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

Phase four

An expert’s perspective Doc McKerr Strategy

My initial impression of Morgan Sindall as a business was that it had a good group of down-to-earth people that were genuinely interested in delivering good work – whether internally or externally. Culture plays a massive part for them – and that’s definitely driven from the top down. There’s independence and empowerment; it’s not ‘command-and-control’. Leadership and development is very much at the centre of Morgan Sindall Construction. Typically, businesses decide they want leadership and development, look out to someone to create it and bring it in, they do it and then they kind of forget about it – it just sort of dissipates. In its work with Cranfield, Morgan Sindall has been able to create something that has longevity. It isn’t just a one-time thing that they then forget about, there are several touch points over time. The other positive is that they took the bold decision at the very beginning to identify their biggest business challenges, so all of their learning and development projects are trying to understand and making recommendations to their core challenges. Sometimes, when we do leadership programmes, we say there are three types of people – there’s the holiday maker, the prisoner, and the scholar. I would say the majority of people fell into the scholar, or at least wanted to become the scholar. We definitely didn’t have any prisoners – and if they were holiday makers they hid it really well! When they arrived, I would say their understanding of what good strategy is was pretty limited. They were very good at delivery – at operational, hands-on stuff. That isn’t surprising – that’s their job.

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