We’ve spent years focusing on skills shortages, but construction’s biggest challenge may be a confidence crisis that recruitment and technical training alone cannot solve.
Working with clients, consultants, and contractors across major projects, we’ve observed that project professionals usually have the technical knowledge to do their jobs.
However, more often the issue is whether they have the confidence, communication skills and behavioural capability to apply that knowledge effectively, especially when projects become complex, pressured or uncertain.
Research by the Association for Project Management in 2026 supports this: only 20% of construction leaders expressed confidence in their organisation’s ability to deliver projects successfully.
Projects are becoming increasingly collaborative. NEC contracts, alliance models and integrated delivery approaches all rely on organisations working well together. Yet too often we still focus on systems, processes and contracts while giving far less attention to relationships, behaviours and trust.
This is particularly relevant as skills shortages continue to accelerate promotion cycles across the industry, with talented professionals taking on significant responsibilities much earlier than usual in their careers.
People are often promoted into leadership roles through their technical expertise and positive results. But consistent success depends on leadership style – and this is often untested or developed before a promotion is made.
When individuals are promoted too early, without training in the people skills needed for consistent high performance, they have often neglected to build a supportive and high-performing team around them and can be insecure and constantly working to protect their own reputation as a result.
Patience and clarity
Getting the best from your team requires focus. Listening, observing team culture and dynamics, and taking time out for developmental mentoring requires patience and clarity.
When you step into leadership shoes, these qualities are often dismissed as soft skills that are easily acquired. But in truth, they can be the hardest to learn.
At Solomons Europe, this understanding led us to create The Halcyon Club, an immersive learning environment for construction, engineering and infrastructure professionals, focused not only on NEC capability but also on the behavioural skills that underpin successful project delivery.
Using behavioural science, DiSC profiling, Lencioni’s Five Behaviours and facilitated peer learning, participants explore how they communicate, make decisions, respond to pressure and build trust. The objective isn’t simply to improve what people know, but to improve how they behave when faced with the real-world challenges of project delivery.
Learning to collaborate
Our first RICS APC Bootcamp this year focused on mandatory skills, including business planning, ethics, negotiation, accounting principles, conflict avoidance and client care. However, to show the implications of these competencies in practical terms, we worked through a recent collaboration opportunity for our business and challenged participants to devise solutions to the real challenges which took place during these negotiations.
This was an animated session that gave everyone the confidence to ask questions about our practice, how decisions were made and why we might turn down business in some cases.
This wasn’t a standard syllabus, and didn’t tick the competency criteria, but it taught the real challenges of running a business and the multiple risks in contract negotiations and pricing proposals for clients.
We’re also seeing results on our NEC Project Manager and Supervisor programmes, where participants are achieving first-time pass rates of more than 90%, well above industry averages.
Learning how to collaborate
Many participants tell us their biggest learning comes not from the contract itself, but from gaining greater self-awareness, building confidence and learning how to collaborate more effectively with others.
We’ve worked with clients who have spent thousands on online training and programmes, and sometimes these can have a place. But there is no substitute for training in environments where you can ask practical questions and seek input from people who can help you better evaluate the whole picture, rather than just a snapshot.
So, what next for the industry? We need to stop treating leadership skills and collaboration as a by-product of project delivery and instead as capabilities that require deliberate development.
We need to invest more time building shared understanding, trust and clear expectations, rather than waiting until problems arise.
Construction needs more professionals who can combine technical excellence with leadership, communication and collaboration. It’s not necessarily what people know that makes the difference – it’s how effectively they can work together.
