05.1
Client–Contractor Partnership
Client–contractor relationships had become defensive and adversarial, with mistrust, guarded communication, escalation, aggressive challenge, and leaders pulled into firefighting.
We helped the project groups examine how they saw one another, to discuss their frustrations openly with each other, clarify respective responsibilities, and agree sound decision-making protocols. Together they reset how they worked, supporting less escalation, stronger shared delivery, and a more unified project team approach.
The developer and contractor both faced financial consequences if the project exceeded the agreed cost or deadline. The project was delivered on time, and both credited our work as essential to meeting that deadline.
05.2
Medical Manufacturing: from departmental blame to site-wide performance excellence.
The site was struggling to improve some stubbornly negative key performance metrics. Separate departmental efforts were not enough. The site’s leadership brought us in to help overcome this challenge and to build shared ownership of the site’s results.
We helped nine different departments and three shifts move beyond blame and self-protection to examine their impact on one another and clarify responsibilities. Through our intergroup workshop, they agreed behavioural standards across functions, levels and shifts. Their guiding principle became: “We can do this together, and we can only do it by doing it together.”
The business credited our work with laying the foundation for its subsequent success in winning the Shingo Prize for Organizational Excellence.
05.3
Energy: three teams, one shared result.
Three teams were responsible for successive stages of an Energy Sector project. Overall success depended on each team delivering its work in a way that left the final team sufficient time to complete the project. Time lost earlier in the chain put that final delivery—and the whole project—at risk.
Our work helped the three teams develop a new “We’re in this Together” spirit: taking shared responsibility for the overall result and recognising what their colleagues further along the chain needed to succeed. This change in how they worked together helped achieve successful overall project delivery in a situation where time was critically short.
Hear Sean Hegarty’s perspective ↑
Different sectors. Different pressures. The recurring pattern is what happens between groups that depend on one another to deliver results — and what can change when damaging hidden currents are surfaced.
