Your site manager decides your promotion, not your boss

Ask a QS who decides whether they make commercial director and they will name their line manager. Sometimes the managing director. They are half right. The person with the real casting vote is usually sitting in a site cabin, and most QSs have spent years treating them as the opposition.

Here is how the decision actually gets made, from what I have watched happen again and again on the hiring side. A commercial director slot opens. The MD has two or three internal names. Before any of them are told the job exists, the MD walks down the corridor and asks the operations director one question: could you work with them? If the answer is a pause, that candidate is finished, and they will never know why. The job goes external, or to the name the ops director did not pause over.

Why that question gets asked

A commercial director spends most of the week saying difficult things to operations. The programme has slipped and it is costing us. This variation will not be paid. We are not buying that off the subcontractor at that price. None of it lands unless the people hearing it already trust you. Every MD knows that a commercial director the site teams resent is a commercial director who gets routed around, and a routed-around commercial director is an expensive way of losing money.

So the reputation that gets you the job is not the one you build upwards. It is the one you build sideways, with people who have no say over your appraisal and every say over whether the business can be run with you in the chair.

I spent twelve years as a QS before I started recruiting, and I remember how the incentives felt. Every month offered a chance to be right at the site team's expense. The final account that proved the site manager over-ordered. The CVR that showed the programme claim was optimistic. Winning those arguments feels like competence. Inside the business it reads as something else: a QS who scores points off the people delivering the job.

What the promoted ones do differently

The QSs I see get the tap on the shoulder do a few unglamorous things. They turn up to the site progress meeting even when the commercial agenda is thin. They walk the site manager through the CVR before it goes to the director, so nobody is surprised in the room. They ring operations with bad news early rather than let it arrive in a report. When a subcontractor is failing, they treat it as a joint problem rather than a commercial one. None of this shows up in a monthly report. All of it shows up when the MD asks the question.

There is a test you can run on yourself this week. If something went badly wrong on your project this afternoon, would the site manager ring you first, or ring you last, once they had worked out how to present it? If it is last, you have the reputation of an auditor, and auditors do not get made commercial director. Change the order of that phone call and you have changed the answer the ops director gives when your name comes up.