Aug 19, 2026 | News and insight
The role of the project manager continues to evolve. Technical delivery remains a core part of the job, but there is now a growing recognition that successful outcomes depend just as much on how teams function as on what they deliver. Awareness of this shift is increasing; translating it into practical action is less straightforward. Building an effective team is not an abstract idea – it requires intent, structure and practice.
This is the question that originally led me to write Performance Coaching for Complex Projects.
At the time, I had just completed a Master’s degree in coaching and behavioural change and had become increasingly interested in research on group dynamics and the emerging field of team coaching. The theory was compelling, but I wanted to understand whether it would hold up in the context I knew best: major projects, where pressure is high, timelines are tight, and teams are often temporary and fragmented.
To explore this, I spoke with experienced project leaders and asked a simple question: “Tell me about a project that went well.”
It sounds straightforward, but it often wasn’t. Many had to think hard before answering. Yet once they found their example, something shifted. Their posture changed, their energy lifted, and they began to describe the experience with real clarity.
Despite differences in sector and scale, the stories shared a consistent theme. Success was not primarily attributed to technical excellence or process efficiency. It came back, time and again, to the team – how it was formed, how it worked, and how it evolved over time.
When I probed further into how those teams developed, a familiar set of factors emerged. There was strong, people-focused leadership. Time had been invested in building relationships. Teams were aligned around a shared goal. There was a sense of mutual support, a collaborative culture, and an openness to learning.
In other words, the lived experience of project leaders reflected what the research had already been telling us.
Much of that research, however, is based on teams within stable organisational settings. Project environments are different. Teams form quickly, often across organisational boundaries, and must become effective under immediate pressure.
Leadership groups are assembled with little time to establish shared ways of working. People join and leave throughout the lifecycle, disrupting continuity and weakening behavioural norms. Under these conditions, teams can easily revert to transactional patterns – doing what is required, but not necessarily working well together.This raises an important question: if effective teamwork is so central to delivery, whose responsibility is it to make it happen?
In practice, it sits with the project leader.
Yet traditional project management training has focused far more on planning, governance and control than on the mechanics of building and sustaining team performance. As a result, many project managers are left to develop their own approaches through experience. Some do this exceptionally well, but often by trial and error – reinventing methods that already exist elsewhere.
What has changed since I wrote that first book is the accessibility of knowledge. The field of team coaching has developed significantly, and there is now a substantial body of research and practical guidance available. The challenge is that much of it still sits outside mainstream project management literature.
This creates an opportunity.
Team coaching is not about turning project managers into coaches in the traditional sense. It is about equipping them with a set of perspectives and tools that help them work more deliberately with the team as a system. It provides practical ways to shape how teams align, interact, learn and adapt – particularly in complex, fast-moving environments.
This is increasingly relevant in today’s delivery landscape. As highlighted in our wider work at ResoLex, the challenges that undermine major projects are rarely technical in nature. They are social, relational and behavioural. Teams struggle to operate effectively at scale, across interfaces, and under sustained pressure. Addressing these challenges requires more than good intentions – it requires capability.
Encouragingly, developing that capability is now more accessible than it was a decade ago. The growth of digital tools, including AI-enabled search and synthesis, has made it easier to engage with established thinking and adapt it to specific project contexts. Alongside this, there is an increasing range of practical resources – frameworks, diagnostics and techniques – that can be applied directly within live delivery environments.
For project managers who recognise the importance of team performance, the next step is to experiment. Start small. Introduce structured conversations about how the team is working, not just what it is delivering. Create space for reflection and learning. Pay attention to alignment, relationships and behaviours – not as secondary concerns, but as integral to delivery.
Looking ahead, this shift is likely to accelerate. As aspects of technical project management become more automated, the differentiating value of the role will increasingly lie in areas that cannot be automated: judgement, adaptability, and the ability to foster effective human collaboration.
Developing team coaching skills is not a departure from project management – it is an evolution of it.
Tony is a Director at ResoLex specialising in developing team coaching processes and techniques to apply to large, complex project team performance. He regularly advises teams on applying alliance-based principles and how to adapt both mindset and behaviours. Tony has developed a range of practical tools designed to support team development and ongoing performance. The tools are designed to transfer skills and develop social intelligence throughout the project team. Contact Tony here or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Jul 24, 2026 | Events, News and insight
What if leadership development has been shaped by people who no longer remember what it is like to be led?
