The co-CEO: can two heads be better than one?

Less than three months into their new roles as co-CEOs of Jun­gle Cre­ations, Melis­sa Chap­man and Nat Poul­ter are con­vinced shar­ing the hot seat is a win­ning for­mu­la and that more com­pa­nies will catch on.

The UK media com­pa­ny has joined the ranks of busi­ness­es world­wide, such as Role­share, iSup­ply Ener­gy and Octo­pus Ven­tures, with the per­haps quirky com­mon denom­i­na­tor of a co-CEO set-up. 

“COVID has changed the way we work so much already. With busi­ness­es like ours break­ing with tra­di­tion, I see more com­pa­nies mov­ing in this direc­tion,” says Poul­ter. 

Togeth­er with Chap­man, he has been tran­si­tion­ing into the co-CEO role over the past year, joint­ly nav­i­gat­ing a rev­enue and prof­it jump of 38 per cent and impres­sive 342 per cent respec­tive­ly.

The con­cept has clear appeal: dou­ble the fore­sight, exper­tise and, of course, time and ener­gy, offer­ing the abil­i­ty to dri­ve a com­pa­ny for­ward at break­neck pace. There’s also an argu­ment for it help­ing address gen­der imbal­ances at the high­est lev­el.

But can it work for any com­pa­ny and what chal­lenges must be dealt with for the pair to be greater than the sum of their parts?

A level of reach and diversity beyond one person

Role­share, a job share part­ner match­ing web­site run by hus­band and wife co-CEO team Sophie and Dave Small­wood, is hop­ing to fill more lead­er­ship posi­tions using this mod­el. They’ve just part­nered with the Glob­al Net­work of Peo­ple Liv­ing with HIV, a non-prof­it specif­i­cal­ly look­ing to appoint two peo­ple to their most senior direc­tor posi­tion, the equiv­a­lent of a cor­po­rate CEO.

“Because it’s a sen­si­tive sub­ject requir­ing strate­gic alliances and con­nec­tions glob­al­ly, the organ­i­sa­tion wants a lev­el of reach and diver­si­ty you would­n’t get from just one per­son,” explains Sophie.

From both Role­share and Jun­gle Cre­ations’ per­spec­tives, the extend­ed breadth and scope that can be derived from two peo­ple lead­ing a busi­ness is clear.

“It’s such a large role that requires so much, there’s no way I’d be able to do this by myself,” adds Sophie, who leads on mar­ket­ing, while Dave dri­ves oper­a­tions, with sales, fundrais­ing and prod­uct devel­op­ment a joint effort. “There’s a whole aspect of the role Dave does that I just would­n’t be able to get to. It’s so big it does require two peo­ple.”

As Jun­gle Cre­ations’ Poul­ter points out, the company’s four dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed rev­enue streams are essen­tial­ly like four dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es, so “hav­ing dif­fer­ent skillsets to oper­ate these makes sense”.

Echo­ing Sophie’s point, there often “still aren’t enough hours in the day” to be as hands on and strate­gic as the role requires, notes Chap­man, who along­side Poul­ter runs indi­vid­ual depart­ments, teams and relat­ed bud­gets, while build­ing strat­e­gy and mak­ing key deci­sions togeth­er. 

“We feel it’s impor­tant for us to be involved in the day-to-day goings on across the var­i­ous parts of our busi­ness, which would frankly be impos­si­ble for one per­son,” she says.

Are co-CEOs paving the way for female business leaders?

The poten­tial to boost num­bers of female CEOs is some­thing the Role­share team believes should be anoth­er key dri­ver for busi­ness­es look­ing to appoint co-CEOs.

Sophie argues it can help buck the trend of women not apply­ing for roles because they don’t meet 100 per cent of the cri­te­ria, com­pared with men who are more like­ly to apply even if they only meet 60 per cent. 

“From a diver­si­ty per­spec­tive, that’s real­ly impor­tant for me,” she says. “Align­ing with Dave as my co-CEO has giv­en me the courage to pur­sue this type of endeav­our. It’s the same in pre­vi­ous roles I’ve had, where per­haps I did­n’t apply for a more senior posi­tion that seemed real­ly inter­est­ing, but I was too hard on myself about whether I could do it, even though I had most of the skills they were look­ing for.

“If I had to apply for a senior lead­er­ship role today, and saw I met a lot of the descrip­tion, but then I’d be matched with some­body else, I would feel much more con­fi­dent.” 

How­ev­er, the argu­ment doesn’t res­onate with Chap­man, who doesn’t see the con­nec­tion between a co-CEO role being more acces­si­ble or suit­able for a woman. 

“I couldn’t pre­dict if co-CEOs will be a route to fix­ing the inequal­i­ty that exists at the high­est lev­el in many busi­ness­es,” she says. “It still depends on deci­sion-mak­ers remov­ing their gen­der bias to appoint women into the roles they deserve, either solo or as part of a co-CEO mod­el, when it best suits the busi­ness.”

Where co-CEOs have failed

But do the pros out­weigh the cons when it comes to co-CEOs? The mod­el has been tri­alled and aban­doned by both soft­ware firm SAP and tyre­mak­er Pirelli that revert­ed to the sta­tus quo after just six months. Accord­ing to SAP, the clar­i­ty of a sin­gle CEO struc­ture would help it best to recov­er and grow post-pan­dem­ic.

Con­sul­tants Steve Hyde and Char­lie Crowe agree, unsold by the case for co-CEOs. “In a shared sit­u­a­tion, you’ve dilut­ed the author­i­ty of the CEO,” says Crowe. 

For Hyde, CEO of 360xec Exec­u­tive Search, cus­tomers and employ­ees “expect to see a lot of the per­son that’s in the shop win­dow, who is near­ly always the CEO, so you don’t need two on that basis”. 

While Jungle’s Poul­ter acknowl­edges the pow­er of the “genius CEO”, like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, he stands by his and Chapman’s appoint­ment.

“Although there may have been times where a co-CEO set-up hasn’t worked, there are plen­ty more exam­ples where an indi­vid­ual CEO hasn’t. There are busi­ness­es in our indus­try that have had almost as many CEOs as they’ve had years in oper­a­tion,” he says.

Tips for co-CEO success

Con­sen­sus from Role­share and Jun­gle is that suc­cess for co-CEOs is down to align­ment, which can bridge dif­fer­ing per­son­al­i­ties and approach­es, and avoid a sit­u­a­tion of one co-CEO try­ing to over­ride or out­shine the oth­er.

“The main thing is com­mu­ni­ca­tion and mak­ing sure you have a pre-agreed mod­el for how you’re going to work, and a joint vision and val­ues, or you can end up in a bad place,” says Dave. “As a com­pa­ny, it’s about how you can enable a bet­ter way of work­ing for every­one. We’re seri­ous about diver­si­ty and it’s at the core of why we’re stand­ing up togeth­er as co-CEOs.”