MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Trade union managers
and this is corroborated in management documents issued within the
union. The new General Secretary issued a Managers’ Action Brief in
October 2002 dealing with issues surrounding a forthcoming
professional staff seminar and in 2000, senior managers issued a
circular to staff responding to external criticism of management in the
union which commenced:-
Please find attached a copy of the Management Plan - Senior
Management's response to the report prepared by Michael
Johnson of the Industrial Society. The report, which is circulated
separately as SB.11/00, has been welcomed and endorsed by
Senior Management. The Management Plan includes proposals
on staff communications, a Member Focus Committee, and
generating an environment of trust, co-operation and support
(PCS Staff Briefing February 2000)
The view was expressed widely that the role is largely accepted
amongst the Senior National Officers in the union. This, it was
suggested, had its genesis in PTC where a management structure
almost identical to that in PCS was adopted:-
National Officers are really important people in unions. They’ve
got all their own little fiefdoms. So I’m in favour of delegating to
them and then the buggers turn on you. So, we whipped them
off to Templeton College. I’d got an old mate there, Roger Undy.
I said that we had a problem here, with the NUCPS and the
IRSF in that we can’t get organisational synergy and we want to
create a line of managers who actually manage for us and stop
buggering about. We got the intellectual high command of him
and MacCarthy on the case. We took them away for a weekend
and the first question we asked them was the question you’ve
just asked me. What is your role? To which, to a person, they
said;’well, we’re negotiators, we’re bargainers, we’re
propagandists’. To which my response was; ‘you’re managers’.
‘No we’re not; we don’t want to be managers . We’re politicians,
organisers, propagandists, not managers.’ To which my
response was; ‘well, who the hell manages your teams?’ Well,
what they wanted to do was to delegate all the bloody
management across to the personnel manager. All they wanted
to do was to do the things they were good at. Organise
conferences, politics. They didn’t want to manage. So we had
two days of row, cat and dog about what their job was. And
eventually, after another session at Templeton College we got
them to recognise that unless they managed, this structure
would disintegrate. And they then took control of the structure.
And these people now want to manage. They spend between 50
and 60% of their time actually managing their teams whereas
10 years ago they spent bugger all time managing and whinged
and whined about the personnel function, and that’s very
familiar. Now we’ve changed that culture. It wasn’t by accident.
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