In 2025, ResoLex brought together senior leaders from major projects and high-performance environments to explore leadership, resilience and personal performance. These conversations highlighted the need to move beyond the traditional “hero leader” model and create more collaborative, emotionally intelligent and sustainable approaches to leadership.
However, one important voice was still missing: the next generation of leaders who are experiencing today’s leadership models first-hand and will ultimately inherit responsibility for delivering tomorrow’s major programmes.
ResoLex, supported by the Major Projects Association, recently hosted an interactive workshop for early-career professionals and emerging leaders. The session was designed to test previous findings, understand where current leadership thinking reflects their experience and identify where it falls short.
We were delighted to be joined by Professor Christine Unterhitzenberger from the University of Leeds and Nathan Rendel from Hintsa Performance, who brought complementary perspectives on sustainable careers, leadership under pressure and the realities facing those progressing through the major projects industry.
The reality of a sustainable career
Professor Christine Unterhitzenberger shared interim findings from her recent research into sustainable careers in major projects.
Major projects can offer an unusually strong sense of purpose, variety and opportunity. However, they can also involve long delivery cycles, uncertain pipelines and career structures that do not always reflect how people want, or need, to develop.
The research encouraged participants to think about career sustainability through more than progression or productivity alone. Happiness, health, purpose and the surrounding organisational context all influence whether people can build careers that remain fulfilling over time.
This provided an important starting point for the discussion. Developing future leaders is not simply about preparing individuals for their next role. It is also about creating an environment in which talented people want to remain, can continue learning and are able to sustain their contribution across a career.
Leadership is becoming more relentless
Hintsa Performance explored how the demands placed on leaders have changed.
Leaders are now expected to provide clarity, maintain performance, lead change and make decisions while operating in environments defined by uncertainty, information overload, hybrid working and continuous pressure. Leadership frameworks may describe the right behaviours, but those behaviours can become much harder to access when under pressure.
The discussion drew attention to an often-overlooked component of leadership development, capacity. Knowledge and technical competence remain important, but future leaders will also need the physical, cognitive and emotional capacity to apply their skills consistently when leadership is at its most difficult.
This shifted the conversation away from resilience as simply enduring difficult conditions. Sustainable performance requires organisations and individuals to manage pressure, recovery and personal capacity deliberately.
What future leaders told us
Participants were then invited to respond to five themes drawn from ResoLex’s previous leadership events:
- Collaborative leadership
- Emotional intelligence
- Development and training
- Clear career progression
- Resilience and wellbeing
The discussion broadly supported the five themes presented, while also adding important nuance.
Participants agreed that collaborative leadership, emotional intelligence, development, career progression and wellbeing all matter. However, they also stressed that none of these can be considered in isolation or applied as a fixed formula.
Collaboration should not remove accountability or slow decision-making. Emotional intelligence must sit alongside sufficient technical and organisational understanding. Development needs protected time, visible sponsorship and opportunities to learn through experience. Career progression should offer clarity without assuming that everyone follows the same route.
A recurring message was that leadership is shaped as much by what people observe as by what they are taught. Future leaders look to senior colleagues for examples of how to make decisions, manage pressure, invest in others and respond when things do not go to plan.
Creating the conditions for future leaders to succeed
The second part of the workshop moved from reflection to action. Participants considered the factors that help and hinder their development before identifying practical steps current leaders and organisations could take.
The conversation highlighted several consistent principles: Future leaders need access to mentors, sponsors and senior leaders who are visible and available. They need permission to stretch themselves, make decisions and learn from failure. They need clearer communication about opportunities, meaningful feedback and dedicated time for development. Just as importantly, they need leaders who demonstrate the behaviours they expect others to adopt.
The workshop also reinforced that there is no single model of “good leadership” that works in every situation. Leadership needs to respond to context, balancing collaboration with direction, autonomy with support, and performance with recovery.
The challenge for the industry is therefore not simply to identify the characteristics of an ideal future leader. It is to create the structures, cultures and experiences through which a diverse range of people can develop and succeed.
