Who do you call when it goes wrong?

This week the question comes first. It grew out of two conversations I had on Wednesday and Thursday, and I would rather have your answer before you read mine.

This week's question: when you hit a problem you cannot take to your board, who do you actually call?

• A former boss or mentor, unpaid
• A peer at another company
• A paid adviser who already knows the business
• Nobody. I work it out alone

Vote on this week's question

Vote with one tap, and read my take on Friday: community.lechley.com/question. The two conversations are below.

From my desk

On Wednesday I spent an hour with someone who has run a national rail programme and a division of a tier-one contractor, and who now advises boards. On Thursday, half an hour with a retired major-programme director, ex Army, three weeks into a six-month assignment on a new programme. Different careers, the same gap.

The first put it plainly. What a newly appointed executive needs is "more than a mentor, and it's not your board". The board holds the executive to account; it does not run the business. The mentor who gives you an hour for nothing has to spend that hour being told where you are. The people who were actually useful on the programmes they ran were paid, read in, available all week and selling nothing. One client body they worked with went abroad and found nine "grown ups who knew stuff about stuff", none of whom were trying to sell it anything. That panel was the best governance they ever sat under.

The second has delivered programmes most of us only read about, and is now watching a young business try to absorb experienced people at speed while the programme moves faster than the new and the established teams can adapt to one another. Their worry was simpler: how much experience this industry throws away because hiring matches a job description to a CV, and how little of what a programme learns survives the people who learned it.

Put the two together and you get this week's question. The industry has a budget for consultants, who arrive with a team and a deck, and for non-executives, who meet eight times a year. It has no budget for the call a leader needs at seven on a Tuesday evening to someone who already knows the job and has done it. I am working on that with one of the two, and I will say more when it is ready. For now I want to know who you call.

On the desk, second interviews ran on a Senior Design Manager appointment, the Project Director search for a London residential and leisure scheme stays live (more at the end), and I spent half an hour with a water company's graduate and apprenticeship team on whether the free careers side of the community could pick up the applicants they have to turn away.

The market observation sits with the Budget on Wednesday. RSM's warning this week was not that there is too little work. It was that housing, defence and energy all land in 2028 and 2029 on the same workforce. Detail below.

The week in construction

• Fifteen contractors have been named on the North West Construction Hub's £1bn High Value Construction Framework, Manchester City Council's route for public buildings over £8m. BAM, Graham, Kier, McLaren, Robertson and Vinci take the top lot, for projects above £45m; Galliford Try, Tilbury Douglas and Willmott Dixon bid and missed out altogether. Willmott Dixon told the market the same week that it wants £1.5bn turnover by 2030 with frameworks bringing 90% of new work, so missing the biggest regional public framework in the North West is a real hole in that plan. For the fifteen, the preconstruction and bid teams get busier from here; call-offs, not the place itself, are the work. Source: Construction News, 22 Oct, and Lechley Community, 18 Oct
• RSM has warned that housing, defence and energy programmes risk colliding in 2028 and 2029, placing demands on the workforce and supply chain the industry may not be able to meet. Kelly Boorman, RSM UK's head of construction, said mobilising them together would make delivery of major projects "impossible", with most defence programmes not shovel ready until 2027. It lands four days before the Autumn Budget on 28 October. The hiring pressure is two years out, which is exactly when the people you take on now become useful. It is the strongest argument I have seen this year against the 2008 reflex of cutting the intake first. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction News, 20 Oct
• Arup's pre-tax profit fell 41% to £26m in the year to March 2026, on revenue up 5% to £2.27bn. Operating margin is 1.5%, down from 2.7%, after nearly £26m of fresh provisions on loss-making contracts, and the firm is going from five regions to three by 2027/28. A margin that thin leaves no room for one more bad job, and fewer regions means fewer regional leadership seats. If you lead in technical consultancy, expect senior movement out of the big firms over the next 18 months, and expect the contractors and client bodies to be the ones hiring them. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction Enquirer, 20 Oct
• Farrans reported a £36.2m pre-tax loss for 2025, against a £3.4m profit the year before, with turnover down 22% to £298m. The loss follows provisions on legacy contracts in the firm's last year as an independent business; Sisk completed its purchase from CRH on 3 November 2025 and kept the brand. Clearing out risk in one hit after a change of ownership is the better way to carry it. What to watch is whether Sisk keeps the Farrans leadership as it is or folds the business in, because that decides where the senior roles sit in Northern Ireland and the north of England. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction News, 20 Oct
• Balfour Beatty plans to grow the direct and supply chain workforce on its power projects from around 3,200 to 6,000 by 2030, backed by a power order book of £2.1bn, five times what it was in the first half of 2023, and a further £6bn to £8bn of awarded pipeline. Network owners plan around £80bn of transmission investment by 2031, and Balfour is lifting its Hereford tower and substation factory from 10,000 to 15,000 tonnes a year. Grid is the one part of the market committing to headcount years ahead. If your record is substations, overhead lines or HV plant, your market is set for a decade. If you are a civils or buildings leader looking for a sector, this is the one adding people. Source: Lechley Community, from Construction Enquirer, 18 Oct

People on the move

• Conor Considine, managing Expanded Structures at Laing O'Rourke from 19 October, succeeding Stephen O'Rourke, who leaves the group after 15 years. Considine joined as a site engineer in 2007 and has led delivery at HS2's Old Oak Common and the £600m Olympia redevelopment. More
• Sir John Kingman, first chair of Great British Railways, confirmed by the Department for Transport on 16 October and starting immediately. Chair of Barclays UK, formerly second permanent secretary at the Treasury. More

Great British Railways is a hiring event

Kingman's appointment is the start of a hiring event, not a rebrand. Great British Railways will absorb Network Rail's roughly 37,000 staff, the Rail Delivery Group, the Department for Transport's own operator and the passenger franchises as their contracts run out, with royal assent for the Railways Bill expected by the end of 2026 and the organisation live within about a year of that. A new headquarters in Derby carries up to 450 roles on its own.

A new public body spends its first two years on governance, financial control and stakeholders before it makes the big operational calls, so the early hiring is programme, commercial and controls people who have stood an organisation up before, not timetablers. If you want to be part of it, 2027 is when the conversations happen, and the people who get the senior seats will be the ones already known to the design team this winter. The full note on the community.

New on the community

Superprojects started last Friday: one big project a week, told sideways, with a picture from the Commons. Two of the first six, and two pieces of news from the week:

• A crane built for one job, ninety years apart (Superprojects)
• A diver shut the water out, a machine never lets it in (Superprojects)
• Five Welsh councils open £800m civils framework tender (News)
• Robertson starts remedial strip-out at Berwick hospital (News)

All of it free at community.lechley.com.

One useful thing

Whoever you call is only useful if they can be read in quickly. Keep one page, in the same format every week: where the job stands against programme and cost, the three decisions you are carrying, and what changed since last week. "If you're not reporting data in the same way, it's just anecdote," as one of this week's two put it. Build the page for yourself before you need anyone else to read it. When the call comes, you send the page, and the hour goes on the problem instead of the briefing.

What I'm working on

A leading UK contractor has retained me to appoint a Project Director for a residential and leisure scheme of around £100m in the London region: permanent, site and office based, executive package, full ownership of delivery from pre-construction to close-out. It is one of several senior appointments coming up with developers and contractors across London over the coming months, most of which will not be advertised openly.

Alongside it, the data centre Project Lead roles in Dublin and Sines, Portugal are still open for a turnkey delivery partner with more than 500 MW in flight across Europe. The briefs are at lechley.com/jobs.