Putting feminist leadership principles into practice: the transformative potential of shared research project leadership

1 Introduction

Which forms of research leadership can best stimulate innovative and impactful scholarship and build ethical organizational structures where people can thrive? This question has occupied us as project leaders in a university context. Universities are traditional, bureaucratic, and hierarchical institutions that grant individuals the opportunity to pursue excellence in research and teaching through various competitive career-building systems. But while they offer possibilities for individual development and growth, enabling a select few to build lifelong careers in the same workplace, universities have also established and sustained oppressive power structures that benefit those who lead projects or labs, echoing what Kark and Buengeler (2024) call “heroic leadership theories.” Moreover, research has shown that narrow, merit-based systems risk enabling favoritism, hindering diversity, and creating inequitable structures along lines of gender, race, and class (Castilla and Benard, 2010; Sauvé et al., 2025). This predicament not only affects the work environment but can also impede the ways in which knowledge is created, maintained, shared, and used, as recent scholarship on intersectionality, race, and colonialism has suggested (Kulal et al., 2025; Stein, 2022; Wang, 2026). Yet, at the same time, universities are driven by the mission to be open-minded and intellectually generous environments, committed to the advancement of knowledge and education, and contributing to broader societal goals.

Since before the turn of the millennium, the university sector has undergone structural reforms along neoliberal lines. Rankings, merit systems, and other forms of quantitative measurement have become crucial to how academics and academic institutions, including publicly funded universities, compete for funding and students (Shore and Wright, 1999). Moreover, academic institutions, and knowledge creation more generally, are facing pressure in a changing media landscape that includes the spread of disinformation on digital and social media, anti-academic politics, and new tools for language-based knowledge production and storage through artificial intelligence (Lan and Tung, 2024; Maldonado-Maldonado, 2025). In this changing landscape, we return to our question: which forms of research leadership can best stimulate innovative and impactful scholarship and build ethical organizational structures where people can thrive? In this article, we present our experiences of leading a research project where drawing on feminist leadership principles and creating a model for shared leadership became part of the answer. The article thus offers a case study of a conscious attempt to advance feminist leadership principles as both a tool and a goal.

Our endeavors confronted the established structures of research project leadership in our local academic environment in Denmark. For the research project in question Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975, which we co-led in 2020–2024, we strategically built a format for shared leadership in response to the structural-institutional challenges we had witnessed around us. Inspired by the UK-based organization We Are Feminist Leaders,¹ we see feminist leadership as a practice that understands and seeks to transform power dynamics in an organization through the positive use of leadership and power. As education scholar Fitzgerald (2020, p. 1) states, feminist leadership is a “collective social practice” that “involves functioning with greater consciousness not only of others’ but one's own power, and consciously moving away from hierarchies that unjustly change the distribution and relations of power.” We thus acknowledge the privilege and power that university positions and research leadership roles bring. Drawing from recent literature, we adopted specific guiding principles for feminist leadership: sharing power, building collective action, practicing shared learning, establishing proactive accountability, transforming power (Fuller and Lashari, 2025; Kark and Buengeler, 2024), and joining feminist theory with practice, that is, walking the talk (Shiffecker and McNaughtan, 2022). We will return to these principles throughout this article as they link to our leadership practice in different ways.

As Kark and Buengeler (2024) argue, feminist leadership has been and can be carried out in multiple ways, in tune with what is often described as different waves of feminism. As Kark and Buengeler's taxonomy shows, shared leadership is one of the models that feminists have used to contest and provide alternatives to existing structures, and it can mean sharing leadership between two people or in larger groups. Leadership shared by a dyad (as in our case) or among three or more people can bring different potentials and obstacles (Alvarez and Svejenova, 2005). We do not suggest that our dyadic leadership model is the only way to enact the feminist principles outlined above, or that our model would be replicable in all other contexts. Rather, our aim is to share experiences, reflect, inspire, and hopefully transfer some of the insights we gained from our highly contextual position.

