UNISON Leadership School Day 2 AM

I’ve posted here; here and here so far on issues relating to last week’s UNISON course in Stoke Rochford. I’ll try and post over the next week or so about what the rest of the course and what ideas and lessons I feel are important to the trade union movement.

I will also “attempt” to assess and think about how I try to organise in my workplace and my branch.

Obviously a public blog isn’t the place for a warts and all analysis but I think that there are some useful lessons that I have learnt which I can share. The usual health warning applies about this being my own subjective interpretation of what was going on. The course was very much a pilot and a learning experience for the union as well. Also it was very intensive and pretty knackering and some of my hastily typed notes may be misleading.

The Monday evening we had a team “Quiz night” on current affairs, politics, history, films and music etc. This was a good team building exercise. A positive feature about the course was that we were constantly split into new and different work groups. Our team did not win – we felt of course we were robbed of victory by very hard marking. It didn’t help that the other teams knew more of the answers.

The Tuesday morning activity was firstly about reflecting on ideas about leadership and applying them to our own work context. Then about applying the leadership theories we had learnt about the previous day to an “organising union” (IMO all activists in unions are leaders whether they like it or not). We were asked to reflect on what approaches to leadership do we see the most and what approach we would like to see develop – in others and around us and how to use this week to help achieve it.

I hold various positions in the union but with regards to my union role with my employer at this stage I concluded that the most common leadership model in our union is transactional. To face the current and future challenges our leaders needs to be more transformational. This has to be subject to collective and shared responsibility at all levels. Personally I need to communicate (talk) more face to face with members and potential members, delegate more, spend more time recruiting members, local contacts and reps while supporting existing reps. Collective action is difficult since we have a very complicated Group structure and members spread over dozens of different workplaces in a very wide geographical area. But we are getting there. All this is hardly rocket science but spending time thinking, discussing and sharing ideas with other experienced colleagues who are outside your own box about such strategic themes is one of the key positive experiences of this course. At the workplace you are constantly fire-fighting and find it difficult to find time to stop and think.

In the morning we were also allocated into project groups and tasked to develop a proposal or resource to help in promoting leadership in UNISON. We had to present our ideas to the rest of the course on the Friday morning during the final session. We also had useful a self assessment leadership questionnaire to fill out.

In the afternoon we had an enlightening presentation on “Trade Unions and transforming public services” which I will post about soon-ish.

(Course picture with our General Secretary Dave Prentis)