MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Staff development
point all the time. We're doing it in a number of ways. One of
these is setting each of these senior national officers objectives
which are management-based and not just objectives linked to,
say, the bargaining agenda. (Interviewee A)
Other experience was that the managers did have particular difficulty in
managing a formal performance management scheme:-
We tried in the IRSF, we started to make it run, to bring in a
performance management system. We linked performance pay
to it because our members were doing it, we should have it, was
the thinking. And because it was such a small organisation we
all bottled the judgments that should have been made. And
everyone became exceeders and marvellous and the bloody pay
bill went up. Something else always came along on the day of
having a session with someone that was more important. So it
never became really a tool that a manager could use to shape
management behaviour. …The same thing happened in PTC
and I thought it was from the top, when we had two General
Secretaries, Clive and John, that we tried to bring in a
management system there, a PDR, personal development
review system, and it was meant to happen between those two
and the senior team, the DGSs, who were meant to get their job
plans and then cascade it throughout the organisation. It never
got past us. The meetings that we were meant to have with
them; I had one and the telephone went and it was curtailed
and I never got beyond that. The discipline of having those
systems is just lost because the organisation contrives to
strangle them (Interviewee H)
This supports the first citation made in this sub-section, to the effect
that some trade union managers tend to shy away from making
judgments on their colleagues. We have seen how cognitive rules
stemming from the experiences of organisational members influence
the willingness of trade union members to take disciplinary action and
this is consistent with that mechanism having operated here. However,
things may be changing in PCS. One of the action areas arising from
the professional staff seminar in October 2002 was:-
Better development of existing staff including a mentoring
system, perhaps via an appraisal system (Building a Better PCS,
2002)
Staff development
This carries an implied criticism of PCS’s systems of staff development.
We have seen how a development reviewing scheme is in place and
training was undertaken to enable managers to undertake it, with mixed
results:-
We have had training for it and a number of people have been
trained but on the course that I was on we decided as course
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