Over four years, inspired by more or less explicit feminist leadership principles, the two of us developed and explored a model of shared research leadership. We did so not only to build a strong research platform with external funding and to meet the goals of the competitive academic system, but also to create a supportive work environment where innovative research could happen at the intersection of individual and collective growth. In this article we build on feminist autotheory (Fournier, 2022) to narrate our own situated experiences, learnings, and reflections. We lay out how we collaborated and what challenges we encountered along the way. We hope this and other attempts to develop alternative leadership models might be inspirational for other researchers at a time when universities are taking new approaches both to research funding and to their role in society more generally (Eilenberg et al., 2023).

2 Our own project as case study: creating alternatives to individualizing imaginaries and structures

The research project Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975 sprang from a shared need for reflection, from curiosity, and also from frustration. Both of us had been active in the field of architectural history for more than 20 years. We are trained architectural and cultural historians, and we were teaching landscape architecture students at the University of Copenhagen, focusing on 20th- and 21st-century building culture and especially the postwar period. Sometimes called the golden age of Danish design, that period made a greater mark on Danish landscapes, buildings, and everyday lives than any other, garnering international recognition (Tietjen, 2010). However, if we examine the large body of architectural history literature about the period, we see that much of it gives the impression that these landscapes and buildings were created by a handful of men, such as architect Arne Jacobsen, planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen, and landscape architect C. Th. Sørensen (Bendsen et al., 2020). Of course, their work left an important legacy that deserves examination. The problem is that many of these monographs and other scholarly works tend to refer repeatedly to the same few individuals, obscuring from view the others who were engaged in making the built environment. We therefore became part of a feminist and critical turn in architectural history that deconstructs the traditional portrayal of individuals, particularly men, as creative geniuses who had fantastic ideas they just had to build (Riesto and Steiner, 2024). Instead, we wanted to help tell a richer and more nuanced story about how built environments come into being (Heynen, 2025; McLeod, 2024). It was time to take a fresh look at the original Danish archival material and to ask: can it really be the case that these men did all this work all by themselves? When we looked at our students—the majority of whom identify as women— we wondered why we were talking about only male architects, landscape architects, and planners in our history classes. We knew there had been many Danish women architects, and that women had trained as architects in Denmark since at least 1908—even earlier, in the case of garden design at the agricultural university. But where were they in the books we read, or even in our own lectures? Inspired by architectural historian Stratigakos (2016), we looked at the professional contexts that had created Danish architecture, design, landscape architecture, and urban planning in the 20th century and asked: where are the women?

We started searching, and we started counting. There were almost no women in the history books, but when we expanded our gaze and looked in more marginal places—such as indexes, footnotes, and anecdotal asides—we started to see many women's names. We therefore decided to build a research project that would revisit Danish architectural history between the 1930s and the 1970s and seek out the contributions of women architects. We wanted to transform architectural history-writing and tell another story, not about great heroes but about the diverse forms of collaboration that bring the built environment into being. We took our starting point in intersectional feminism (Crenshaw, 1991) and questioned class and other markers of power and difference, although our primary focus was on a gender identity that had been underexplored in Danish architectural history. We aspired not only to make an impact in Denmark but to push the boundaries of the field more widely. Internationally, there had already been several excellent endeavors to diversify architectural history along lines of gender, class, and race (e.g., Burns and Brown, 2020; Cheng et al., 2020 Dümpelmann and Beardsley, 2015);, and we believed our Danish material about women could contribute a significant case study (Bendsen et al., 2023).

Our research project was not about emphasizing individual geniuses, heroes, or pioneers, whether men or overlooked women. It was about demonstrating that a diversified architectural history is also a more just and accurate story about the built environment. We wanted to build a transformative research project that challenged the notion of the star architect. Similarly, we felt uncomfortable with the imaginary of the star researcher, which increasingly surrounded us as we became more senior faculty. That imaginary often lurks in the background of understandings of what it means to lead a research project. Taking on a leadership role in research is often individualized and idealized through the image of the powerful genius professor presiding over junior faculty (Abir-Am, 1982; Nielsen, 2023). Like hero narratives in architectural history, this image of the hero researcher overemphasizes individualized narratives and patriarchal power structures with regard to how knowledge comes into being, regardless of the gender identity or background of the researcher in question. The hero researcher image glosses over other structures, leaving many stories untold—stories about how innovation and creativity emerge within particular frameworks, and how those frameworks often depend on creating environments that foster collaboration, bringing together different forms of knowledge and skill to solve complex problems despite hierarchies and power struggles over resources and so forth (Page, 2019). This chimes with organizational research on how to create the conditions for psychological safety (Edmondson, 2019) and generative tension (Wedell-Wedellsborg, 2024), both of which are required for creative and innovative work to unfold (Kegan and Lahey, 2016; Page, 2019). We therefore faced an emerging question: how could we build and lead a project that would dismantle the myth of both the hero architect and the hero researcher, while at the same time developing a strong research project framework that would harness the collective work of a team with different skills, interests, and tasks, as well as different levels of responsibility and accountability? Shared leadership became one of our answers, as it chimed with the feminist leadership principles outlined above.

