By Adam Ives, governance and executive officer, NAHT The School Leaders’ Union | 4 min
As trade unions reckon with the need for renewal to ensure they are best positioned to meet the challenges of the 21st century, strategy has become paramount.
Modern frontier issues like just transitions, artificial intelligence, the rise of far-right populism and the changing nature of work can transform the industrial landscape faster than unions may be able to adapt. Traditional conceptions of union governance, often rooted in the administration of static structures, are increasingly inadequate. They inhibit the union’s capacity to anticipate challenges or opportunities, respond with agility and adapt to consequences.
In a previous blog, we introduced the Triple-A governance model and applied it to trade union rulebooks and procedures. By stepping beyond an administrative model, where these procedures are an end in themselves, the true strategic strength of governance and democratic structures can finally be realised.
Reframing governance
Strategic governance fundamentally reframes the relationship between the democracy and strategy of the union. It offers the foundational landscape to make strategy possible.
Governance structures designed with this approach in mind provide the essential environment to conceive, deliberate and execute a union’s strategy. Crucially, strategic governance represents a fundamental shift: strategy flows through governance itself, rather than governance acting merely as the bureaucracy in which strategy operates.
The administrative elements of union governance remain essential. When done well, they should be routine, offering a predictable landscape to map strategy against – unions should know precisely where election cycles, executive meetings and annual conferences sit in the year. This administration is the necessary process that enables the union to transform member voice into a meaningful strategy for delivering collective wins.
Establishing strategic governance
Through the processes of rule changes, procedural modifications and the structuring of the union’s democracy, governance engages in choice architecture, effectively defining the possible, the practical and the unthinkable. The outcomes of this architecture create the conditions where member engagement either flourishes or withers. In strategic terms, unions with a rigid structure and an inward-looking approach to governance are more likely to produce oligarchies out of touch with the membership. This creates significant barriers for any strategy to be reflective of member views or genuinely embraced by members on the ground.
Strategic governance operates across three simultaneous levels:
Structurally: It establishes the formal mechanisms for member engagement in the strategic priorities of the union and structures how that strategy cascades through the entire organisation.
Culturally: It shapes whether members see the strategy as ‘their’ strategy or merely ‘our’ strategy, and dictates the visibility of the strategy as something lived or something left strictly to the minutes of a National Executive meeting.
Operationally: It determines the resource priorities for pursuing a strategy. This may be financial (cost or staffing), temporal (activist or staff time) or political (the emphasis placed on particular elements and the willingness to steward stakeholders through change).
Administrative governance inherently relies on a reactive approach. Strategic governance, however, can utilise the same foundational functions to build crucial institutional capacity: it anticipates challenges before crises emerge, designs democratic structures that generate rather than constraining member voice, and adapts constitutional or procedural frameworks to facilitate rather than prohibit action.
Checklist: “Is our governance strategic or just administrative?”
Do our rules and procedures facilitate proactive changes to union strategy or obstruct it?
Do our members perceive the union’s strategy as collectively owned and lived, or as the distant province of executive committees and professional officers?
Are our members’ voices actively shaping strategic direction, not only policy positions?
Do our structures encourage forward-looking debate, not just retrospective reporting?
Are our resources deliberately deployed to advance strategic initiatives, or does institutional inertia perpetuate legacy priorities regardless of current relevance?
Find out how your governance measures up
Unions 21 has produced an audit process for you to assess the standard of governance at your union. Scan the QR code below to take the audit - and benchmark yourself against other unions.
This article is supported by Slater and Gordon
