Any democratic organisation must be led by a strong leadership at all levels of the organisation. Numsa with almost 200 full-time employees, also has the challenge of managing its staff in a democratic way so as to get 100% support from them.
During the assessment of the organisation, harsh words were levelled at the leadership at all levels of the organisation, often by the leadership themselves.
These are just some of the problems that participants identified:
poor planning of meetings or no meetings at all top down decision making with not enough input from below poor communication of decisions, poor communication with staff poor implementation of resolutions and decisions made at constitutional meetings break down in trust amongst staff sometimes because of 'business management' style of leaders growing centralisation of the activities of the union starts to block initiatives on the ground. Eg. all income goes to Head Office and a region is then allocated the money that it requests. If the region relied on income direct from companies, then it would be forced to follow up on subscriptions from all companies.
What Project 3 will do:
prepare a draft Leadership and Structures Guide Book for discussion at the November Central Committee. In 2003, try out some of the proposals and reassess them for adoption at the June 2003 Central Committee develop an outline for a leadership development programme for discussion at the November Central Committee. Implement Phase One during the first half of 2003.
Source
Numsa News