Jennah's role did not begin as a tidy box on an organization chart. Very little about growing a practice does. We had known each other since college and grown into the mental-health field alongside each other before her work in my practice moved from clinical care into leadership and operations.
Because Jennah was also my best friend, our story can sound like a recommendation: find someone you love and trust, then build a leadership structure around the relationship. That is not the lesson I want to offer. Friendship did not replace role clarity, disagreement, or accountability. It made the need for those things more visible.
Friendship was context, not the framework
A long friendship gave us history, but it did not answer the operating questions. The practice still needed defined responsibilities, multiple support paths, and clarity about who could decide what.
That is the boundary I want to keep visible in telling this story. Our friendship is part of what happened; it is not a management model another owner can copy.
We grew into the work
Jennah moved through clinical and leadership responsibilities before becoming the chief operations officer at my former practice. That progression gave her context other people would not have had on day one. It also meant the boundaries of the role had to be made explicit as the work changed.
The practice needed more than help with tasks. It needed another person who could hold operational context, make defined decisions, and create another route for staff support. It also meant I was working beside someone who could disagree with me and keep working toward the same outcome. That part is less glamorous than “shared leadership,” but considerably more useful.
Trust did not mean constant agreement
One of the most useful parts of sharing leadership was having someone who could disagree with me and remain committed to the work. Agreement is easy to mistake for alignment. We could want the same outcome and still see the route differently.
In the episode, I compare compromise to the work couples sometimes do: agreement is not guaranteed, and the solution still matters. That was closer to our actual leadership work than the polished idea that aligned leaders simply agree. We could want the same outcome and argue about the route.
I do not want to romanticize that. Disagreement still required time, emotional regulation, evidence, and clarity about who ultimately owned a decision.
Another support path changed more than my workload
I used to be the person many questions eventually reached. As the practice grew, I sometimes had to tell people that I was no longer the best person to ask. Going through me could slow the answer down and bypass the person who actually owned the work.
Jennah described why another path mattered from the staff side too: the owner may not be the person someone feels most comfortable approaching about uncertainty or a mistake. Supervisors, operations leadership, and clearer routes gave people more than one place to begin.
That was an organizational change and a personal one.
Sharing authority changed my place in the practice
Another leader did more than reduce the number of tasks reaching me. It meant the practice had another person staff could approach and another place for operational context to live.
The practical test was whether work could move through the authority we had assigned rather than returning to me by default.
That is less dramatic than a lesson about trust. It is also much easier for another owner to examine honestly.