To be able to carry out our research project, we first needed funding. The procedures involved in raising money from various Danish foundations compelled us to answer certain implied questions. For example, several of the grants we applied for could only have one “official” research leader. In response, we switched things around: some of our application proposals named one of us as the official research leader, while others named the other. Such naming signaled a hierarchy between us that we planned not to sustain in practice, and we always wrote in the application texts that we intended to practice shared leadership. We were also careful to divide the funds equally in our department's internal accounting system, signaling to local management that the two of us had been equally successful in acquiring funding—a crucial issue for tenure and promotion. This was possible because our project won funding from multiple sources, and we were formally responsible for different funds of approximately the same size. The funding bodies with which we worked made no comment about this, although it is an unusual practice in our field.

Despite all these pragmatic arrangements, at one point a senior colleague advised us not to collaborate because doing so might hinder our individual careers. This prompted us to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of shared leadership and feminist leadership principles in our organization. We therefore looked to management theory for models that might be applied to university contexts and pondered how they might nurture or hinder our endeavor.

2.1 The missile model and the star club model

On the various leadership courses we attended, we often heard about the university leadership models conceptualized by Danish leadership coach Rasmussen (2014). While we found these models interesting, we did not see our needs or ethics reflected in any of them. Nevertheless, they did give us a language to speak about what it means to lead a research project. An example is the missile or rocket model, where one researcher leads a lab, project, or research center. The rocket is a powerful metaphor with (to our ears) uncomfortable military and colonialist connotations, describing research as a vehicle that can take us to new parts of the world or even the galaxy (Liborion, 2021). Moreover, in the rocket model, the leading researcher—a well-known or recognized figure in their own right—leads a team along a strict pathway toward one goal. The team—like a rocket—consists of a machine room with mid-career researchers, and perhaps lab or project managers. It is truly hierarchical. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the early-career researchers on fixed-term contracts, who—to take the metaphor to its logical conclusion—deliver the fuel for the project, but who eventually burn out and fall away as the project lifts off. This model can power a scientific agenda, and as Rasmussen notes, it is especially successful at delivering knowledge toward a particular goal in research traditions that have strong hierarchies and peer-reviewed systems for recognition (Rasmussen, 2014 p. 230). Indeed, our own project was goal- and results-oriented in relation to a particular field of knowledge. However, for us it was important to question the power dynamics embedded in the rocket metaphor, which—as Rasmussen also mentions—can entail a certain cynicism in terms of exploiting the labor of those further down the hierarchy. Moreover, the rocket model is hugely dependent on one individual, and compared with Rasmussen's other model—the star club model, where power is distributed among several senior researchers, which he considers more “agile”—it has other shortcomings too.

According to Rasmussen, in contrast to the rocket model, the star club model consists of an organization of fairly senior researchers who loosely work in the same field, and who come together to utilize particular research infrastructures while working relatively independently and often on different goals. Importantly, as Rasmussen notes, in this model there is not one leader: leadership is divided between the various senior researchers. This means there is little explicit leadership at all. Instead, leadership unfolds through invisible systems. In our view, this results in a lack of accountability concerning who gets to use the shared resources, why and how, and who can access time or resources for personal development or higher-risk projects. Thus, the star club model also creates problematic hierarchies, and its lack of explicit leadership creates an ambiguity that leaves room for the exploitation of those who are not at the core of the “star club,” e.g., those who lack permanent positions. Nevertheless, as Rasmussen notes, the star club is very good at maintaining and adapting to external relationships, e.g., decoding changing political or academic ideas (Rasmussen, 2014 p. 230). Yet, to our minds, both the star club model and the rocket model lack not only accountability but also any form of leadership that can build working relationships focused on support structures, divide risks and responsibilities, and take a proactive approach to differences, power imbalances, and conflicts.

