Big Idea

What’s your job: Director, project manager, senior engineer, architect, other? And what if you were really confident in your role, what if you weren’t holding back, what would you do? I’ve been asking this question lots over the last few months and the responses are both inspiring and useful. Of course, I asked myself first and here’s what I came up with. And then, if you were a really confident team what would you all do and where would that get you? Think, write and manifest…

Here’s three big reasons why the construction industry needs a coaching management culture. It’s not only construction. We hear from Gallup’s chairman, Jim Clifford, who has firm views on this based on decades of global research by the analytics giant. The argument for culture change is convincing. We signpost the simple steps to get started…

Hero leadership was the order of the day back when I was a young project manager. I thought I was being a hero though people around me whispered ‘he’s a pain in the neck’ and worse. 30 years on things have changed; young professionals don’t want hero bosses, they want to be coached to success. And “The Six Point Focus Plan” is as relevant now as it was then, probably more so…

Few cyclists dedicate conscious effort to skill refinement; most get on their bike and ride, some of them very hard and fast. Here, I explore the parallel with managers in the construction industry where the default assumption is they are doing their job optimally and the same for their people. What would skill refinement as a manager look like anyway? Suggestions included…

We have just launched an exciting MOOC on the Chartered Institute of Building’s Academy aimed at enabling young construction professionals to perform better in their jobs, become effective managers and eventually great leaders. At scale and over time this will change the construction industry from the ground up. Though Graham raised an interesting challenge…

We are going to change the construction industry from the bottom up. To do that we need to change the default conversation. Command, control and blame as a conversational style does not work; its crushing. You have felt it. There is a better way to gain commitment and get things done – big or small. Use a coaching style of conversation. But what is coaching?

My Big Idea is taking shape, now I need to get young professionals on board with it. I’ve suggested ‘what’s in it for them’ though I don’t really know. So, I am reaching out here to find out and then I will shape things to fit. But first let’s see how to kill off talent, cos we don’t want to do that, right?

I’ve got a big idea. It’s about changing the construction industry from the ground up, and energising thousands of young professionals and their organisations along the way.
For the last eight weeks I have been articulating this Big Idea, here in my blog.
In this post we get down to brass tacks including: costs, benefits and executive legacies.

You could change the organisation for the better, perhaps together we could change the construction industry; though not without psychological safety.

Maybe that’s the elephant in the room – you have something that could work but think it would be career limiting to mention it – there’s no psychological safety round here

In our last post we highlighted the opportunity for changing the construction industry from the ground up based on the survey of millennials we did with the help of the CIOB. In this post we see the opportunity globally. 85% of the global workforce is disengaged. My Big Idea has just got a whole lot bigger.