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.)

In recent years, 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. The 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, something construction really needs.

Toward that end, I developed a course for construction professionals, called Coach for Results, on how to incorporate these techniques into their management styles.

In essence, a coaching style of management is one where you move away from giving orders and hunting for non-compliance – which is termed a ‘command-and-control’ style of management – and you put your people in charge of fulfilling their accountabilities while supporting them in finding their own way to do that.

Basic coaching techniques give managers who have no intrinsic gift for or formal training in people management simple tools for bringing out the best in their people so great results can be achieved.

I mean no disrespect to experienced managers in construction. They have amassed huge personal knowledge, experience, authority and influence, and all of that naturally lends itself to telling people what to do. It can seem to be the easiest thing to do all round, and it is very satisfying, knowing and advising and helping.

However, it is a trap because when you help someone you make them helpless. When you give orders and instructions, the people you are ordering and instructing stop thinking for themselves. Managers I coach often complain that they’re ‘the only one doing the thinking around here’. I complained of the same thing when I was a command-and-control project manager. That’s what happens with command-and-control.

With coaching, experienced managers don’t disown their expertise, they give others the chance to become expert as well, so they’re not so lonely at the top.

Think of it as a bit of social technology – an ‘app’, if you like – a new protocol guiding how we are with each other.

In my view, construction’s social technology is outdated. It has not kept up with changes in other types of technology and in society at large. I believe this is the root cause of the industry’s chronic problems of poor quality, low productivity and its struggles to attract talent.

The industry’s fragmented and adversarial nature is often blamed for these problems, and for good reason, but none of us can change the way the industry is structured; it evolved that way, pushed by forces beyond our control, and it is what it is.

We can, however, change the way we are with each other in our teams, business units and companies. We can adapt so that our team, business unit or company is having a better time, with less stress and conflict, while achieving consistently good results and enjoying the competitive advantage that brings.

As a social technology ‘app’, a coaching style of management is not like the big, top-down culture-change programmes I led from the late 1990s. These were fascinating and worthwhile but, in hindsight, they were also disruptive, resource-hungry, uncertain and took years to bear fruit. In contrast, a coaching style of management can start right now in any pocket of your business and, with a little encouragement, it can spread organically so that culture change happens quite swiftly with minimal disruption, cost and uncertainty.

• This blog is adapted from the introduction of my latest book, Coach for Results: Empower your people to achieve the extraordinary, available now.