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

Case study

Matthew Bidewell Senior Contracts Manager East Anglia Time with business: 17 years, 1 month

I was really pleased to get the opportunity to join the Shaping our Future programme. I knew it was important for us as a business, but I also thought it would be good for my own growth and development. There were a lot of techniques and tools that I’ve never come across before on a course, which was great. The main learning point for me was in the way in which we go about dealing with challenges. During my career, my ethos, skills and management style have been honed and challenged, but everything has always been about solutions – about getting to the result or the end goal. The learning at the start of Shaping our Future turned everything on its head. It was about learning new techniques for looking at the problem, understanding that there are lots of different ways of doing things rather than the way in which we have always done something – regardless of how well we do it. I had to completely reverse-engineer what I have been hard-wired to do, which was difficult to get my head round to start with, but it made a lot of sense in terms of what we were trying to achieve. Neither the industry nor the business is going to change overnight, but I definitely think looking at things in this way has opened my eyes and added a new facet into the way I work. It has changed how I manage teams on projects. I can’t hone in on one thing in particular, but it’s just sprinkling of everything I learned about doing things differently and encouraging innovative thinking that I’ve brought to the job. I’m challenging my teams more, encouraging them to think differently, and we’re trialling new things. We’re a massively risk-averse industry, so we’re not talking polar change, but more small differences to complement and enhance what we are already doing well.

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