By Becky Wright, Executive Director, Unions 21 | 4 min
A few years ago I was facilitating a governance session for a union’s executive and one member, who had been vocal all day on effective governance, responded to a question I’d asked the group with:
“But this isn’t work, it’s union stuff, we should be able to talk as we want.”
It shocked me because in the room were a good amount of staff who were there to brief the board, record minutes and support the governance work of the union.
“Really?” I said. “Then what about your staff members here? Do they not deserve to have an inclusive and appropriate work environment? Does that happen if you’re swearing at each other, arguing and accusing each other of all manner of misdoings?”
There was a pause across the room and it was at that moment when the idea was cemented in my mind that getting our union culture right wasn’t just about staff, but the executive too.
Our recent work on union operating models explores six culture types and how each one shapes the effectiveness of a union in achieving its strategy.
When it is said that culture starts at the top, it’s usually in a vague, aspirational way, focusing on how senior union leaders set the tone and model behaviours.
But in unions, it's more specific and more structural than that.
Staff attend executive meetings. They prepare for it, present to it and experience it as their place of work. They see who gets heard and who gets managed. They see whether the general secretary is genuinely challenged or quietly deferred to. They see how disagreement is handled.
If your executive meeting is characterised by long debates on procedural matters while strategic questions get nodded through, your union's culture will reflect those priorities. If challenge is rare and consensus is the default, don't be surprised when staff are reluctant to raise difficult things with their managers. If the most powerful person in the room drives the direction of every discussion, that dynamic will replicate itself at every level below.
Most other organisations, at least in theory, choose who leads. In unions, the executive and general secretary (at least in the UK) is democratically elected. Staff work with whom the movement chooses. That democratic legitimacy is foundational to what unions are. It can't and shouldn't be traded away for cultural convenience.
But that democratic reality doesn't let executives off the hook for the culture of the room. If anything, it raises the stakes. Because an elected executive that models poor governance, that prioritises form over substance, that mistakes busyness for strategy or that confuses loyalty with agreement is using the authority of democratic mandate to embed a culture that may actively undermine the union's ability to change.
We've seen unions where the executive is genuinely engaged, challenging and curious, where the general secretary is held to account in a way that strengthens rather than undermines their leadership, where new ideas get a hearing even when they're uncomfortable. Those unions tend to have cultures where the same qualities show up at every level: staff who will name a problem, teams that will tell you what isn't working, reps who feel trusted to use their judgement.
We've also seen the alternative.
So, the question to unions is: does the way your executive conducts itself reflect the culture you say you want for your union?
Does your agenda make space for genuinely strategic conversation, or is it dominated by reporting and administration? Are the papers you receive designed to prompt real decisions, or to seek approval for decisions already made? When someone challenges the prevailing view, what happens next? When a staff member presents, do they leave feeling heard or handled?
These aren't comfortable questions. We know that from our conversations across the movement. But they're the right ones. Because the culture you're trying to build in your union is either being modelled or undermined every time that executive room convenes.