From a feminist perspective emphasizing proactive accountability and awareness of power and power relations, we believe the greatest responsibility should be borne by those with the greatest power. While Rasmussen's rocket model is superb at creating high-quality research outputs that speak to specialized criteria of excellence, as we wished to do with our own research, it can also become rigid: it can move toward a goal that may prove unsuccessful, and it can overemphasize the single individual over the team effort—potentially leaving those lowest in the hierarchy exposed to the greatest risk in terms of their careers if something goes wrong. Research conducted within Rasmussen's star club model, on the other hand, is excellent at positioning itself in relation to a changing world and achieving impact, as we also wished to do. However, it may not be so good at moving toward a single goal, its lack of explicit leadership can make prioritization difficult, and it can create cliques with exclusionary structures of belonging where the criteria for joining may entail soft power, relationships, and favoritism. Further, as Rasmussen explains, the star club can move in new directions but is not good at maintaining focus, saying “no,” or scaling back, which in turn means that its unaccountability and inability to handle conflict become barriers to impact. Thus, the star club model is not aligned with the feminist principles we wished to pursue despite its distribution of power. The rocket model recognizes the need for collaboration and leadership, but it is monodirectional and problematically hierarchical, since its leadership is devoid of checks and balances, and therefore it is also not aligned with feminist principles. In short, we could see aspects of the models that resonated with our aims, but we also wanted to do things differently.

2.2 Searching for alternative leadership models: the power of two

Initially, we had many ideas about the kind of research leadership we did not want to conduct and the kind of project structure we did not want to build, partly driven by previous personal experiences of research project structures that had soured and become counterproductive. It was harder for us to formulate positively what we actually wanted to do, and our conversations about it forced us to become clear about our intentions quite early in the process. We spent a lot of time working not only on the core narrative about the project content, but also on the core narrative about the conduct of the project, regarding which we were very explicit. Only later did we connect any of this to management theory, leadership models, or explicitly feminist leadership principles. Nevertheless, one thing was clear: we wanted to lead together and we wanted to lead in a way that was true to the feminist ethos of our research, and we saw a transformational potential in that move. We therefore developed a model of leadership shared between two people at the level of project management. We saw people in other fields already undertaking such models, especially in creative fields such as architecture (e.g., the Danish architectural firm Cobe), art museums (Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Germany, and Spritten in Aalborg, Denmark), and theatre (Betty Nansen Teatret in Copenhagen, Denmark), fields that rely on getting people's creative potential to blossom individually and in groups. We wanted to develop the concept of shared leadership further, but we did not yet have a language for it. What were the strengths and weaknesses of sharing leadership? What organizational systems were needed? To answer these questions, we had a set of very productive sessions with Mikkelsen (2020), an organizational psychologist who works in creative industries, including research, film, and especially architecture. We thought of these coaching sessions as a kind of “preventive couples therapy” to preempt conflict between us, and to build trust and communication that would allow us to address conflicts along the way in a constructive manner.

To support our efforts, Mikkelsen advised us to read the management book Power of Two: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life by Wagner and Muller (2009), two authors writing at the intersection of management and research. The book tells the stories of various two-person partnerships that produced innovations in management or product design, and it explores the elements required for such partnerships to work. We will now briefly outline how these elements chimed with our practice in our own shared leadership model.

The first element is complementary strengths. When two people work together in a creative partnership, they can double up on their strengths and double down on their weaknesses (Wagner and Muller, 2009, pp. 11–35). This requires a proactive approach to difference and conflict. It is therefore crucial to be explicit about what each partner's strengths and weaknesses are (and this is something we ourselves could be clearer about in future work). While we were careful to practice leadership based on shared decision-making, we also needed space to make quick decisions when we were apart, reflecting later on whether those decisions had been in line with our joint strategy and supporting each other if other decisions needed to be made in future. Thanks to our commitment to our shared goals, even though we might come to decisions from different perspectives, those perspectives were not difficult to align. This chimes with Wagner and Muller's suggestion that another component in a strong creative partnership is a shared mission: nothing happens unless you are moving together toward a common goal.

