As a child I was in the Boy Scouts for a while. And they talked a lot about leadership. I always thought that was dumb -- "Why are they always going on about that? You only really need a couple of leaders." I was much more interested in pursuing the oceanography and astronomy merit badges. Leadership seemed like something for a small elite, clearly nothing I needed to trouble myself with.
Then I moved to cohousing. At our monthly meeting last month, I noticed something. Over half of our community is engaged in leadership positions of some kind -- including me! This is one of the best outcomes of the consensus process. Because we are explicitly not a hierarchy, everyone is expected to step in and make things happen. If a meeting is going off the rails, it is everyone's responsibility to fix the problem not just the presenter. We rotate who is going to lead a meeting, and everyone is expected to take a turn. And it works. When we lose someone indispensable, other people step up to take over. Some of our (many) leadership positions:
* Overseeing the maintenance for our 30 households
* Improving our consensus process
* Budget controller
* NVC training
* Remodeling our common house
* Overseeing the landscaping for our 6 acres
* Setting up a car coop
etc.
The more leaders we have the more we get done, so we are always happy to see someone step up -- it is something we definitely try to encourage.
In many ways cohousing can be like taking a permanent personal growth course. All of the elements needed to improve our world are there, now we just have to do lots of practice.