Shared Leadership: The Do’s and Don’ts in Shared Entrepreneurship Enterprises

When visiting shared entrepreneurship (SE) enterprises and studying them through formal interviews, conversations, and questionnaires, it became apparent that leadership in such enterprises is different than in traditional hierarchical command and control organizations. For example, Fred Freundlich of the University of Mondragon explained that the roles of the central leaders are defined in terms of facilitation and coordination and not based on typical top-down executive roles. At W. L. Gore & Associates such terms as “manager,” “management,” “employee,” and “employer” are taboo. When employees have the ability to influence who their leader is either through a democratic process such as at Mondragon or Equal Exchange, or through the administrator of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) trust, leadership has to be different.