberately with co-leadership, job-sharing and other arrangements where responsibility doesn’t belong neatly to one individual.

I’ve worked in co-leadership myself, and what interests me now isn’t whether two people can lead together. Clearly they can.

The more interesting question is what happens between them when they do.

Sharing a role is easier than sharing authority

On paper, co-leadership can look wonderfully efficient. Two people bring different strengths, perspectives, experiences and perhaps even different working patterns. Responsibilities can be divided. There is somebody with whom to think. Decisions don’t have to rest entirely on one pair of shoulders.

And then two actual human beings turn up.

Each has their own instincts about what good leadership looks like. Each has relationships within the organisation. Each communicates differently, responds differently under pressure and notices different things. They may agree completely about where they are going while having rather different ideas about how to get there.

That difference is not a flaw in the model.

In many ways, the difference is the point.

But it does create something that needs attention. If we aren’t careful, the understandable desire to present a united front can slowly turn into an expectation that two leaders should think, speak and behave as though they were one person.

I don’t think they should.

If the value of co-leadership comes partly from bringing different perspectives into leadership, eliminating those differences rather defeats the purpose.

The challenge is learning how to disagree without making the organisation carry the disagreement for you.

Trust becomes practical

We talk about trust in leadership rather easily. In co-leadership, it becomes remarkably concrete.

Can I allow you to make a decision I might have made differently?

Can you have a conversation with somebody important without me needing to know every detail?

Can I watch you receive recognition for something we created together without quietly keeping score?

Can we tell each other when something isn’t working before everybody else in the organisation has already noticed?

And perhaps most importantly, can we disagree without interpreting disagreement as a threat to the relationship?

Those aren’t abstract questions about trust. They show up in calendars, meetings, emails, decisions, conversations and all the tiny moments in which authority is exercised.

The temptation when trust becomes uncertain is often to increase control. More checking. More copying each other into emails. More conversations before conversations. More decisions that require both people to be present.

Before long, two leaders have somehow become half a leader each.

You need boundaries precisely because you share so much

One thing I still agree with from the original version of this article is the importance of clarity.

Co-leadership doesn’t mean both people need to be involved in everything. In fact, I suspect the opposite is true. For the arrangement to work, there need to be places where one person can act without waiting for the other.

That requires conversations that aren’t always particularly glamorous. Who decides what? Where do we genuinely need agreement? What can I decide independently? When do I need to tell you rather than ask you? What happens when one of us isn’t available? What do we do when somebody tries to play one of us against the other?

And what happens when we simply disagree?

The last question matters because disagreement will happen. Creating a structure that assumes it won’t is rather like designing an umbrella on the assumption that it probably won’t rain.

Clarity isn’t there to remove difference. It gives difference somewhere to go.

The relationship becomes part of the leadership system

The relationship between two leaders doesn’t remain neatly contained between them. Other people observe it, respond to it and, consciously or otherwise, adapt themselves around it.

If one leader consistently defers to the other, people notice. If disagreements are never visible, people notice. If decisions appear to change depending on which leader happens to be in the room, they definitely notice.

And when there is tension between two leaders, the wider system has a rather remarkable ability to find it.

Someone asks one leader after receiving an answer from the other. Information begins travelling through particular routes. Alliances form. People learn who to approach for which answer. What began as something between two people becomes something the whole team participates in.

That doesn’t mean co-leaders need to perform perfect harmony. Actually, seeing two leaders disagree respectfully, remain curious and eventually find a way forward may be far healthier than pretending disagreement never exists.

It means recognising that how you lead together is itself part of what you are leading.

Perhaps the goal isn’t alignment

There are moments when clarity and consistency matter enormously. An organisation cannot function particularly well if two leaders continually give contradictory instructions or undermine each other’s decisions.

But alignment doesn’t have to mean sameness.

Two people can share a direction without sharing every opinion. They can hold common responsibility while bringing different perspectives. They can disagree and still trust one another. They can even allow some of that disagreement to be visible.

Perhaps the more useful ambition is not to become indistinguishable as leaders, but to become increasingly aware of what happens between you when you are different.

Because that’s where much of the real work of co-leadership seems to happen.

And, come to think of it, much of the real work of teams too.