Construction leaders face relentless pressure to make difficult decisions and deliver results. Yet some of the most powerful lessons in leadership can come from beyond the built environment. Construction leaders face relentless pressure to make difficult decisions and deliver results.
Construction is an industry where leaders are expected to make difficult decisions and deliver under constant pressure. While the sector brings its own pressures, some of the most valuable lessons about leadership come from outside it.
That was the premise behind Willmott Dixon Interiors’ Developing Leaders conference in London, where leaders from construction heard from a Royal Marines Commando, a King’s Counsel, a pioneering heart surgeon and a psychologist whose work focuses on psychopathy. Despite their vastly different careers, each arrived at remarkably similar conclusions about what effective leadership looks like.
For Scotty Mills, leadership starts long before a crisis unfolds. Drawing on his experiences in the Royal Marines, including leading operations in Iraq where intelligence reports suggested his team had only a 20% chance of survival, he spoke about the importance of preparation.
The Royal Marines’ approach is built around making standards part of everyday life, not something reserved for difficult moments. As Mills put it: “Train hard, to fight easy.”
His message was also one of personal growth and resilience. The Royal Marines trains people to push beyond what they believe their limits to be, creating individuals who can perform in even the most intense situations, while never losing sight of the values that define a team.
Great leaders challenge assumptions
Jo Delahunty KC specialises in making judgements, without being judgemental.
As one of the UK’s leading barristers, her role demands an ability to understand people, challenge assumptions and uncover facts, without allowing preconceptions to dictate outcomes.
Her message was that hidden biases exist, whether we acknowledge them or not. The key is recognising them. She encouraged leaders to be honest about their own prejudices and weaknesses, and spoke about how we can adapt our communication style to create environments where people feel empowered rather than intimidated.
One observation particularly stood out: “It’s not always the noisiest people who get heard. The thinkers are often the ones with the brightest ideas.”
High-performing teams are built on trust
Professor Martin Elliott has spent his career operating on the hearts of babies at Great Ormond Street Hospital, a craft with next to no margin for error.
While the surgeon often attracts the attention, his presentation highlighted a different reality. Successful outcomes depend on teams.
Complex surgical procedures require dozens of people working together seamlessly, and in some cases, Elliott relied on as many as 29 professionals to contribute to a single operation.
His team’s breakthrough came not through individual brilliance, but through empowering colleagues to speak up, regardless of their role or seniority. As Elliott explained: “We don’t make decisions on our own.”
It demonstrates that high-performing teams are rarely built by everyone thinking in the same way.
Why psychopaths make good leaders
Professor Kevin Dutton brought a different perspective to the day.
Drawing on decades of research into psychopathy, he explored traits including fearlessness, focus, emotional detachment, ruthlessness and poise under pressure.
Through a version of his widely-known psychopathy assessment, delegates were invited to consider where they might sit on the psychopathy spectrum and what those characteristics can reveal about behaviour and performance.
While the term often carries negative connotations, Dutton argued that certain traits associated with psychopaths, when balanced with integrity and purpose, can be highly valuable in leadership, business and crisis situations.
Are leaders born or made?
Perhaps most striking was that none of the speakers set out to become the person standing on stage.
Scotty Mills joined the Royal Marines almost by accident after walking into a recruitment office to escape the rain. Jo Delahunty KC was once told she was bright enough to work in a bank but had “too much attitude” to work in a front-of-house role. Professor Martin Elliott initially planned a different medical career before discovering paediatric cardiac surgery. While Professor Kevin Dutton, the son of (in his own words) “a real-life Del Boy”, emerged from a colourful, working-class London background to become one of the world’s foremost authorities in his field.
The event raised an interesting question: are leaders born or made?
The answer was consistent in that leadership is rarely a fixed trait. It is developed through experience and often begins when someone sees potential in a person before they recognise it themselves.
