Anti Union Campaign Tips - Win With Your Supervisors

This is the fifth part in a five-part series of posts on tips for winning a union avoidance campaign. This key covers how to win with your supervisors in your anti union campaign.

Can you remember the first key in my eBook on the keys to winning your union election? It is that winning your election is not your key concern - fixing your organization is.

Obviously you must win the election. There are several approaches to doing that. But if you look at the election as a symptom of an organization that is suffering, you already know your best hope for success: your front-line supervisors.

The truth is that all the videos or consulting advice in the world only gets you so far. These are excellent vehicles for delivering the facts about unions to voters. This will get you well on your way to an election victory. This information will create mistrust of the union. However, it will not create trust in management.

The trust issue is a tricky one. Employees know that when the dust settles and the election is over, it will just be them and their supervisors once again. So it is vitally important that supervisors be given a critical role in the campaign.

Supervisors should not only be armed with flyers and negative information about unions. They must communicate strongly management's position on unions. More important, they must communicate clearly and effectively why they personally prefer working directly with employees - and why they hope to continue to do that in the future.

You should look at your union election as an opportunity to improve the skills and abilities of your supervisors. They will have more opportunities to communicate with employees during the course of this election campaign than any other time in their career. It is a great proving ground for supervisors, and a great way to develop skills that can be used later to manage all sorts of tough issues.

If you look at the campaign as a development opportunity for your leadership group you will not only significantly improve your chances of winning your election campaign, but also dramatically improe your supervisor group after the election. At the end of the vote this group will be ready and equipped with the skills necessary to handle the tough task of transforming your labor relations environment after the election.

That is the end of the 5 tips. I hope you've enjoyed them. Please let me know what you think. I really enjoy hearing from readers like you. Best of luck with your election campaign. If you follow the tips outlined in my eBook and this blog series you are already well on your way to an election victory!