Fairness is also important. Wagner and Muller (2009, pp. 55–75) explain that in creative partnerships, each partner utilizes their different qualities: for example, one person might be highly extrovert and enjoy outward engagement and visibility, while the other might prefer inward-focused tasks. This can produce creative complementarities and diverse perspectives, but it can also potentially generate imbalance—for example, when it comes to academic reward systems. It is important to take fairness into account. In our case, for example, we did this by dividing up our official roles for different tranches of funding, as mentioned above. There also needs to be a high level of trust and acceptance, because complementary strengths may entail complementary weaknesses. Moreover, collaborating closely together, and pursuing a common mission from different positions, inevitably leads to conflicts that must be overcome, which demands an element of forgiveness (Wagner and Muller, 2009, pp. 115–133). A high level of communication, honesty, and transparency is therefore necessary for creative partnerships to become innovative and successful, even though such communication can be time-consuming.

Unselfishness is also needed, according to Wagner and Muller. This resonates with the normative goals of social and historical justice—goals that we pursued in our project—and it therefore also constitutes a point where feminist values and leadership practices can come together. Of course, the very idea of unselfishness seems to clash with the highly individualized ambition that drives academic careers. Indeed, according to Wagner and Muller (2009, pp. 153–171), individual ambitions and differences are equally important drivers that help to create complementarity. Nevertheless, the concept of unselfishness resonated deeply with us and spoke to feminist leadership ethics such as power-sharing and collective action. Unselfishness also relates to mutuality, another quality that creative partnerships can develop, according to Wagner and Muller (2009, p. 10). Mutuality here means that one's partner's success or growth through the work is just as important as one's own. In our view, this idea offers great potential for fulfilling and enriching work relationships, and it is central to the model of shared leadership between two people. Collaboration with another person has the potential to produce a great sense of satisfaction and meaning in one's working life. It might also create a sense of resistance against all of academia's various measuring systems. It means that the model of shared leadership per se and the depth of collaboration it entails is a real added value.

Thus, the idea of shared leadership between two project leaders appeared to be an alternative model that resonated with feminist principes, both building on and contesting the academic leadership models we knew from the literature, such as those described by Rasmussen.

3 Tools for achieving research excellence and creating a good working environment

During our initial process it became clear that we needed to develop a strong sense of leadership and a clear direction for the project. Building the project on a shared leadership model became a way to do this: it created a structure that was aligned with the feminist principles underpinning our research, and it also gave the project the strong leadership we believed it needed to create a good working environment and achieve relevant and excellent research results. Just as we built a structure where we took a clear—and shared—leadership role, we were also keen to understand clearly the roles of the people who worked with us on our project, e.g., by holding regular individual development meetings with everyone in our project group, and conducting joint workshops to make the division of work and project procedures transparent. In this way, we allowed everyone time and space to understand their role and to articulate how they were motivated and worked best, holding continuous dialogues with them about their needs and contributions (Figure 1). This knowledge also made us more able to create good working conditions for all and allocate time for specific developmental opportunities, such as going on field trips, reading, participating in seminars with external collaborators, or contributing to publications or an exhibition.

