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

Phase one

Trusting the process “I remember warning them at the start that there would be no agenda for our sessions, but that they would take whatever direction they needed,” David recalls. “Working ‘off-script’ – without the safety net of a pre-approved slide deck – can be really powerful, but you need the client’s complete trust. They need to have confidence in your ability to guide them through that in a way that makes them feel safe. They need to be comfortable with trusting the process and just letting things unfold, not really knowing where they are going to lead. “Part of this relationship was built through some of our early conversations with Morgan Sindall Construction, but it was also inherent in their attitude as a business. They were a very informed, enlightened client. They wanted a genuine leadership development process, rather than just for us to give them some content to work through. They weren’t telling us what they needed from the programme – they were telling us what the business needed and letting that shape what the programme became.” “As we came out of Covid, we identified a need to give ourselves time to think about where we go next with the business and how we make us fit for the decade ahead, and the decade beyond that,” remembers Nicola. “We didn’t really know what was going to come out of the organisational resilience workshop; we were very open-minded. “I remember David saying to everyone in the room right at the start: ‘You’re not the right people to solve these problems, or even to think about these problems’. We needed to go away and think about the diversity we needed to bring into the room in order to understand the problem.”

“Leadership is a practice; it’s a process; it emerges in the organisation and it’s about how a sense of direction, alignment and people’s commitment is developed in the organisation”. Professor David Denyer Professor of Leadership and Organisational Change, Cranfield School of Management

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