I learned two things in my 20s and early 30s that are useful to remember.
- Bad leaders can ruin an otherwise exemplary organization.
- All organizations need good written rules that reflect the way they actually do things.
The first one I learned when I went to work in the general counsel’s office at the National Consumer Cooperative Bank (now the National Cooperative Bank). That bank, established in the late 1970s, was the dream of the consumer cooperative movement – a funding source for food and housing co-ops (and, despite the name, for some worker co-op businesses).
The people initially hired – I started there in 1980, when it was just staffing up – included many people who, like me, had worked in the weeds establishing food and housing co-ops across the country, but it also included people who had come from other kinds of development banking. They were all very smart and committed to the project.
The initial president of the bank, Carol Greenwald, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter. (The bank was funded by federal money, though set up to eventually be independent.) I am sure she looked good on paper – a banking regulator from Massachusetts with a strong Democratic Party and general progressive background.
But she had a major flaw: she didn’t trust anyone who didn’t suck up to her. At the time, her behavior made me furious. In retrospect, I am sure some of that came from the misogyny she must have experienced as she built her career – she was older than I, meaning that the blatant sexism was even worse than I put up with and I saw plenty of it.
(The nonsense that the man Republicans want as vice president puts out about childless cat ladies was pretty much par for the course back when second wave feminism came along. It was harder to mock back then.)
But if you have a staff of people who know much more about both co-ops and development banking than you do, you need to listen to them even when they tell you you’re wrong. And she refused to.
We even started organizing a union there – in the early 80s when unions were disappearing – not because our working conditions were bad (they weren’t), but because we were a bunch of activists who knew what the purpose of the bank was supposed to be and wanted to make it happen.
The National Co-operative Bank still exists, but it did not become the transformative institution it was intended to be. The truth is that most co-ops are still small and locally funded. And yes, I blame Carol Greenwald and bad leadership for that.
The second I learned doing food co-ops and other community groups in the early 70s. Because most activist sorts – actually most people – hate law and lawyers, the general attitude was that if you had to incorporate something, just do the minimum and ignore your charter and bylaws.
That works fine until you have a dispute. And you will have a dispute – human beings are social creatures, but they rarely agree with each other all the time.
Here’s the thing: the rules of your charter or your bylaws or your partnership agreement or your contract are what is going to govern when things get out of control. So if, for example, the bylaws require a formal annual meeting with decisions made by a majority, occasional informal meetings with decisions made by consensus are not going to be accepted. (And that doesn’t even get into the myriad definitions of consensus.) Continue reading “A Couple of Things I’ve Learned”…
