This article completely jives with my own experiences using democracy in the workplace.<p>My misc Yes and:<p>I've always struggled to articulate my ideas, experiences. Workplace democracy is a hard sell. I've only successfully used it when I had full control, like a benevolent dictator. Supremely ironic.<p>Focus on good structures and processes and the outcomes will take care of themselves. h/t Luke Hohmann and The Journey of the Software Professional.<p>Workplace democracy is about both empowerment and responsibility. I hired really good people. The answers we need are right here. The trick is creating the environment where the team can find and flesh out their answers. Together! Maybe this is called nurture.<p>My team members have always owned their processes and structures, and therefore they earned their outcomes. Using democracy instills emotional involvement and commitment.<p>My primary involvement was adjudicator, enforcer. If a team made a joint decision, I held them to it. No sniping, sabotage, withholding, backstabbing, and all those other icky personal political BS details. If someone wanted to, needed to, revise a team's decision, then it was handled democratically. So be prepared to be the asshole.<p>Democracy feels slower, more painful. That's only because the heartache is front loaded. It's one of those "go slower to move faster" things. If you stick to the process, there's much less rework, relitigation.<p>Trust is key. In that "disagree and commit" sort of way. In owning and learning from mistakes. In demonstrating that team decisions will not be capriciously or casually disregarded or overruled.<p>Like a magpie, I cobbled together goofy ideas from every where. Joint Application Development (JAD) for brainstorming, project planning. Approval voting for triage. Roman evaluation for hiring. Balance of powers between roles (Marketing, Engineering, QA) for governance. Streamlining from Goldratt's theory of constraints. Etc, etc. Books like Innovation Games are good sources.<p>Democracy is hard. Requires commitment. It gets A LOT easier once the culture is established (eg storming, forming, norming, performing).<p>Major caveat: Once you experience democracy, a high trust environment, it kinda ruins you for the rest. It's really, really hard to suspend disbelief.