Building resilience and capability: Shaping the future of Morgan Sindall Construction

Phase one

Organisational resilience workshop Leading for organisational resilience

An initial workshop was designed to engage the Morgan Sindall Construction leadership team and managing director Patrick Boyle in thinking about the concept of leadership for organisational resilience, and how that might be applied to their business and the challenges and opportunities it was facing. Professor David Denyer and chartered psychologist Professor Kim Turnbull James led a series of online and face-to-face sessions with the team aimed primarily at defining the issues and challenges they were facing, rather than seeking to find solutions. “Most leadership programmes start with the leader, looking at the attributes of a leader, their role, how they lead others, and how they try to achieve organisational goals,” David explains. “I try to flip that round and ask: ‘What is the problem that we think leadership is the solution to?’ Let’s have a conversation around that first, and then later we can talk about what leadership we are doing now or that we think we need for that type of problem.” Together, the group discussed the competing tensions at play – such as the need to balance ensuring compliance with innovating for the future – and how far they thought the organisation was along its journey to where it wanted to be. They explored how different leadership approaches may be used to role model and bring about desired change, support organisational resilience, and respond to uncertain and unpredictable times, as well as how leadership may be enabled at all levels of an organisation and how to create an environment where people feel safe to innovate. The leadership team then worked collectively to make decisions that would form the foundation of further business enhancement as well as inform their ongoing leadership development strategy.

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