MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Conclusions
Arising from development reviews, staff development is made
available. Some managers went to some lengths to distinguish
development from training and to make arrangements for development
experiences to take place within the organisation. Management training
has also been made available, based, however, around a menu of
centrally provided courses rather than necessarily arising from
development reviews as such. Some managers had received training
when they had managerial positions in the civil service so there is
some trained management within the organisation.
There does seem to have been experience, in CPSA, of a less than
positive attitude to team working based, perhaps, on the premise that
teams stopped people doing things. But team working is something
about which managers in PCS are positive and considerable effort has
been put by individual managers into team development. An example
of poor team working, at senior management level, seems to be
explicable by its formal, top down character; other examples of positive
team working seem to have been participative and bottom up.
Managing Action
In PCS there has been considerable discussion about the difference
between leadership and management. On the training courses where
this occurred, a traditional view emerged – that leadership is the ‘soft’
side and that management is the ‘hard’ side. But at very high level in
the union, there was a concentration on the visionary side of the role.
This does not necessarily match because the fact that one has a vision
does not automatically mean that one is equipped, in whatever fashion,
to achieve that vision. Other managers raised qualitative issues, either
relating to people or initiative – creativity. There is some distinction
between ‘doing’ and ‘controlling’ – doing the blue horizon stuff – but, in
general, no meeting of minds about what trade union leadership was all
about and the extent to which it included hands on roles which perhaps
leaders in other organisations eschewed.
‘Legitimate’ Managerial Actions
Stakeholder management
As in several other areas, the interface between management and the
lay activist structure is affected by the conflict within the union.
Managing relationships is a difficult enough task when such conflicts do
not exist and there appears in PCS to be competing stakeholder claims
of influence which have not been resolved and which are having a
significant impact on the way managers are able to undertake their
managerial responsibilities. Some managers have clear views about
where boundaries should be drawn and within their own sphere of
influence, such as the relationship of individual elected members with
team operation, boundaries can be drawn and managed. At higher
levels, though, this does not seem to be the case and managers often
sound rather helpless in the face of managerial issues, as they see
them, becoming part of a political process.
199