Co-leadership: Running a museum together for creativity, impact, and resilience

ID: WMA2026_572

Track:

Join co-leaders from the Museum of Idaho for a candid exploration of co-leadership in practice. Through practical lessons learned and interactive discussion, this session will challenge traditional hierarchies, surface equity-centered approaches, and offer actionable strategies. Participants will leave inspired to experiment with collaborative leadership models that strengthen resilience, creativity, and community impact across diverse nonprofit contexts today.

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: Museum co-leadership is an emerging trend. This session will offer candid insights, practical strategies, and fresh perspectives that challenge traditional leadership models and inspire innovation.

Objectives:

1. Understand co-leadership in practice. Participants will examine real-world examples from museum contexts, gaining clarity on how co-leadership functions across roles and structures. Outcome: Attendees can understand models of co-leadership and identify where these might apply in their own organizations.
2. Explore equity-centered approaches. Through dialogue, participants will reflect on how co-leadership can challenge hierarchy and support more inclusive, equitable decision-making. Outcome: Attendees will identify one or more strategies to distribute authority, elevate diverse voices, and address power dynamics within their teams.
3. Generate actionable strategies for implementation. Using shared insights, participants will co-create practical approaches to strengthen collaboration, communication, and resilience. Outcome: Each participant leaves with 1–2 concrete actions or experiments they can apply to pilot or deepen co-leadership practices in their organization.

Overall, the session aims to move participants from inspiration to action, equipping them with both the mindset and tools to foster collaborative leadership that enhances creativity, adaptability, and community impact.

Engagement: Centers a knowledge café format with some contextual presentation and then discussions where participants share experiences and co-create strategies. Guided prompts support peer learning and equitable participation, followed by brief whole-group synthesis. Emphasis on dialogue over presentation. Resources needed: movable seating and simple tools for capturing and sharing insights.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Other 

Professional Level: Mid-Career Senior Level 

Scalability: The session is designed to translate across a wide range of museum sizes, structures, and missions by focusing on adaptable principles rather than fixed models. For small museums and emerging organizations, outcomes support flexible role-sharing, cross-functional collaboration, and informal co-leadership practices where staff often wear multiple hats. Participants can apply low-resource strategies such as shared decision-making and rotating leadership responsibilities. For mid-sized institutions, the session offers approaches to formalize co-leadership across departments, such as co-directorships, team-based leadership, or collaborative project management, while improving communication and alignment. For large or complex organizations, participants will explore how co-leadership can operate within established hierarchies, including distributed leadership models, cross-departmental partnerships, and equity-centered governance practices. The knowledge café format ensures relevance across this spectrum by centering participant experience. Attendees engage in small-group discussions with peers from different institution types, allowing ideas to be tested, adapted, and refined in real time. Guided prompts encourage participants to contextualize insights to their own setting, while whole-group synthesis surfaces patterns and diverse applications. By prioritizing peer exchange over a single case study, the session intentionally reaches a multitude of museum content areas, ensuring that each participant leaves with insights and strategies that are meaningful within their unique organizational context.

Participants