MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Managing through people
We have had bullying types of management, we have had
management which has been secretive, we have had cliques,
we have had networks that exclude people and quite a large
number of people, they continue working for the organisation
because they want to be a trade unionist but they feel alienated
from many of the internal processes. We have never, ever been
good at managing. I think with Unison -- and again, a lot of the
work was started with you with the initial management courses --
nine years into Unison they are realising that we are a big
organisation, that we do have a duty of care to the staff. I am not
pretending that everything is rosy in the garden (Interviewee C)
Part of this message is that people management is still developing, a
point taken up by another manager:-
When it comes to the relationship with people, it is really like
anywhere else. It depends on the individual and how they relate
to people and I don't think that we have ever tried, although we
have tried to introduce certain things by performance
management, etc, I don't think we have ever tried to introduce a
sort of way of managing people. So you have got good and bad
people managers and, going back to my point, you have got the
wrong people in the wrong jobs so we have got people who
have no people skills in people jobs. If you were to go to staff
and ask what is it like in Unison, I suspect it would depend on
how good or bad their manager was. I guess that is the same
everywhere. (Interviewee B)
Good people management is not equated by some managers with lack
of decisiveness. One manager, having described the way she has
tightened up on sickness absence and annual leave and removed
anomalies in what staff were doing, describes her approach:-
What I have done is put forward proposals and said to people,
tell me what you think about it and, to be honest with you, most
have been agreed with. Some people have disagreed with
some things, some things I have taken on board, others I have
enforced. They have to take it or leave some things.
(Interviewee D)
Both she and another manager are firmly of the view that this sort of
clarity and openness is what staff want:-
There is a transformation taking place and it is a recognition that
we are a big organisation with huge resources the most
important of which is staff and those resources need to be
managed in an efficient and effective way. The price of
mismanagement its first of all that you are less efficient than you
ought to be but you’re also sending messages out to other staff.
And, in fact, if you talk to staff and not managers, one of the
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