MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Merger management
become concentrated round Barclays and Nat West (Interviewee
L)
There is little data on the topic of merger management as it applied to
UNiFI lay members. At management and staff level, however, a
number of proactive steps were taken in the smaller unions. In old
UNiFI, the managers looked at change and merger management:-
The executive committee had used a guy called B. F. to deliver
a number of seminars to them as part of the process and one of
those on change management -- how to handle the relationship
with Barclays Bank which was changing quite dramatically
following the industrial action and how to put it back on an even
keel and hopefully delve into the future. So we decided to extend
that to the management team and Bob did a series of training
courses for us aimed at equipping the people in how to identify
the traditional responses to change, how to deal with them, how
to involve people etc (Interviewee C)
In NWSA, similar training was commissioned, as its General Secretary
explained:-
The programme was called Techniques for Change, it was at
Gatwick and the guy who did it was called David F. David was
important for a few reasons. One is that he was very
experienced in change, that goes without saying, and we were
trained in change management techniques. Secondly, I knew
him. Thirdly, and most importantly, he was at that time an ex
trade union official and is now back as a trade union official
working for MSF. So he actually understood the issue of trade
unions as well as being an expert in change management and
what I was very anxious to do was to have someone who
understood our peculiarities. A lot of companies did not
understand the constraints that trade unions work under
because of their structure and because of their ethos. But David
understood all that. Because David knew me,, he was able to
say "this is everybody else's change management training, Rory,
you don't get involved. You are the sponsor of the change, you
do not get involved. You let me deal with it. You stay out of it.
You can be there at the beginning and you can be there at the
end, but you don't get involved." And I was a bit nervous about
that because I'm a bit centralist in the way that I approach
things. I wanted to hear what was being said and how it was
being said and the structure of it but David convinced me that it
was going to be done, it had to be done properly. If there was an
issue there, it had to be got out. There was no good covering it
up. So I did it and I'm not sure that I would have taken it from
many people that because I knew David personally and trusted
him, because he understood trade unions and was clearly an
expert in change management, it seemed to me that if he was
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