Shared Leadership: A Sustainable Model for Tech Teams
When your team lead gets sick, everything grinds to a halt. Vacations are postponed indefinitely. Critical knowledge lives in one person’s head. And you ask one human to be a technical expert, a manager, and a leader, all at once.
These are the costs of getting team structure wrong.
This model is for CTOs, managers, non-technical CEOs, and anyone involved in creating a tech team or department. The goal: help you reevaluate your approach and start meaningful discussions with your team leaders.
The Cost of Single-Leader Teams
Single-leader teams create hidden costs that rarely appear on balance sheets.
When your lead gets sick or leaves, work stalls. Delays compound, knowledge walks out the door, and frustration grows. Retention suffers when people see no path to vacation or sustainable workload.
The cost isn’t just in salary, it’s in the time spent finding a replacement who somehow checks every box: technical expert, manager, and leader. Then there’s onboarding, during which the team continues to drift.
This is the true cost of single-leader teams.
The Dual-Leadership Approach
The model I propose: instead of one leader at 100-120%, split the role between two people at 60-80% each. This creates redundancy in both knowledge and task coverage, with the added benefit of enabling a 4-day work week, a model researched and proven to improve retention and employee satisfaction while maintaining the same output.1
Finding one person with all the required skills, managerial, technical, and leadership, is increasingly difficult, and those who meet all criteria know their worth.
Making It Work
This isn’t a rigid model to follow strictly, it’s guidance for building sustainable teams.
To succeed:
- Ensure the two leaders are compatible and can create an environment of nurturing and teaching
- Both must be willing to put egos aside while maintaining the ability to make decisions
- Define how responsibilities are split (technical vs. managerial, or combined skills with shared workload)
- Two leaders at 60-80% may appear more expensive, but weigh this against reduced burnout, better retention, and knowledge continuity
- Clarify decision-making authority upfront to prevent delays; shared ownership doesn’t mean slower decisions when roles are clear
Building a Scalable Team
A well-rounded tech department doesn’t require many people, but some roles are essential.
Start with a Principal Engineer, someone who sets the technical direction. If resources are limited, you can begin with a specialized engineer and add the Principal later. The key is that once you have more people to manage, you need someone who can translate business needs into technical direction.
A Principal Engineer also brings another benefit: they can guide other technical personnel and serve as one of the two shared leaders.
As you hire more engineers, you’ll need to plan, manage, and organize the work, the people, and communication with other departments. This is where the managerial leader comes in. They work with the Principal to plan tasks, translate stakeholder requirements, and maintain a unified direction through sprints, waterfalls, or whatever methodology you use. Together, they share the workload and find solutions.
Team Composition
An ideal team of up to 12 engineers includes:
- A technical and a non-technical team lead
- A Principal Engineer (optionally one of the team leads)
- 1-3 Senior Engineers
- 1-2 Junior Engineers
- ~5 Mid-Level Engineers
With this structure, the team can function consistently even when people are sick, on leave, or transitioning out. The leads share knowledge, maintain both overlapping and specialized focus areas, and ensure continuity: one is always available to hold the reins and transfer knowledge.
Seniors can onboard new team members, and juniors always have guidance. To further strengthen knowledge sharing, consider pair programming where two engineers work together on the same task.
Of course, this is the ideal. Reality isn’t always this clean.
Role Definitions
- Principal Engineer: Researches solutions, creates prototypes, and mentors senior and mid-level engineers.
- Senior Engineer: Works independently on problems, aligns with the Principal on direction, and guides mid-level and junior engineers.
- Mid-Level Engineer: Works mostly independently but collaborates with seniors and juniors to improve.
- Junior Engineer: Works alongside senior or mid-level engineers, focusing on learning technology and domain-specific knowledge.
Conclusion
This model won’t work for every team, but if you start having some thoughts after reading this, you might consider trying it out. If you see potential in shared leadership, sustainable workloads, and nurturing engineers, start the conversation with your team leaders. Reevaluate what’s possible when you stop asking one person to do it all.