You never arrive at democracy, you have to develop and work on it always.
Who This Guide Is For #
This guide was created to support managers of conventional companies that have recently transitioned to a worker-owned cooperative. The information in this Guide will also be useful to managers and workers of start-ups as well as seasoned worker cooperatives and democratic ESOPs. It may also be useful for any company that wants to learn how to increase its democratic practices.
Management is hard work. You have competing priorities and have to make hard decisions all the time. Democratic management is perhaps even harder. It requires that you overcome personal barriers based on fear of change, loss of power, or distrust that workers can take on increased responsibility. You might need to unlearn what you have been taught about conventional business management. You may also have to overcome a perceived lack of time to put these ideas into practice, lack of experience or skill in doing so, or even resistance from workers or other managers.
But just as you learned a set of skills to manage, so too can you learn and practice the skills of democratic management. This guide is here to help. In it we share practical activities, assessment tools, planning ‘checkpoints’ and meeting instructions to improve your workplace.
The content comes from worker cooperative managers and consultants who have supported democratic practices in worker cooperatives and Employee Stock Ownership Plans.
This is not a complete set of management practices; instead it is a curated set of tools to help you put more democratic practices in place, no matter where you are on your journey.