On 22 March, 12 of the Future Leaders attended the BESA headquarters for the all-day workshop which was led by Clive Wilson, board director at specialist leadership and organisational development consultancy, Primeast.
Mr Wilson has devised a tailor-made programme for the Future Leaders, intended to give a comprehensive overview of modern leadership and the opportunities available for leaders to develop, taking into account the group’s aim to embrace and learn more about emerging technologies.
He explained: “We seek a future characterised by innovation, interconnection, sustainability, equality, and good health. This future is actually happening, powered by massive technological advancement and the ingenuity and co-ordinated efforts of millions of people in workplaces around the globe, and making it so is demanding a new, sophisticated type of leadership.
“Leaders require skills to deal with the complexity of an emerging future, and the mind-set to inspire an increasingly diverse workforce and stakeholder networks. This is what the BESA Future Leaders programme is all about.”
The leadership programme will run until the end of the year – with the initial workshop serving as the first of four – and has been designed not just for the benefit of direct participants. On the day of the first session the Future Leaders were each accompanied by their respective sponsors, who were then able to relay information back to their companies to aid with internal leadership initiatives.
The first workshop, entitled ‘Leading with purpose’, considered the importance of leader alignment in the context of an evolving building and engineering services sector. Each participant came prepared with information on the purpose, vision and values of their company, and the workshop encouraged discussion among the Future Leaders to help them establish, in turn, a collective vision for the sector, while also addressing associated challenges.
Reinaldo Melendez, BESA Future Leaders vice chair and mechanical project engineer at Imtech said: “I enjoyed sharing new ideas with everyone around the room, and we also spoke about the purpose of the construction industry and ways to build for a sustainable building.”
For the members to gain a greater understanding of their peers’ companies, as well as a deeper appreciation of their industry as a whole, it was essential that the session was collaborative and interactive. The Future Leaders took part in group thinking rounds and traffic lights exercises, and even worked together to come up with the news items and key issues they expected to be seeing for their industry over the coming years. This exercise in particular helped the Future Leaders to think like industry leaders, cultivating an awareness of the importance of foresight and advanced planning.
Kelly Moss, apprentice chartered surveyor at Briggs & Forrester said: “The most useful part of the workshop was creating a newspaper article to include more detail on the headings and the topics. The topics discussed involved things such as social, funding, skills, age, politics, technology, and sector interest.”
While the Future Leaders all left the workshop with an appreciation of how industry leaders should think and collaborate, as well as a more complete understanding of the intricacies of the building and engineering services sector, some members had additional reasons for taking part, as Reanna Evans, m&e project engineer at NG Bailey explained: “I wanted to take part because, as a female in the industry, I am particularly struggling to find my feet. I thought this would help me on a level I can relate to.”
Benefiting from the ongoing guidance of the leadership programme, the Future Leaders will continuously engage with their company sponsors to ensure that their personal goals are met.
Collective aims also emerged from the initial workshop. The participants will apply their learnings to their working lives, detailing their progress through writing up individual case studies prior to each workshop.
Working together, members will also be designing a project to support the BESA Future Leaders’ chosen charity, Mates in Mind, which promotes mental health awareness in the construction sector. More than just a fundraising initiative, the project will entail direct engagement between the charity and the members’ organisations in order to foster collaboration and what Primeast terms a ‘mature leadership mind-set’.
Looking to expand its membership, which currently stands at 22, BESA Future Leaders is open to all young graduates, engineers, apprentices and technicians who want to proactively engage with their industry to help improve it and encourage technological innovation.
In turn, the initiative gives its members a vast array of opportunities to learn and develop their careers, and the Primeast programme in particular is set to provide the Future Leaders with the knowledge required to live up to their name and lead building and engineering services in the right direction.
To find out more or join BESA Future Leaders, visit: www.thebesa.com/future-leaders