Short answers, pulled from the story.
Collective leadership is a shared distribution of power within an organizational structure where no single person dominates the political system. A single officer such as the general secretary or party chair serves only as primus inter pares on the relevant leadership body. This concept emerged from ideological debates about how to prevent autocracy within revolutionary movements.
Collective leadership in the People's Republic of China began with reformist Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s during the same time period as the reform and opening up. Deng tried to encourage the CCP Politburo Standing Committee to rule by consensus in order to prevent a resurgence of autocracy under Maoist rule. Official post-Mao historiography portrays 1966 as the year when Mao wrongly abandoned the organizational principle of collective leadership.
In the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, collective leadership involves powers being distributed from the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party and shared with the Politburo Standing Committee while still retaining one ruler. There is not one paramount leader in Vietnam; power is shared between the General Secretary, President, the Prime Minister as well as the National Assembly Chairmain along with collegial bodies such as the Politburo, Secretariat and the Central Committee. The distribution of executive responsibilities among multiple top officials creates a system of checks and balances within the party hierarchy.
After Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev accused him of one-man dominance leading to controversy surrounding the period of his rule. At the 20th Party Congress, Stalin's reign was criticized by Khrushchev as a personality cult. Collective leadership was strengthened during the Brezhnev years and the later reigns of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko before Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms helped spawn factionalism within the Soviet leadership.
As of 2025, the Green Party of Canada adopted a co-leadership model for its party leaders while the Green Party of England and Wales has only one leader named Zack Polanski. Alliance 90/The Greens divides its Federal Executive between two co-equal spokespersons and Québec solidaire divides its leadership among its president secretary-general and male and female spokespersons. The Scottish Green Party began to practice collective leadership in 2004 with the election of a male and a female co-convenor.