Opinion

Listen, understand and apply – three steps to a diverse and collaborative future

Beth West, HS2 commercial director

Infrastructure must constantly challenge itself to encourage and embrace ideas from a wide pool of talent if it is to meet the challenge of delivering the best infrastructure for the future, says Beth West.

What will make infrastructure programmes successful in 2015 and beyond? To me it is increasingly clear that creating a more diverse and collaborative environment must sit at the top of the list.

And when I started to think about the challenge, I was somewhat surprised to realise that the actions and behaviours necessary to make our diversity and collaboration ambitions successful are exactly the same. Three words kept coming back- the need to listen, understand and apply.

"The key is applying very simple steps: listening, understanding and applying these diverse views to our designs, our delivery and our decisions."

Let’s start with diversity – and understanding just what we mean by the term. For me it is not a box ticking exercise to make sure that we have a sufficient number of women and ethnicities within our organisation, but rather being able to understand a wide array of views in order to deliver the best solutions.

The key is applying very simple steps: listening, understanding and applying these diverse views to our designs, our delivery and our decisions. But applying also can mean not applying, provided that we understand why we have chosen to not apply the difference in approach, rather than just disregarding it because it is different.

And we shouldn’t assume that just because we’ve hired people from one underrepresented group that we understand the issues of others.

As an example, I recently shared the stage on a panel discussion called ‘The Changing Face of Construction’ with Neil Bentley, the chief executive of OUTstanding and he said something that has stuck with me: that gay people are coming out every day.

Even having helped friends with the challenge of their own experience coming out, I didn’t appreciate that this was the experience of LGBT people on an ongoing basis. But I now have more of an understanding of what it is like to need to articulate a fundamental part of yourself to new people - and I wouldn’t have changed had I not been willing to listen and understand.

Moving onto collaboration, the infrastructure sector has recently taken some colossal leaps to develop relationships that reflect the need for clients and suppliers to work together rather against each other.

And again, it starts with the question of what do we really mean by collaboration?

"Collaboration doesn’t mean never having conflict. Often, we will have differences of opinion and it is here where listening and understanding is most important."

A couple of years ago, I had a supplier tell me that another major infrastructure company told the supply chain how they were going to collaborate. That is not collaboration in my mind.

Like diversity, collaboration also requires us to listen and understand our potentially diverse colleagues, suppliers - the groups of people that should contribute to developing a solution or an outcome at the outset, not the end, of a project. And again, we should then apply this learning as we engage these individuals throughout the project.

That means being able to trust that our colleagues and suppliers are working for the same objectives and that their contributions are intended with that purpose in mind.

But collaboration doesn’t mean never having conflict. Often, we will have differences of opinion and it is here where listening and understanding is most important.

If we don’t understand the perspective of the person or group with whom we are having the conflict and that they are as well intentioned as we are, it will be incredibly difficult to achieve outcomes in a collaborative manner.

It may take more time to reach conclusions working this way, but it should be far faster to deliver the outcomes if all parties have contributed to determining the solution and accept that it is the right one.

"We must constantly challenge ourselves to listen, understand and apply the ideas of others."

The infrastructure industry is at an extremely exciting moment and if we want to attract and retain the best teams, we need modern working environments that appeal to the widest array of people.

Therefore, we must constantly challenge ourselves to listen, understand and apply the ideas of others to how we decide and how we work. And we need to reconcile ourselves with the reality that the best outcomes aren’t necessarily going to be our idea.

Beth West is commercial director on the High Speed 2 project.