David Ellison’s appointment of Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO of the merging Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery empire is a timely reminder: the lone chief-executive model isn’t the only way to run a company.
Rather, in an environment characterized by complexity, speed and pressure, sharing the CEO role can be a strength that delivers increased shareholder returns.
Analysis from Harvard Business Review supports this, finding that companies with two CEOs delivered an average shareholder return of 9.5% from 1996 to 2020, outperforming the 6.9% return from single-leader companies during the same period.
The model has been adopted by several corporations, including Spotify, Comcast, Netflix and KKR. But while some have created value by having two people at the helm, others have floundered. Approached in the wrong way, it can even lead to crisis—notably at the mobile phone pioneer Research in Motion, which later became BlackBerry.
What separates the models that work from those that fail is clarity. Co-CEOs can work every bit as effectively as a single CEO when there is clarity of vision, strategy, and action, and a leadership team fully aligned behind the plan.
Here’s how to get that right—no matter how many names are at the top.
Know why you’re doing it
Research from Calgary University’s Haskayne School of Business finds that the dual-CEO model works best when there’s a specific context and clear strategic reason for doing it. This might involve overseeing different verticals or regions or, as in Lululemon’s case, bridging the transition between two single CEOs with trusted, interim co-CEOs while the board ran its search, eventually appointing Heidi O’Neill to the top job.
The news that James Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping down as co-heads of DC Studios, four years after being hired to rebuild the franchise, shows why the “why” matters. Their pairing was created for a specific mandate under a previous owner. With the studio now inside a merged Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, and Marvel veteran Jeremy Latcham taking over as president and chief creative officer, it’s the context that has shifted—not necessarily the model.
A co-CEO structure is only as durable as the strategic reason behind it, so that reason needs revisiting whenever the business around it changes.
Secure leadership alignment
Above all else, leading a company requires clarity of vision, strategy and action. Whether you have one chief executive, two, co-CEOs, or a multi-CEO model, that simple fact doesn’t change.
That involves the whole leadership coming together and getting fully aligned on the unified plan. In my experience, skipping that stage is where many companies fall down: not in the ambition of the plan, but the absence of genuine buy-in around it. Alignment will bring clarity to decision making, influence culture, and motivate people to deliver against the vision.
I recall interviewing the executive team of a major UK retailer in the early 2000s, following a major strategy review and build by McKinsey. Of the 12 executive members I spoke with, only five were fully on board with the new CEO’s strategy. Without leadership alignment from the word go, the organization struggled and was eventually acquired and swallowed up into a larger organization.
Complementary skillsets
Often, pairing two CEOs brings complementary skills that, when combined, strengthen the business. Get this right and tactical decisions also move faster, because nobody is waiting for sign-off on someone else’s patch.
At Netflix, for example, Ted Sarandos was promoted to co-CEO alongside Reed Hastings in 2020. When Hastings stepped back in 2023, Greg Peters replaced him—with Sarandos owning content, marketing and legal affairs and Peters owning technology, product and operations.
Seven years in, it’s one of the model’s starkest successes and compelling evidence for a deliberate split with distinct demarcation of roles.
Invest in the relationship
A co-CEO relationship is a strategic asset and needs the same deliberate investment that goes into any critical partnership. This means regular, structured time together and an agreed process for resolving disagreement long before one arises.
Most importantly, build up enough trust in advance that neither party has to perform confidence they don’t feel. In the early months of our partnership at Enterprise IG, [my co-CEO] Jim and I spent an enormous amount of time together. While it wasn’t always easy, it was critical to understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Mutual trust at the top has a ripple effect; it is the cultural foundation of the organization. Conversely, when leaders have vastly different personalities or lack experience working together, dual leadership structures can become strained and ultimately collapse.
The real question isn’t how many CEOs you have
Lululemon’s board turned to co-CEOs for continuity in trusted leaders while it searched for its next chief executive at a challenging pivotal moment for the business. The lesson for any organization weighing up the model is that the structure isn’t the strategy, it’s the vehicle for one.
The biggest misconception is that a single CEO automatically delivers clearer leadership. One name at the top can mask a divided executive team just as easily as two names can expose one. I’ve watched solo chiefs try to preside over strategies that half their leadership never bought into. The missing piece of the puzzle was alignment, not authority.
Co-CEOs don’t get to skip that step. From day zero, they have to define the vision, agree the plan, and draw hard lines around who owns what. That forced clarity is exactly the thing many companies assume they already have and rarely test.