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Recently celebrating St Valentine’s Day, triggered Martyn Jones thinking about the importance of nurturing “good” relationships in construction.

For as long as most of us can remember, we have been urged to build better inter-personal and inter-organisational relationships in our project teams and supply chains.

Back in the day, for example, the Reading Construction Forum’s publication, Unlocking specialist potential called for better relationships based on teamwork and greater collaboration. This not only recognised the importance of the relationships between clients, consultants, and main contractors but also reaching out to and including specialist contractors.

Some progress has clearly been made but we still tend to err towards traditional and well-trodden procurement approaches and delivery methods, emphasising price rather than value, and accepting their implicit transactional relationships.

We know it is particularly tricky shifting away from our traditional approach to relationships in construction as we are mainly a project-based industry, with short-term and transitory relationships. Many clients are infrequent who have neither the nous nor inclination to devote time and resources to relationship building.

And, when early attempts are made to build better relationships in a project these can be quickly thwarted when the going gets tough – as is often the case in even the best managed projects – and we end up back in our silos and reverting to more transactional, even adversarial relationships.

This presents a strong case for working on our relationships in construction, as they do in many other industries which, because of the way they operate, often benefit from having longer-term, more transparent, committed, and trusting relationships.

What does the practice of building and maintaining positive relationships between people and organisations involve? To start with, it involves assembling teams having shared behaviours and one aligned culture as well as, of course, having the necessary technical skills and experience.

Then there’s embedding relationship building in the purpose of projects alongside delivering on quality, cost, and programme. And building trust by being respectful in words and behaviours and having open, honest, and deep conversations.

Investing the time, resources and energy needed, admitting weaknesses, culpability and saying sorry. And starting every progress meeting by checking on the health of the relationships and surfacing and continuously addressing the “invisible” reasons why people and cultures so often resist working on relationships, even when traditional interactions clearly aren’t working.

What about the don’ts? These include, don’t keep finding faults and defaulting to managing via the contract rather than the relationships.

Don’t argue on email; always have face-to-face conversations for matters of difference and don’t let egos get in the way of admitting weaknesses, culpability, and saying sorry.

Don’t spend so much time on religiously following systematic processes at the expense of delving deep into what people are thinking and feeling.

Don’t underestimate the time, effort, resources, persistence, and patience needed to bring about changes in behaviours and relationships and don’t ignore what holds us back when it comes to confronting and changing our behaviours.

How do we go about finding out what people really think and feel? In the case of Andrew Goodenough, Infrastructure Director at Bristol International Airport, he commissioned Paul Fox, at Constructive Coaching, to help build better relationships, starting in the pre-contract stage, of one of his projects.

Paul says, “Building a collaborative cohesive team was front and centre along with the necessary investment. The team have met every three months – offsite – to work on the team and its goals, resolving differences and misunderstandings, and growing the mutual confidence to set new goals. This has created a high-performing team delivering a project that’s ahead of programme and under budget.”

Andrew says, “We are in the middle of a £64m project. From preconstruction, we engaged Paul to facilitate regular workshops to help us hold each other to account, keep us on track, and hold open, honest, and sometimes awkward conversations between us as client, consultants, and contracting parties.

We do not leave these workshops until we reset and sorted through any problems together. And it works. We are currently ahead of programme, have positive working relationships and a no bull…t attitude throughout. We have no outstanding compensation events – all being agreed as we go.

We invest heavily in the team and the team ethos, recognising that it takes time to create the necessary trust and culture so that we can have honest, healthy, and constructive disagreements.

I know the team finds it refreshing and I know too that after 30 years in this game I certainly have got a lot out of it and really enjoyed the process.”