The full findings from the session will contribute to a ResoLex whitepaper, supported by the Major Projects Association, exploring how the industry can better select, develop and support the leaders needed for the future of major programmes.
Mar 6, 2026 | News and insight, Tools
In the previous article, we explored why successful projects depend not just on technical expertise or commercial strategy, but on the strength of relationships between individuals and, importantly, between organisations. The focus was on how we can apply relationship theory to improve project delivery. Schein & Schein’s “Level 2” relationships, where partners are open, aligned on needs, and view each other’s success as intertwined, represent the theoretical “sweet spot” for effective delivery.
These relationships can be foundational to the delivery of a project or programme, and so it is vital that they are developed in the right way. This is not just about building an environment where everyone is nice and friendly, but where they have an aligned vision, are able and willing to constructively challenge, are comfortable raising issues and know what is expected of them. These relationships will not materialise just because we’d like them to. We cannot assume that because everyone in an environment is experienced and professional, that they will also seek to understand the need for and value the relationships needed for successful delivery.
The desired relationships, therefore, need to be intentionally built into the way a project or programme is set up from day one. As Professor Bent Flyvbjerg references a project leader observing: Projects don’t go wrong. They start wrong. So moving beyond the theory to the practical, how can we set up to ensure we start in the right way?
Here are some principles to project setup that we’ve developed over time at ResoLex to begin building the relationships, teams and environments needed to deliver successfully:
- Don’t assume good will ‘just happen’
As touched upon above, good relationships require space and structure to grow, and if you do not take the time to proactively drive this aspect of your delivery approach, it will languish. In the early stages, you may get away with this, but when complexity grows and challenges hit, the lack of adaptable or resilient relationships will undermine every aspect of delivery.
- Understand and align values and goals
This is especially relevant for complex programmes that comprise multiple interconnected projects, but is applicable to any environment comprised of multiple teams or organisations. Each group comes in with its own culture, language, and definition of success. Bringing these into alignment – and creating a shared vision – is essential if you want a “best for project” mindset. As we discussed last time, fundamental to this is taking the time to properly understand and appreciate one another’s needs and wants, and where those differ.
- Value difference
While it’s important to ensure you understand and align values, it is equally important to ensure you don’t stifle innovation. Alignment should provide a ‘north star’ to work to, not set a single way of working or thinking. It is the differences between people that drive change and improvement, and the key in project setup is creating a proactive management framework that identifies and uses these differences to drive positive behaviours rather than conflict.
- Make it a leadership priority
If leaders are measured on elements of team development and relationship quality, they will make time for it. If they’re not, it will always slip down the agenda. The social aspect of delivery is, unsurprisingly, a cultural item. If it is not driven from the top and given priority, it will be forgotten. This leadership then also grants permission for others to invest the time and effort needed to build effective working relationships across the project and programme.
- Build psychological safety into how your project operates
Psychological safety is a cornerstone of effective working relationships. If the people in your project feel unable to openly constructively challenge, they cannot build the trust needed to achieve true Level 2 relationships. Embedding a culture that values this supports an environment where issues can be openly raised and addressed as early as possible, driving effective project delivery.
The look ahead…
Setting up relationships is only half of the job, because too often, great starts are undermined by complacency and erosion over time. These relationships need managing, maintaining, and developing as the project evolves. We’ve explored some of the initial steps you can take and questions to ask yourself here, however, we will look at the longer-term approach, including how we can ensure that what we’ve built is embedded, enduring and adaptable, in a follow-up article.
Relationships are foundational to delivery. And like any foundation, they have to be deliberately laid.
Tom Chick is an Associate Director at ResoLex specialising in building effective working environments in major projects. If you want to learn more about how to get the most out of your professional relationships, contact Tom here or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Feb 25, 2026 | News and insight, Social value
We are incredibly proud to see Concordis International nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, a truly significant and well-deserved recognition.
Concordis’ work is grounded in the patient building of sustainable relationships in places where conflict has fractured trust and stability. By working alongside local leaders and communities, they help create the conditions for dialogue, understanding and long-term peace.
We are proud to support Concordis International, an organisation whose impact is shaped by the courage and commitment of local peacebuilders working in some of the most challenging environments in the world.