To ensure a transparent and accountable work environment for our team, we compiled a document outlining the different formats of the meetings we held regularly throughout the project (Figure 2). In our experience from other projects, a lack of clarity about the aims and formats of meetings could easily lead to misunderstandings or even disappointment; it could also give us a great deal of informal power over the situation as project leaders, in ways that would work against our aim of transparency. Inspired by other organizations, notably the collectively led Danish consultancy Analyse og Tal, we decided to start team meetings with a “walk around the table,” asking not just what work people were engaged in that moment but also how they were feeling about their workload (Figure 3).² Saying and hearing this out loud helped us to make the best use of the resources we had, and to navigate some of the very intense periods that came later in the project. During meetings, people could express how they felt about their work, and whether they had enough to do, in terms of “green,” “yellow,” or “red,” where green meant they had capacity to help someone else on the team, and red meant they had too much to do. Everyone found themselves in the red zone at times, us included, and while this was not desirable, it was tolerable for short periods in order to achieve our goals: we were ambitious, and inevitably things sometimes happened, often outside our control, that led to intense periods with many deadlines. After periods of hard work in the red zone, we were careful to allow for the recuperation and regeneration of everyone on the team, and to support each other as best as we could. These strategies are aligned with current developments in what is often called regenerative leadership practice or awareness (Hutchins and Storm, 2023), but they also chime with feminist notions of attunement to physical, corporeal, and natural cycles, evoking economies of both collective care and self-care.³ Such attunement contrasts with the idealized machinic—and often masculinized—researcher body, a body that is also found in popular cultural images of the researcher uniformized in a white lab coat and preoccupied with abstract theories or experiments, working around the clock (Abir-Am, 1982; Nielsen, 2023).

A concrete example from the beginning of the project is a reflective workshop we held on the various types of relationship one might develop with one's work. Here we drew inspiration from work researcher and coach Hein (2013) and business administration researcher Amabile et al. (2002). The workshop was an important arena for everyone on the team to talk about personal motivations and preferences, but it also demonstrated that we all played valuable roles in different ways. Every role on the project comprised a combination of rather dull routine work, highly personal creative processes, and vital tasks concerning the everyday running of the project. The organizational work included not only the research process itself, but also all the things that made the team function, including care for each other and the social fabric of the group—what is sometimes called invisible work or non-promotable tasks (Daniels, 1987)—as well as prestigious invitations and opportunities that were associated with privilege, delivered resources, and could translate into forms of career development capital. The starting point established at this early workshop enabled us to move more easily in and out of periods of more or less exciting tasks, and we could make sure that everyone—occasionally, at least—had space for personal development or a type of work they really loved doing, financed through the project. The workshop exercise thus helped us to understand each other and ourselves, and to develop a more nuanced language for the work we were conducting.

Such open conversation was necessary and important not just because many different contributions were needed, but also because the research team encompassed people in diverse positions, ranging from student assistants to postdoctoral researchers and graphic designers. This diversity embedded different levels of power and privilege in the project setup, a state of affairs that is perhaps unavoidable in research projects, which almost always bring together relatively senior and junior scholars. Since we were concerned to recognize accountability proactively, and to identify and transform power structures, we held regular person-focused individual conversations to take stock of how project members were doing, seek to improve their working conditions, calibrate their workloads, and set clear expectations. During these meetings, we practiced what is sometimes called active listening,⁴ and we asked for feedback. We were aware of the risk that the presence of not one but two project leaders at these meetings—double the usual number of people in formal positions of power—might feel overwhelming for team members. However, it also meant the two of us could bring our differences to bear on the situation and keep each other in check. In this way our dual presence worked toward a developmental organizational model that was concerned from the outset not just with individuals but also with groups and dialogue, thereby both acknowledging and challenging the often highly individualized setting of our organization. Despite their very different roles in the process, everyone on the team had a personal motivation for being part of the project, whether that was their passion for historical research, feminism, or organizational change. We wanted to cherish those passions and allow them to energize our project work without losing sight of the specific tasks and responsibilities each of us had to fulfill, both inside and outside the project.

As the project drew to a close, and people's contracts were coming to an end, we took care to hold a joint celebration. In our experience, the end of a project or creative process that has been both intense and rewarding, both overwhelming and pleasurable, can bring mixed emotions, including pride, joy, and relief as well as a sense of loss, regret, or even sorrow. We took everyone to dinner and celebrated what we had achieved, marking that sense of closure. We also held individual meetings with everyone on the project to reflect on what they and we had learned, and to get feedback. For us as project leaders, it was essential to be clear that work is just work: it is not the primary content of our lives, and we should hold each other accountable for creating good and fair working conditions. But in another sense, work is not just work: it means different things at different times to different people, and creative work in particular—such as the innovative research on our project—is meaningful in ways that go beyond the practicalities of generating output. Sometimes creative work expands or launches us into new worlds, produces added value, meaning, joy, or social bonds. Yet, it was important to us that we should not create a structure that expected people to overcommit. We all came to work as full human beings, and we could create something together, but we also had the right to leave work aside when we went out into the world to do something else or move onto new tasks.

