MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Teams
senior full time officer meetings but that has fallen into disrepair.
They were badly attended at the start and they got worse since
(Interviewee H)
This is despite their strategic espousal of the idea:-
We have cascaded the team working process right the way
down the organisation, with limited degrees of success but that
is the plan (Interviewee K)
But, in general, reference to teams was overwhelmingly positive and
full of aspirational language relating to team building and maintenance.
There has been a great drive towards team working and team
working works in open plan areas more successfully than it
would in cellular offices where you are cut off and close the door
and you are in your own little area. So team meetings team
working, sharing of information, sharing of workloads, sharing of
the general concept of PCS I think has improved considerably
as a result of that. (Interviewee L)
I operate very much on a team approach. There are three teams
in here concerning three different areas which are pensions,
accounting and then processing all the payments and income
and expenditure. Each has got a front-line manager and they
operate very much as a team with me as the captain, if you
want. So that is very much the model of management that I
follow (Interviewee C)
One manager reports putting an enormous amount of effort into
building the teams in his unit:-
Maybe it goes over the top but what I end up doing is holding a
range of team meetings -- full team meetings, officers team
meetings, commercial sector team meetings and so on. So on
Monday my day is taken up by meetings of the different teams
and so on. We keep it free. We have just done it now because
we have had a number of staff changes. We will get a facilitator
in and just review what we are doing and how we are doing it so
that we can move on again and try and do things differently. And
then also for the negotiators and the organisers and for the
PAs/office managers. Weekly is an exaggeration; probably
fortnightly -- it depends who it is. If we sit down and there is half
an hour kept in my diary and their diaries -- what to do, what do
they want to talk about, what do I want to talk about. That takes
a lot of time but it has been worth doing. (Interviewee B)
And methods of developing teams involved perceptions that openness,
in different respects, was an important value:-
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