Your site manager decides your promotion, not your boss
The QS who wins every argument with the site team is building a reputation that caps them. Promotion to director is decided sideways, not upwards.
Opinion · Becoming a director
The first year as a director.
What changes when the job stops being the work and starts being the people doing it.
Skip the subbie packages, stall as a director
The step most ambitious QSs skip isn't a stretch project. It's running an ordinary subcontract package start to finish.
Sector experience is the weakest test for a director hire
Contractors fill director roles from their own lane. The supply side runs bigger P&Ls on thinner margins, and almost never gets the call.
The first thing you lose when you become a director is bad news.
The moment you have authority over someone's pay or their next role, the account you get from them changes. Building a route for the truth to reach you is a director's job, not a personality trait.
The instinct that got you promoted will wreck you as a director
The skill that got you promoted, giving fast right answers, is the same skill that keeps your team dependent on you. Here's what to do instead.
If nobody's annoyed with you six months into the director role, you didn't do it
The moment a QS becomes a commercial director, the job changes from being good at the work to making other people good at it, and that first step trips up more people than anything else in the Pathway.
Promoted above your mates? The kindest thing you can do is stop pretending
The hardest promotion in construction is the first one that puts you in charge of the people you sat beside. Softening it helps nobody.