Build a team you can trust before building anything else

In July 1994, Sir Michael Latham published ‘Constructing the Team’, his landmark report into the British construction industry. He called for a less adversarial industry, built around better relationships, greater trust and a willingness to work together rather than protect individual interests. Yet 32 years on, what has changed?

We talk endlessly about building differently, usually in terms of technology, materials and sustainability. But perhaps the biggest change we still need to make is in how we work with one another, and how we build the teams responsible for delivering projects.

Construction is a team activity. Yet we still organise many projects as a series of separate transactions, with different organisations protecting their own interests, working to different incentives and sometimes measuring success in different ways.

Poor relationships and combative work environments full of friction rarely lead to better project outcomes for clients or for the people who are working on the project. This is hardly a new lesson. ‘Building differently’ means behaving differently.

We know what good looks like

The major programmes I have worked on during my career have repeatedly shown the value of clear governance, aligned objectives and genuinely integrated teams. The same themes come through in Mace’s research into major programme delivery, which I worked on in my time as global head of project, programme and construction management at Mace Consult.

The research showed that the recurring causes of underperformance were all linked to unclear governance and poor integration between project teams and supply chains from the start, leading to fragmented execution. In contrast, the research saw the direct benefits of more collaborative delivery approaches, including alliancing and delivery partner models, where clients, consultants, contractors and the supply chain work as an integrated team and are empowered to take decisions in the interests of the programme as a whole. That sounds straightforward. But in practice it requires real discipline.

Collaboration has to be designed in

A contract can create the conditions for partnership. It cannot create the culture by itself. Successful partnerships need a clear common objective from the outset. The client, consultants, contractors and supply chain need to understand what success looks like and be able to make decisions against that shared purpose. As new people join the team or the programme goes through any big change, you have to go back through that loop again, making sure everyone is still aligned.

Governance and commercial arrangements also need to reinforce that behaviour. If every organisation is incentivised to optimise its own position, it becomes much harder to create an integrated team, however collaborative the language in the contract may be.

All of this demands more time at the beginning. One of the recurring problems identified in Mace’s research was the pressure to start programmes too quickly, before scope, governance and baselines have been properly established. Collaboration works best when it is established before the difficult decisions arrive, rather than introduced in response to them. So sometimes we need to slow down to go quicker.

Time spent building trust across the team, agreeing a shared sense of purpose, as well as clear alignment on goals, roles, responsibilities, how decisions will be made and the team’s expected behaviours, will save a great deal of time later on.

What MWJV taught me about partnership

I saw this first-hand through the Mace Ward Williams Joint Venture (MWJV), which delivered Cornwall Council’s Built Environment Professional Services framework between 2019 and 2025. I worked with the joint venture while I was at Mace. The experience was one of the things that attracted me to join Ward Williams this year.

What made MWJV interesting was not simply that it brought a large consultancy and a specialist SME together. Its strength came from combining genuinely complementary capabilities within a single delivery culture.

Mace brought major programme experience, national capacity and wider expertise. Ward Williams brought B-Corp thinking, strong local knowledge, relationships and close connections with the regional supply chain. It also incorporated its particular philosophy of built differently to project and people management, and that set the tone for a very unique experience.

The framework covered more than £500m of capital programmes across housing, education, transport and regeneration. It was structured as a six-year partnership, with consistent teams, shared KPIs and joint leadership. MWJV worked with regional architects, engineers, surveyors and other delivery partners, with 67% of spend going to micro, small or medium-sized enterprises based in Cornwall.

But we all wore the same badge. Staff operated as one team, sharing goals and solving problems collaboratively rather than retreating behind organisational boundaries when challenges emerged.

Do the basics brilliantly

There is a tendency in construction to make collaboration sound complicated, but the principles are relatively simple. Create one team around one outcome. Give that team clear governance and the authority to make decisions. Make sure the commercial model and legal contracts all support the behaviour you are asking people to demonstrate. Keep people close to the client. Involve the wider supply chain where their expertise can improve those decisions. Protect continuity so that knowledge and culture are carried from one stage to the next.

The future of construction may well be shaped by tech and innovative systems. But it’s still fundamentally about human endeavour and will still be shaped by how effectively we work together. Built differently starts with us.

Caroline Lassen is regional partner at Ward Williams’ London office