Another structural issue that emerged had to do with the reward structures of academia (Bowman, 2023; Sauvé et al., 2025). Research work entails the establishment of positions of power, privilege, and opportunity, including less measurable forms of career development capital such as networks and organizational standing (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer, 2024). One of our explicit aims was to balance the fair and proper distribution of these less measurable opportunities and resources against our leadership goals for the project; this was also a way of sharing power and practicing proactive accountability. As part of our feminist leadership ethos, we made sure to create awareness of what those resources meant, and we were explicit about holding each other accountable for their equitable distribution and sharing. The same applied to even more invisible structures, such as our emotions and the need for collective and self-care. Sharing power thus became a way for us to build a project where we connected feminist theory and practice, that is, walked the talk (Shiffecker and McNaughtan, 2022). In doing so, it enabled the positive and transformative use of power, as the final section of this article will now explain.

4 Putting feminist leadership into practice

We started out with vague ideas about exploring shared leadership of our feminist architectural history project, as a way to both achieve our research goals and to contribute something new and better. We began to develop ways of doing this that yielded great project results, both measurable and intangible, ranging from impactful international research publications and invitations from exciting research institutions, to outreach activities including a podcast, a guidebook, an exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center (which attracted 90,000 visitors), and educational materials for Danish primary schools. Disseminating our research in so many different ways enabled us to reshape the narrative about 20th-century Danish architectural history and contribute to international feminist scholarship. We also contributed to the discussion of university leadership through multiple invitations to present our approach and experiences.⁵ Ours was the first history research project to be nominated for the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship's Diversity Award, and it received two awards for dissemination from our university.⁶ In less tangible ways, we received positive feedback from the other team members about this way of conducting research and research leadership. The project led to new networks, relationships, and professional friendships, and to new perspectives and ways of thinking about academic work cultures individually, in the team and beyond. In our view, shared leadership is a model that offers great value with regard to the feminist impetus to join practice and theory—in our case, to join the normative goals of social and historical justice with the practicalities of project organization and it's dialogical nature implied a way of making things explicit and therefore transparent and was a way to allow for accountability. In the process, we discovered that although researchers collaborate constantly on writing and teaching, there were few previous examples of explicit shared research leadership. As this article has outlined, shared leadership in and of itself speaks against the strong individualization of the researcher role as a power position, and indeed against the individualization of the research leader role. Instead, a feminist optic sees shared leadership as a form of collective power and power-sharing. In today's context, where research is often conducted in groups and projects led by a single senior researcher, we believe, people in leadership roles need to be even more cautious about how we divide the work while also creating accountability, recognition, and opportunities for personal development and growth for all, from project leaders themselves to early-career researchers and colleagues in administrative roles (Hartmann et al., 2025). Projects often entail work by early-career researchers in time-limited and precarious positions who are in relationships of dependency with researchers in permanent positions or higher up the hierarchy. Those senior researchers in turn are dependent on all the other contributors to the project. An indicator that this is a real issue is junior colleagues sharing their experiences of senior staff that misuse their power under the hashtag #PleaseDontStealMyWork (Young, 2022).

In our view, nurturing collaboration can be a way to counter the harmful effects of this competitive and individualizing culture, but it needs to be organized, structured, and facilitated in ways that are transparent and fair. Shared leadership is particularly well-suited to doing this because it puts collaboration front and center even with those who hold the most power and responsibility, and it can also serve feminist principles, including sharing power, building collective action, practicing shared learning, establishing proactive accountability, and transforming power. There needs to be accountability to create space for creativity, and indeed for conflict—not in a competitive way for competition's own sake, but in the more agonistic sense of creative abrasion and growth. This, we believe, can stimulate a setting that allows for difference and enables researchers to step out of their comfort zone, thereby advancing knowledge, creativity, and innovation. Creative abrasion, as defined by organizational theorist Hill et al. (2014), should not be confused with an abusive work environment, a distinction explicitly drawn in the #MeToo movement as well as in theories of innovation and creativity—and this is why leadership matters (e.g., Edmondson, 2019; Hein, 2013; Kegan and Lahey, 2016; Mikkelsen, 2020).

