I've watched a lot of quantity surveyors get promoted into their first director role, and I can tell you the exact week it goes wrong for most of them. It's not the board meetings or the budget. It's the moment someone they used to sit next to at lunch does something wrong, and they have to say so.

Nobody tells you, when you're being interviewed for the director job, that the actual skill being tested is your willingness to disappoint people you like. Everything up to that point in a QS career rewards being liked. You're diplomatic in meetings, you smooth things over with the site team, you're the person everyone wants on their job because you don't make waves. Then you get the promotion, and the waves are now your job to make.

The pattern I see most often, in the first six months of a new director's tenure, is a kind of quiet paralysis. They keep the same relationships they had as a peer, hoping the title will do the managing for them. It won't. Somebody on that team is coasting, or missing deadlines, or briefing against the new appointment behind closed doors, and the new director knows it, and does nothing, because doing something means the group chat goes quiet, or the Friday pint gets awkward, or an old mate stops picking up.

I'll say the unpopular part plainly: if you get through your first six months as a director and everyone on your old team still likes you exactly as much as they did before, you haven't done the job. Somewhere in those six months there should have been a conversation that cost you a bit of the relationship. A performance conversation, a reassignment, a "no" to someone who used to get a "yes" from you as a colleague. If that conversation hasn't happened, you've been managing a friendship group, not a commercial function.

This isn't an argument for being cold. The best directors I've placed keep the warmth and lose the flinch. They can still buy the round on a Friday and still tell someone on the Monday that their cost report was sloppy. What they've given up is the fantasy that being liked and being respected are the same currency. They're not, and construction, with its long projects and long memories, punishes anyone who confuses the two for years afterwards.

If you're stepping into your first director role, do one specific thing early. Pick the conversation you're most avoiding with someone you used to call a peer, and have it in the first month, not the sixth. Waiting doesn't make it kinder. It just means you did five extra months of the old job while everyone around you assumed you'd already started the new one.