Who tells your chief executive they are wrong?
Most growing contractors have a chair or a non-executive. Far fewer have anyone whose actual job is to challenge them.
Thoughts
Opinions with skin in the game.
Careers, hiring, leadership and the habits that get people promoted, including the ones nobody spells out for you.
Start with these four
- Getting promotedThe fastest route to promotion is a problem nobody assigned youAsk most QSs what gets someone promoted and they'll describe doing their own job brilliantly. That's rarely the reason someone gets the tap on the shoulder.
- Becoming a directorThe instinct that got you promoted will wreck you as a directorThe 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.
- How hiring worksI have never been taken through a bad reference. That should worry you.Reference checks at senior level have become a ritual that confirms decisions instead of testing them. Here is how to take one properly.
- The industryConstruction isn't short of applicants. It loses them.Early careers teams are drowning in requests they cannot answer, while the people the industry says it wants never reach the door.
Construction isn't short of applicants. It loses them.
Early careers teams are drowning in requests they cannot answer, while the people the industry says it wants never reach the door.
External hires aren't braver. They're just easier to justify.
Boards go outside for a director role far more often than the market justifies. It usually isn't because the external candidate is better. It's because promoting from within means someone has to explain, out loud, why the internal favourite lost.
Gordon Brown is still at the table. Your retired directors are not
Two Prime Ministers in a row have kept a former one advising on the G20. Construction retires its best commercial brains at 60 and never rings them again.
Being indispensable is why you're still doing the same job in five years
Everyone tells you to make yourself indispensable. It is exactly backwards, and it is why so many good QSs plateau at the level where they became essential.
The hiring decision is usually made by minute five
Panels believe they are weighing the whole interview. Most have already decided, and spend the rest of the hour confirming it.
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.
You don't get promoted for starting things. You get promoted for finishing them.
The QSs who get the tap on the shoulder are rarely the ones who launch the most initiatives. They're the ones who chase the retention nobody else will chase, and actually close it out.
The CV is the wrong document
The CV rules senior candidates out well and rules them in badly. Three calls in one week showed why executive search should be built on evidence, not employers.
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.
You spent six months hiring them and six days landing them.
Boards run immaculate six-month searches and then abandon the hire on day one. Senior placements rarely fail on capability. They fail on the landing, and almost nobody resources it.
I have never been taken through a bad reference. That should worry you.
Reference checks at senior level have become a ritual that confirms decisions instead of testing them. Here is how to take one properly.
The fastest route to promotion is a problem nobody assigned you
Ask most QSs what gets someone promoted and they'll describe doing their own job brilliantly. That's rarely the reason someone gets the tap on the shoulder.
The talent shortage has already arrived. The numbers are starker than most boards realise.
The talent shortage is not on its way, it has already arrived. If you are hiring at any level of seniority, or weighing up your own options, the data is worth ten minutes.
Keep a decision log. It's the most underrated habit for getting promoted.
Nobody is in the room when you make the good calls. If you don't write them down, the story of your year defaults to whoever is easiest to remember, and that's rarely you.
Staying five years too long is the real red flag on your CV
Hiring panels worry about job hoppers, but the CVs that actually trouble me show someone who stopped growing years before they left. Here is how to spot it in yourself before someone else does.
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.
Mentors won't get you promoted. Sponsors will.
A mentor tells you what to do. A sponsor tells other people you're already doing it. Most QSs invest in the wrong one.
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.
A counter-offer is the cheapest way to keep you, not the best reason to stay
When your resignation lands, money appears fast. The thing that made you look in the first place almost never moves at the same speed.
The housing numbers are turning into hiring
A contract worth more than 112 million for affordable housing, signed this month, tells you more about the next hiring cycle than any jobs report.
No Dead Ends - What BAM taught me
There is a number worth sitting with before anything else is said. One million. That is roughly how many young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training. Not on a gap year. No
The best people in UK construction are rarely looking
They are heads down delivering a major programme, trusted by their board, and not scrolling job boards on a Tuesday night.
Money devolves overnight. Leadership capability does not.
A contact, John, asked me today what I made of Andy Burnham's speech. I did not sit in the room at the People's History Museum. I listened to it. But I spend my working life placing the people who act