MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Managing action - leadership
are they not doing membership services or doing personal
cases?” (Interviewee B)
It would be surprising if, in this or any other union, it proved possible to
gain agreement on the distinctions between these roles. It is, of course,
probably more confusing in trade unions than in many other
organisations. PCS is interesting in that the issue has actually been
addressed and debated but the debate does not throw much light on
the extent to which trade union ‘leaders’ are engaged in ‘doing’ roles
because of their visible status. This contrasts with, for example, the
CWU where negotiating roles are to some extent retained at high level.
PCS’s structure was designed to seek to secure devolution of those
roles.
In undertaking ‘doing’ roles, though they are difficult to extract from the
data, it was suggested on occasion that lack of a culture in which
innovation was welcomed and in which managers felt free to
experiment stifled initiative:-
He (a previous General Secretary) certainly encouraged me --
do that, take the risk and you will fall on your face a few times
and occasionally you will get a smack but generally speaking
you will come up with some good ideas. And that is what we are
missing. I think we are missing it in the trade union movement.
In a way, that is what has been refreshing about New Labour; at
least they have taken some risks. You look at trade union
leaders at the Congress and it is the backside of the nation and I
feel very sad about that. So we are lacking that sort of
innovation, very much so. (Interviewee B)
Another senior manager from the same background is more cautious
about this:-
We weren’t able to think out of the box as much as perhaps we
should have done. We had some outsiders that came in, like L,
who came in who didn’t have that sort of Civil Service
management - more supervisory than management - training
that we had in the Civil Service and she would do things outside
the box and that brought tensions a bit like ‘don’t do that sort of
thing.’ The ability to think outside the box. I feel that we have
actually gone backwards (Interviewee H)
Despite that caution, the move from ‘doing’ to being strategic is
something in respect of which some excitement was expressed:-
An interesting thing is that I had a recent meeting with H and he
said how I needed to take a more strategic role and be less
hands-on and I said, yes, these days I write more papers then I
do SOL programming. It’s something I have increasingly
enjoyed, having your vision of where you want to go.
(Interviewee E)
184