Partnership working in multiple talent projects

BAM Nuttall is part of the Royal BAM Group and is one of Europe’s largest civil engineering contractors, employing just under 3000 people across the UK, with an annual turnover of £750 million. Delivering high-quality engineering and infrastructure projects to its clients, their large-scale projects include airports, railways and station construction, bridges and tunnels. BAM Nuttall are fully committed to exploiting advances in technology and their aspiration is to become the market leader in the use of digital technology, to ensure that their customers receive the highest possible standards of quality. Notable projects include the 2012 Olympics, the Dartford Crossing, and innovative projects such as the Antarctic Infrastructure Modernization Program.

Talogy has worked with BAM Nuttall on two key projects, which are helping to embed the organisation’s commitment to sustainability and collaboration, by developing behaviours and skills for success.

Leadership effectiveness

The challenge

In January 2018 BAM Nuttall formed a new Executive Board and were looking to maximise the effectiveness of the Board and benchmark their leadership skills. The project was to:

• Accelerate the development and effectiveness of the newly-formed Board
• Gather feedback from Board members on how well they work together, plus feedback on the Board’s performance from their direct reports
• Increase self-awareness of individual Board Members
• Foster commitment to focus on specific areas to maximise individual and collective leadership skills

The solution

After initial scoping involving senior stakeholders, Talogy designed a bespoke, online 360-degree feedback questionnaire, which was sent to the CEO, the Board Members and to their direct reports (the Divisional Directors), and feedback gathered.

Key themes were then identified and Talogy ran tailored one-on-one coaching sessions with BAM Nuttall’s CEO and Board members. The sessions aimed to help Board members to interpret and analyse the feedback so as to maximise their effectiveness by identifying their strengths and their areas for development, both as individuals and as a Board.

The results

To maximise understanding of the business context and for continuity, the same executive coach, Mike Murray, Principal Consultant, worked with all the Board members to:

• Act upon the feedback by producing a Personal Development Plan
• Define exactly what they wanted to achieve, what success would look like and how progress could be measured.

The content of the individual feedback and coaching conversations were kept confidential but overall themes were summarised by the coach and shared with the Head of Talent Management to be discussed and addressed by the Board.

Objective assessment for manager development

The challenge

Showing commitment to development at other levels of the organisation, BAM Nuttall again worked with Talogy in 2019 to assess readiness for promotion within their junior and middle management tier. The objective was to upskill managers in their talent pool to accelerate their development.

The solution

Talogy began with a job analysis with 15 subject matter experts across the different divisions, exploring the behaviours that were effective and not effective against the existing BAM Nuttall Leadership and Competency Framework. From this, Talogy identified the top six competencies that make senior leaders successful. To ensure fair and objective assessment, Talogy then:

• created tailored exercises to measure those competencies
• trained eight observers from the BAM Nuttall HR/Talent team
• ran a two-day development centre including an analysis exercise and two roleplays which were designed to reflect some of the challenges that the participants are likely to face at higher levels of the organisation
• recorded and analysed the participants’ behaviour and gave in-depth feedback to each participant, along with psychometric data to give an overview of their strengths and areas to focus on for future development
• designed a self-development module to help the participants to make the best use of their feedback, to understand which competencies were being measured and to produce an effective Personal Development Plan.

The results

BAM Nuttall now have an objective way of assessing the strengths and development areas of those who are in their Talent Pool and they are supporting their line managers to accelerate their development. The feedback from both participants and observers was very positive.