Tim Huet: I come from a background where there was a lot of bias against even the concept of leadership, like it’s a negative thing. Because if you have leaders, you have other people that are followers, we didn’t want to have that.
And I came to feel over time that that was a very toxic thing on the left and among progressive organizations, that in fact we need leadership, and part of the role of a democratic leader is to make other people into leaders.
We learned that the association needed to provide some education, particularly around worker ownership. When a business is new and has the greatest need for labor and fast growth, it tends to throw people into the work at the cash register or in front of the ovens. There’s not much time to develop the larger skills.
So we started to put on orientation sessions — six different ones that we provide at the association level for anyone hired at any of the individual co-ops. And we added one that was called democratic participation in leadership so that we could talk to people about what their pre-hire views on leadership were. We ask them the question, what should leadership look like in a co-op context? And how do we build towards that?
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