MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Managing by information
same resources from critical bargaining, servicing and
organising activities.
• Internal tensions will have adversely affected the performance of
the PCS officer cadre and support staff with the consequence of
a poorer service to members.
• The role of the General Secretaries remains a critical problem.
Lack of agreement on roles is exacerbated by differences in
managerial style and, frankly, open personal antagonism..
• Even if there were only one General Secretary this issue will not
be resolved. There is clearly a need for a GS role that is more
strategic, trusting, delegating and rules-based and less personal,
particularly in the way management decisions are taken (Report
on PCS Senior Officers’ meeting, April 2000)
Managerial Tasks
Managing by information
6.14. Some evidence of lack of managerial communication has been
presented above. The Eastbourne meeting was robust in its criticism of
managerial communication:-
The need for more extensive communication is clear. There is a
danger in these things that everything is always charged to
"more communication" when often the problem is not that people
do not communicate, but that they do not agree. We think that
here there are some areas of disagreement but many areas of
consensus where more communication would be beneficial. It is
interesting to note that more communication is included in all the
Final Session Groups targets (Report on PCS Senior Officers’
Meeting, April 2000)
In the regions this perception may not entirely be shared:-
Badly as a union. Better in so far as the office is concerned in
terms of taking staff along with us, in terms of what they felt they
wanted, having influence on the type of it on accommodation we
took, having influence on the way that it was fitted out.
(Interviewee M)
But rather than there being interview data about communication or lack
of it, managers hardly mentioned the topic at all and there was precious
little material on the subject to code. There were suggestions that it had
improved, after the session at Eastbourne:-
One of the good things that came out of Eastbourne was that
each of the senior secretariat are now meeting with the senior
managers that they manage. I think all of them are doing it. I
report to J and we had met once and have plans to do that
regularly so there is another channel of communication. I don't
know what is planned in terms of all of the senior managers
meeting together. It certainly was a big shift doing what we did at
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