CONSTRUCTION & INFRASTRUCTURE
Executive Coaching for Construction & Infrastructure Leaders
Construction and infrastructure is an industry that understands the cost of poor collaboration better than almost any other. The gap between the value identified at the start of a project and the value that actually gets delivered is one of its most persistent and most expensive problems - too often it isn’t a technical one. Executive coaching in construction and infrastructure gives senior leaders space to examine how they work and what needs to change, in order to maximise impact and value across projects and their organisations.
THE CHALLENGE
This sector requires designers, contractors, constructors, project managers and procurement to work together. And yet it is dominated by combative and contractual behaviours that make genuine collaboration exceptionally difficult. Those behaviours are not accidental. They are the product of commercial pressures that reward defensiveness and punish openness – and they are one of the primary reasons project costs escalate.
Money is wasted at every level compensating for poor communication and a lack of basic trust. The leadership models most construction organisations rely on were designed for control, not collaboration. For contract, not trust. Solving that requires a different kind of leadership. Not harder. Different.
WHAT I BRING
WORKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF COMMERCIAL PRESSURE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR.
John Dyson brings years of expertise working at organisational and project level across construction and infrastructure – including co-authorship of Design to Value – to his executive coaching practice.
01
SECTOR DEPTH
I have spent significant time working with individuals and groups across construction and infrastructure – at organisational and project level. I understand how these projects are governed, where value is created and lost, and what it takes to hold a large, complex delivery organisation together when the commercial pressure is at its most intense. I have seen the same patterns recur across projects of very different scales – and understand both where they come from and what it takes to change them.
02
PURPOSEFUL COLLABORATION
The central argument of my coaching – and of the approach discussed in Design to Value: The architecture of holistic design and creative technology, co-authored with Mark Bryden, Jaimie Johnston MBE and Martin Wood, is that the outcomes that matter in complex projects come from a specific kind of collaboration: purposeful, humble, and focused on the value the project exists to deliver rather than the processes built around it. I have worked with groups to develop approaches to make that possible.
03
CONVENING
I have chaired the Accelerate Data Centres programme, bringing together leaders from Google, Equinix, Digital Realty, VIRTUS and others –competitors who rarely share a room – to work through the infrastructure challenges of exponential data growth. The model of purposeful cross-sector dialogue that underpins that work is the same model that underpins my coaching practice.
04
THE HUMAN DIMENSION
Construction projects fail for technical reasons far less often than the post-mortems suggest. They fail because of the conversations that didn't happen early enough, the relationships that were allowed to deteriorate, and the leadership dynamics that made it impossible to surface problems before they became crises. As a BACP-qualified counsellor, I am equipped to work at that level – not just the strategy, but the human system underneath it.
READING & THINKING
FROM THE DYSON BLOG
WORKING ON SOMETHING GNARLY?
Senior leaders in construction and infrastructure come to me when the prevailing approaches aren't working. If that sounds familiar, I'd welcome a conversation.