MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

‘Legitimate’ managerial actions - stakeholders
you have a good relationship with your Chair and Vice Chair and
I also think it's crucial that you have a business plan so that
everything that you do is crystal clear to the Chair, the Vice
Chair and the Executive itself -- that there is a work programme,
that there are costings beside that. There should be no hidden
agendas whatsoever. So your relationship needs to be on the
basis of trust and confidence in one another. I think that that is
paramount. If you haven't got that, then I think that you are in
trouble. (Interviewee D)
I think it's important that you do have a caring and
understanding for one another because their time that they give
you is precious. You know, they actually have to work and so
you need to keep a keen interest in their health and their welfare
as well. So that of primary importance. I also think it's important
that you have a relationship with each member of the Service
Group Executive and that is a business relationship but it's also
a caring one. (Interviewee D)
Relationships are described by another manager in terms of the
importance of the lay member with whom he is relating:-
I would say, and be honest, if I get a phone call saying can you
ring D.A. (then Vice-President), I'm going to ring (him). Not
because he is an NEC member but because he is an important
player. That doesn't mean if I had a call from someone else, I
wouldn't call them but to a certain extent you do think about the
importance. And you do get NEC members try to short circuit
and I generally will try and not do that because I don't think it is
right. (Interviewee B)
A senior manager reflects on how management of the strategic goals of
the union can be done in such a way that lay activists change their
behaviour:-
We work to the lay membership. But we are bringing in a new
dimension, a different dimension, and one of the things that we
haven't sorted out yet is if we are going down certain tracks as
far as the union is concerned with the full time officers, whether
or not we are taking the lay membership with us. If we are
saying that more of our resources are devoted to doing things
rather than sitting in committees and yet we have still got a
group of lay activists who want to sit in committees and we can't
get them to move over to an organising type of culture.
(Interviewee C)
A regional manager articulates a particular problem for her in
stakeholder management where the issues involved are political ones:-
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