Congratulations to Concordis International and thank you to the Quaker organisations who have recognised the importance of this work.
Read the full article here.
Concordis International is an international non-governmental organisation (INGO) based in the UK, operating in the Central African Region: Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Sudan, Abyei and South Sudan. We are peacebuilders. Concordis staff support those who live in conflict zones. We only go where we are invited. We have twenty years of experience – our expertise lies in building trust with all conflict parties and bringing them together to have those difficult conversations. We work hand in hand with communities, helping them find workable solutions that address the root causes of conflict and contribute to lasting peace and economic development. We are committed to finding sustainable solutions that benefit all those involved: women and youth, as well as men; local administrative authorities, community leaders, and civil society; those who choose to take up arms and those who don’t. We engage for the long term to build trusting relationships and leave a legacy that enables future conflict to be managed peacefully within the community.
To find out more about Concordis International, visit their website.
Jan 28, 2026 | News and insight, Social value
At ResoLex, insight, creativity, and partnership shape how we work with our clients and how we contribute beyond our projects. Mentoring is one way we put these values into practice, creating positive impact by sharing experience, building confidence, and supporting the next generation of professionals.
Mentoring allows us to offer practical guidance and encouragement to students as they navigate key transitions, from university into working life. It’s a natural extension of our client work: building capability, fostering collaboration, and creating environments where people feel supported to thrive.
Over the last year, Joanna Jarvie, one of our Senior Consultants, has been part of a mentoring programme with City St George’s, University of London, which connects students with industry professionals for guidance and support.
For Jo’s mentee, that support took many forms, including preparing for interviews and assessment centres, practising case study presentations, connecting with other professionals for a research project, and offering advice on the first steps of working life. Together, these conversations helped build confidence and clarity about what comes next.
The student reflected:
“Jo was a fantastic mentor and provided brilliant support and guidance during my final year at university. She was always approachable, patient, and generous with her advice. The feedback she gave really helped me grow in confidence and feel more prepared for life after graduation.”
Mentoring benefits everyone involved. For the mentee, it builds confidence, skills, and direction. For the mentor, it offers space to reflect, share experience, and gain fresh perspectives. And for the wider industry, it helps create a pipeline of motivated, well-prepared professionals.
Jo is continuing her mentoring work throughout 2026, and we’ll keep sharing stories that show how our Social Value initiatives contribute to lasting impact.
Jan 19, 2026 | News and insight
At ResoLex, the way we work matters as much as what we deliver. Our Associates play an important role in shaping that – bringing challenge, insight and experience that help create the conditions for effective delivery in complex environments.
While our 25in25 anniversary marked a moment to pause and reflect, our focus now is on what continues beyond it. In this spotlight, Matt Barnes-Smith reflects on how he first came to work with ResoLex, what’s kept him connected over time, and why consistency, care and integrity in how people show up makes a real difference.
I was first introduced to ResoLex around nine years ago, at a point when I was actively searching for people in the construction sector who were prepared to name, and do something about, the patterns that make projects harder than they need to be: poor collaboration, adversarial behaviours, and leadership that too often defaults to control rather than trust.
What drew me in, and what’s kept me connected ever since, is how the ResoLex team show up. They bring the same care, curiosity, and integrity to their work with each other as they do to their work with clients. That consistency really matters to me. It creates a way of working that feels honest, thoughtful, and genuinely supportive, not just in theory, but in practice.
Working with ResoLex feels like being part of a group that is willing to look at itself as well as the system it’s operating in, and to lead by example. That ethos aligns closely with how I approach my own work, and it’s why ResoLex continues to be a team I value and choose to work alongside.
We value Matt’s contribution, and the contribution of all our Associates, not just for what they know, but for how they work – their willingness to reflect, to challenge patterns that get in the way, and to lead with intent.
As we move beyond 25in25, we’ll continue to share the voices of the people who shape our work and our thinking, and who add to the ongoing ResoLex story. The culture that Matt describes is part of what’s led to ResoLex being recognised as a Great Place to Work in 2024 and UK’s Best Workplaces in 2025 for Consulting & Professional Services. As that culture continues to grow, we’re actively welcoming new people into it – we’re currently hiring for an Associate Manager role and always open to hearing from potential Associates who share our values.