Yet, despite this, we contest the assumption that leadership must necessarily be embodied in one person as an individual power position: in our experience, collaborating around leadership, and sharing it, offers certain advantages. As feminist researchers, we wanted to walk the talk and find ways to build a feminist leadership practice, starting from the position that leadership can create accountability and structure while ensuring that we take account of economies of care and collaboration. Although each of the existing leadership models we encountered offered potential advantages in terms of what we wanted to achieve, they did not fit our goals, and we needed to think differently. While shared leadership is resource-intensive, it can create a different and more robust framework, leading to decision-making and a structuring of the work that serves both the shared goal and the shared strategy or mission. The dialogical practice of sharing can also be easily adjusted to adapt to changing needs and can thus be more robust (Alvarez and Svejenova, 2005). Although there are many structural barriers to shared leadership in terms of how funding is allocated, success is measured, and privileges are distributed in academia today, for a project such as ours, which was explicit about those structural barriers and proactive about accountability and collectivity, the benefits outweighed the risks.

As this article has shown, sharing research project leadership between two individuals can be much more than a simple duplication of the traditional hierarchical role of principal investigator. Shared leadership departs from familiar models of research leadership, has transformative potential, and can be an inroad to successful leadership practice based on ethical principles. Bringing our own lived experiences as research leaders into intersection with feminist scholarship and leadership research, we have described how we built our shared leadership model and how it enabled us to navigate a competitive and inequitable academic working environment, creating research results and empowering ourselves and others. We have also shown how the organizational structures and practices we built for the project enabled us to reach our ambitious goals: to create new knowledge and advance our field, to impact societal discussions and promote transformation within and beyond the university, and to create working conditions where our project team and all its members could thrive. This article has shared key learnings and reflections on how we addressed difficulties and challenges along the way, and we hope it helps to open a space for reimagining and diversifying the leadership of university research projects. We hope our case study will inspire learnings and reflections, spur discussion, and provide conceptual models for others who are seeking reflective and ethical forms of research leadership practice, as well as advancing minoritized groups in leadership roles at universities.

Sometimes feminism is about overturning existing systems. But the shared leadership on our project was feminist in a quieter sense, a sense to do with values, and with the creation of links between those values and practical or organizational forms. In this sense, shared leadership may find its form as a driver of transformation or change that Meyerson (2001) would call a “tempered radical.” As we explored the power of collaboration—and indeed, the power of two—we came to the view that dialogue about shared leadership is a necessary and enriching part of academic discussion. We would love to hear about other experiences of similar collaborations, and we hope that you will reach out to us, wherever you are.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Mayra Urrea-Solano, University of Alicante, Spain

Reviewed by: Katalin Tardos, HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary

Cinzia Leone, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Italy

Footnotes

¹https://www.wearefeministleaders.com/

²We thank sociologist C. Astrupgaard (personal communication, 2020), who was then a partner in Analyse og Tal, for sharing insights into their collective leadership formats and procedures.

³https://www.wearefeministleaders.com/

⁴https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/active_listening_is_a_leadership_skill

⁵We presented our shared leadership model at seminars for the 100 Women in Leadership event, Danish Center for Architecture and BLOXHUB, 2022; at a masterclass organized by the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship, 2024; at the University of Copenhagen's leadership seminars, 2025; at the University College of Northern Denmark's Leadership Forum, 2025; at the University of Copenhagen Forward Talent Program for Excellence in Research, 2024, 2025 and 2027; at the 8 March Leadership network seminar of the Vin de Loire Store in Copenhagen, 2025; and at the Young Academy Forum for Early Career Researchers at the Department for Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, 2024. Furthermore, when invited to present our research on women in Danish architecture, we have always included a section on our leadership model, e.g. at invited lectures at MIT, Columbia University, University at Buffalo, ETH Zürich, Cambridge University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, TU Delft, and many others.

⁶The project received the 2023 Science Dissemination Award from the University of Copenhagen's Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management and was awarded Science Communicator of the Year by the University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Science. It was also nominated for the 2023 Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship's Diversity Award.