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MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

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Teams<br />

life changing, fantastic -- I'm not rejecting the notion of outside<br />

training. It can be good. But it is expensive when it is provided<br />

by professional organisations -- indeed, when we have<br />

professional trainers coming here. To meet the experience of<br />

having somebody working with me a one-to-one has helped me<br />

make a much bigger shift in terms of how I do things, how I feel.<br />

…One of my values in all that I try to do, and my consultant is<br />

helping me a lot with this, is about being authentically me. Not<br />

wearing a shell, not posturing, owning when it is difficult, not<br />

pretending that I have all the answers, not being defensive when<br />

people are critical, not taking it personally when people get<br />

angry, being a real human being, that sort of thing (Interviewee<br />

G).<br />

It is the case, however, that managers in PCS are having the<br />

opportunities provided to undertake some training for their managerial<br />

roles. In the event that there is now in place a training and development<br />

strategy and that training and development needs are identified as part<br />

of a development reviewing scheme – or even an appraisal scheme if<br />

the objective of the 2002 seminar has been picked up, then it would be<br />

interesting to look again not only at the development of managers’ skills<br />

but also at the extent to which, if at all, these have impacted on the<br />

experiences of their staff.<br />

Teams<br />

At various times in this case study, managers have used the language<br />

of teams. It has been suggested elsewhere that in some areas of the<br />

trade union movement, the idea of teams is counter cultural. One<br />

manager implied that this could have been the case in some areas:-<br />

We set up the structure of team meetings which was unknown in<br />

the CPSA. We always had team meetings but people from the<br />

ex CPSA were very agnostic towards the whole question of<br />

team meetings. But I had to be fairly firm, particularly with the<br />

officers, in making it clear to them that they were required to<br />

attend team meetings, because they saw them as something<br />

they could opt out of. I told them that they had to be there.<br />

Actually that helped people then to realise that they were having<br />

a discussion amongst each other. We also, in order to help the<br />

process, set up a team building event which the Industrial<br />

Society ran for us. It was in a hotel so it took people away from<br />

the office for two days, all of us, and stayed there and that<br />

worked very well. People came back from that even better in<br />

the team then when they went there. (Interviewee M)<br />

Furthermore, senior managers do not seem to have operated<br />

coherently as a team:-<br />

It doesn’t work particularly well as a team. We’re not particularly<br />

joined up at present. We tried to instigate a series of fortnightly<br />

180

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