For the last two decades I’ve been coaching construction company boards and teams in charge of some of the biggest projects in the UK. I started doing this after leading an award-winning culture change programme at Wates. (For two decades before that, I was on the sharp end of delivering projects for national contractors.)

Last year it dawned on me that the coaching techniques I apply in my work with construction business leaders could, and should, be used by those leaders themselves in their dealings with each other, and by people in management roles all throughout the industry.

These techniques are easy for anyone to use, and they make a big difference in fostering trust, enthusiasm and teamwork, and in growing people’s confidence and capability.

Toward that end, I teamed up with the CIOB Academy to deliver a course for construction professionals, called Coach for Results, on how to incorporate these techniques into their management styles. In essence, with a coaching style of management, I put my people in charge of fulfilling their accountabilities and actively support them finding their own way to do that. The course unpacks this and shows how to do it in a structured, repeatable way.

Here, I’m going to spell out the three big reasons why construction needs this. In summary:

• Construction is foremost a people industry, but we act like it’s not;

• Our default command-and-control management culture is ineffective and hurts our productivity;

• Young construction professionals don’t thrive in this culture, and it’s hurting our ability to attract and keep talent.

Let’s explore this in a bit more detail.

1. Construction is foremost a people industry

We tend to think of construction as primarily a technical endeavour, but above all it is a people industry. I say that as a chartered civil engineer.

A construction project involves total strangers coming together to achieve a big, difficult result, but we typically give zero thought as to how those people will work together. It’s left to individual styles, habits and chance.

Hard systems like contracts, the programme, project management protocols and software should keep everybody on track, but we know they don’t always. Unexpected things happen, priorities diverge, commercial imperatives clash, opinions differ, emotions intervene.

Projects need hard systems but such systems don’t guarantee success. Success relies on the intangible chemistry that is always at play among people, which we ignore at our peril. When the chemistry is wrong, it breeds misunderstandings, conflict, defects and waste.

A coaching management style fosters a positive, results-oriented chemistry. When a coaching management culture takes root in a team or organisation, that team or organisation is wired for success.

2. Our default command-and-control management culture is ineffective

What is our management culture now? In my experience the default management culture is command-and-control. We issue orders and use fear and blame to punish non-compliance.

It’s the style I absorbed when I entered the industry as a youngster in 1976, and I championed it for two decades until I saw sense. I barked orders, tore strips off people and never backed down in a disagreement. Once I saw “Dave Stitt is a bastard!” scrawled on the Portaloo wall, and it made me proud. We’re less shouty and sweary now; we issue orders politely, but the basic command-and-control instinct is still there.

The problem with it is that it erodes trust and engagement, robs people of their agency, and stifles initiative and creativity.

A coaching style of management does the opposite. It gives people ownership of their accountabilities and supports them in finding out how best to fulfil them. This taps into powerful intrinsic motivators such as the quest for mastery, the joy of autonomy, and the satisfaction of making progress in meaningful work.

Where command-and-control assumes that I the manager know best about everything, coaching recognises that I don’t, and calls on the talents and insights latent in the people around me. A team run by command-and-control is rigid and limited by what I as manager know and can conceive, whereas a coached team is smarter, nimbler and more capable because everybody’s talent, knowledge and experience are pooled and harnessed.

If you were a client, which sort of team would you want working for you?

3. Young professionals are not thriving in this culture

Last year we surveyed hundreds of construction professionals under the age of 40 and found that some 57% of them would probably not recommend the industry as a career to friends and family. Only 27% were active promoters of the industry. In the wider world of business, that is a dangerously low level of engagement and job satisfaction.

The reasons they cited were many and various, ranging from long hours, high levels of pressure and poor culture and mentality, to not enough diversity and a lack of opportunities to develop. Analysing their comments, you would struggle to identify what in particular we could fix in order to increase engagement and job satisfaction across the board.

But we do know one thing: research shows conclusively that managers play a huge role in employee engagement and job satisfaction. Analytics giant Gallup found that managers account for 70% of variance in employee engagement. As the management guru Marcus Buckingham observed, people join firms but leave managers. Managers are the glue in high-performing teams.

For decades, we’ve wrung our hands over how difficult it is to recruit and keep talent, and we’ve blamed the industry’s bad image. But what if this is a red herring, and the real problem is our off-putting, command-and-control management culture, which we tend to think is just normal? What if it isn’t normal at all, but dysfunctional?

The most powerful influence on young people’s views are not what talking heads say, but what other young people say. So, what if instead of a culture in which managers are remote, indifferent and demanding, they are instead available, interested and supportive of young people’s development? That would lead to a lot of people loving their jobs.

Gallup sees workforce engagement as the most important determinant of a company’s bottom-line success. Its chairman Jim Clifton said organisations should phase out “command-and-control managers” (his words) and bring in “high-performance coaches” able to hold “high-development conversations”, which is exactly what Coach for Results teaches.

Now, just a quarter of young construction professionals would genuinely recommend the industry as a career choice to peers. Imagine if it were 90%! That would be the most powerful recruiting tool on earth.

Find out more about Coach for Results here.