At my job at the Train, a theatre company that promotes Black playwrights, we're preparing to move to a company-based decision making structure (for you activist girls, company-base = collective decision making process). This means that some of the decisions that I had responsibility to make as the artistic director will be made by the playwrights who make up the Train's company membership. This is all extremely exciting for the theatre company. It reflects our positive growth. This is not to say that it will be one without challenges. I'll be the first to admit that founder-itis is alive and well in my immune system! Stepping back a bit however, I feel the root cause of founder-itis, the dynamic when you have the founder member of a particular organization oppressively doing all the work and not sharing responsibilities and the spotlight equally among staff... the root cause of founder-itis is a lack a trust and probably a lack of setting out from the start a core set of values that folks share.

All this brings me back a recent conversation with friend of mine who has had leadership experience at non-profits here in New York. This friend told me that part of being a leader is setting, maintaining, and being accountable to a value set. What values does the organization hold? What qualities are desirable? What values do you personally have? They told me that in their place of work, folks were brought in who share similar values. And because the values were shared and acted out, not stored on some dusty shelf in the filing room, the day-to-day health of the relationships of the workers and organization itself was fairly healthy.

I'm super excited and geekin out about this new direction the Train is headed into! But at the same time I want to go into it with more than just pretend language and unintentional intentions. I think setting out values would go along way to making this process healthy and fun!