From Succession to Shared Leadership: Why Intergenerational Co-Governance is the Future of Family Business

How boards and organisations can move beyond representation toward real collaboration across generations?

At the 5th edition of the Future of Governance International Conference 2026, the panel “Intergenerational Co-Governance” explored one of the less visible, but increasingly urgent questions facing boards and leadership teams today: how can organisations move from succession planning to genuine shared leadership across generations?

Moderated by Flavia Popa, Secretary General, BRD Groupe Société Générale, the panel brought together Rebecca Robins, global expert in leadership and organisational transformation, Patrick Dunne, Professor, OBE, author and Chair of Boardelta, and Theodora Popa, Vice President, Transavia Group, for a conversation that moved between global demographic shifts, board practice, family business succession and the practical conditions required for trust to emerge across generations.  

Framing the discussion, Flavia Popa described intergenerational co-governance as a concept that goes beyond inclusion. The point, she suggested, is not simply to invite younger voices into existing structures, but to rethink how authority, responsibility and insight are shared across generations. With up to five generations now working and sitting on boards simultaneously, the question is no longer only who comes next, but how multiple generations can contribute to real decisions, with real accountability, at the same time.  

Beyond Representation: Family Business Succession Planning as a Strategic Asset

Rebecca Robins positioned generational diversity as a strategic growth issue, not a symbolic gesture. Drawing on the work behind Five Generations at Work, co-authored with Patrick Dunne, she argued that the demographic shift currently unfolding across workplaces, consumer markets and societies is one of the most significant forces shaping leadership today.

The presence of five generations at work is not only an internal HR reality. It affects employee engagement, consumer understanding, market relevance, innovation and long-term competitiveness. For boards, this means that generational diversity should not be treated as a “nice to have”, but as a strategic asset that can improve horizon scanning, challenge short-term thinking and help organisations understand the people they employ, serve and depend on.

Robins illustrated this through the example of Gucci’s transformation beginning in 2015. In an effort to connect more deeply with the next generation of customers, the company also had to reconsider how it engaged the next generation of employees. A committee of millennials became a sparring partner for leadership, helping challenge assumptions, scan the horizon and inform strategic direction. The lesson was not that every organisation needs the same structure, but that intergenerational collaboration becomes powerful when it is intentional, invested in and sustained over time.  

Trust Before Authority: Navigating Family Business Transition to the Second Generation

If Robins provided the global strategic frame, Theodora Popa brought the conversation into the very practical reality of Romanian family business. As a second-generation leader at Transavia Group, she reflected on succession as a subject that is often still treated uncomfortably in Romania, associated less with preparation and continuity and more with loss, crisis or the eventual absence of the founder. In her view, this is precisely why succession must be discussed earlier, more openly and with far greater structure.

Theodora Popa’s contribution made one idea especially clear: in a family business, trust cannot be inherited automatically. It has to be earned inside the organisation. She described her own integration into Transavia as a long process built close to the operational reality of the company. For several years, she worked side by side with employees across different parts of the business, including on the factory floor. Her first day of work was in the slaughterhouse, placing meat in trays alongside workers. What initially surprised employees eventually became a foundation for credibility, because it showed that she was willing to understand the business from the inside, not only from the boardroom.  

This was one of the most grounded insights of the panel. The next generation in a family business often faces higher expectations than an external executive. Every gesture, decision and presence is interpreted through the lens of legacy, privilege and responsibility. Titles alone do not create authority. In some cases, as Popa noted candidly, assigning authority too early can even make credibility harder to build.

Shared Leadership in Practice: Next-Gen Boards and Challenger Committees

Patrick Dunne expanded the discussion from the perspective of board practice, arguing that intergenerational co-governance requires a broader mindset shift. It is not only about placing young people on boards, nor about asking them to “represent” an entire generation. It is about creating structures in which different generations can bring insight, challenge and creativity into governance.

Dunne offered several examples of organisations experimenting with this idea. At Port of Tyne, the “next generation board” was not simply a youth board, but a multigenerational group thinking about the future of the port itself. At Siemens, “challenger committees” gave younger people space to challenge executive assumptions, while also revealing that senior leaders needed preparation in how to receive and work with that challenge. The point was practical: it is not enough to train younger voices to speak; organisations must also train established leaders to listen.  

Another example came from a professional services firm that redesigned its benefits system through a multigenerational internal group rather than through external consultants. The group quickly identified that the previous system had been designed largely by people in a similar age bracket and failed to reflect the needs of other generations. Once redesigned, the system became simpler, more relevant and better received internally.

These examples suggest that intergenerational co-governance does not need to begin with complex architecture. It can begin with a real organisational problem and a deliberately mixed group of people asked to solve it together.

Creating a Robust Family Business Succession Process

One of the strongest threads running through the panel was the difference between representation and collaboration.

Representation can remain symbolic if people are invited into the room without influence, responsibility or psychological safety. Collaboration requires something deeper: mutuality, respect, trust, communication and the discipline to sustain a structure long enough for it to matter.

For Robins, this also means resisting the temptation to launch many visible but shallow initiatives. The more effective examples, including Gucci and LVMH, were built through focused commitment, patient investment and long-term support. For Dunne, experimentation matters because there is not yet one fixed model for intergenerational co-governance. Different organisations will need different structures depending on their context, ownership model, maturity and strategic challenges.

For Theodora Popa, the foundation remains profoundly human. Trust, care and responsibility are not soft concepts; they are the conditions that allow the next generation to step into leadership with credibility and allow the current generation to share authority without losing confidence in continuity.

Conclusion: Is Your Organisation Ready for Intergenerational Co-Governance?

Flavia Popa closed the panel with a question that turned the conversation back toward the audience: if intergenerational co-governance became mandatory tomorrow, would organisations become stronger or weaker?

It was a useful provocation because it reframed intergenerational governance not as a future-facing diversity topic, but as a test of organisational maturity. Can an institution listen across generations? Can it share authority responsibly? Can it create structures where younger and older perspectives challenge each other productively? Can it build the trust required for collaboration before the pressure of transition makes it urgent?

The panel suggested that the organisations best prepared for the future will not be those that simply manage generational succession, but those that learn to govern with multiple generations at once.

The Future of Governance International Conference 2026 is part of the broader ecosystem developed by Envisia – Boards of Elite, which includes executive education programs, governance initiatives and the Envisia Connect community platform dedicated to board members, senior executives and governance professionals.

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