Are you ready for the top table, asks Chris Chivers PCIOB

The empty boardroom seats are waiting for talented chartered members to fill them, new president Chris Chivers tells Elaine Knutt, as he lays out his aspirations for the year.  

Chris Chivers, the newly inaugurated president of the CIOB, is a troubleshooter by profession – a consultant to clients or contractors who realise that control of a project could be slipping out of their hands. Enter Chivers, who walks the site, asks the right questions, doesn’t take the first answer he is given, reads the contract – “Yes,” he says. “Sometimes it’s that simple” – and advises on next steps.

It could be a student accommodation project in north London, or a boutique developer’s high-end residential conversion, or even the RIBA Award-winning conversion of the old Central St Martins’ building for bookseller Foyles.

He’s evidently in demand, and it’s not hard to see why. With four decades of contracting experience, including projects at Buckingham Palace, Downing Street and St Paul’s Cathedral in his former role as managing director of Killby & Gayford, he has a willingness to be a one-man awkward squad and a manner of speech that is all short sentences, straight-talking and spade-calling.

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Here he is, for instance, on a project manager he encountered who probably would not be a candidate for Construction Manager of the Year: “He says to me, ‘You know the problem with this job? You can’t polish a turd.’ I said, ‘You might well be right about that, but certainly the client won’t want to hear it. Anyway, because it’s an existing building, the turd only exists on the outside of the plasterboard – everything on the inside is yours’.”

He certainly has some colourful examples of what project management skills shortages look like close up, such as the project managers who haven’t been round the block enough times and get into difficulties from not reading the contract. Or fail to connect up pipes, so that a riser cupboard ends up flooded. Or put cameras down the drains after they have laid the carpets.

“There’s a lack of experience of dealing with things when the going gets tough – and sometimes you find the tough go missing!” he says, shaking his head. “It’s about not checking, just accepting what people tell you. There should always be a close-up procedure after every trade.”  

But if these are examples of project management skills shortages, Chivers’ main concern is a skills deficit among the industry’s leadership: among board-level, decision-making, can-carrying directors. In his experience, an epidemic of job title inflation has filled the industry’s board rooms with “directors” who are happier following than leading.

“There’s a lot of people at the moment who have been elevated to a point outside their comfort zone. If you talk to MDs and they’re candid, they’ll tell you they’ve got directors working with them on their boards, or associate directors, perhaps, who really shouldn’t be there. They’ve got them because they needed a backside on a seat.”  

It’s an uncomfortable analysis, but also one that chimes with the industry’s recent patchy results record, where recovery has been accompanied by continued business failures and miscalculated projects risks. But it is by addressing the industry’s deficit in management skills and personal responsibility that Chivers’ hopes his CIOB presidential term can make a difference.

“That’s the bit that’s missing, that’s where the weakness lies in our industry. We’ve got to make sure that people who are at director level are properly chartered in some way. We’ve got to assist that process,” he argues. Bringing the argument to the heart of the institute’s mission, he adds: “We can’t leave people sitting at director level who are ICIOB level. That demeans our chartered status.”

Grade expectations

Chivers, 63, takes the presidential role at the institute just as it has undergone a shake-up: dropping the option to join at the sub-chartered ACIOB and ICIOB grades and encouraging prospective members – as well those currently at those grades – to embark on the path to chartership. It is the institute’s contribution to up-skilling the industry for an era in which projects are becoming technically and environmentally more challenging to deliver.

The grade change is also part of the institute’s wider agenda of carving out a more central role and a higher profile in relation to government, employers and the wider industry, making the case that chartered construction managers can help ensure better outcomes. And beyond that audience, Chivers’ presidency will also aim to connect with a wider but increasingly important audience: the next generation, their parents and teachers.

Chivers has filmed a video interview for the CIOB website, discussing his career, his motivation and his aspirations for his term as CIOB president

“We know we’ve got to be strengthening the brand, we’ve got to be talking to schools, we’ve got to be talking to the higher and further education areas, and we’ve got to be talking to employers. We’re saying that the brand for the CIOB is a must-have, if you want to be in the construction industry. We are the only institute that is fully based in the construction sector, all the other institutes have got a foot in other camps.”

As for members who are already within the institute but not yet at chartered grade, Chivers has already written to each of them personally. “They’ve got unfinished business in my view: they’re telling the world they’ve started something they haven’t finished,” he asserts. “To anyone I meet with an ICIOB tag, it’s: ‘You need to move off that and get yourself a proper MCIOB member status. And don’t leave it too long, because the “A” and the “I” will end up flatlining. They won’t be of any benefit to you and you’ll be left behind’.”

If Chivers sometimes speaks like a character from EastEnders, it is probably because he is an East Ender, born and brought up in Plaistow. He left school at 17 for a one-year construction course at East Ham Technical College, realising instantly he was in the right place. “I found it fascinating to be problem solving, and finding the logic of how buildings are put together.” He took up a trainee quantity surveyor job after being talent spotted on a four-week work placement.

His early career was marked by the search for a “fit” between corporate and personal values, moving on relatively quickly from two firms and a local authority until he joined John Lelliott Construction Group in 1977. That was where he became a director for the first time, joining the board of one of its subsidiaries in 1985. Appropriately enough, he says he took his new-found responsibilities very seriously.

“I bought a book called Directors’ Responsibilities, because I didn’t know what I’d let myself in for. You wouldn’t sign up if you’d read the book! But so many people just do it,” he laments.

John Lelliott was also where he first developed his ongoing commitment to supporting new entrants to the industry, devising and running a programme to give new graduates a more rounded training that he says was innovative at the time.

But the firm also gave Chivers a ringside seat of how it can all go wrong: it was engulfed in cashflow difficulties after the property crash of the early 1990s and forced into administration in April 1993. Bovis later bought out some of its contracts, creating a division known as Bovis Lelliott.

After another short stop at a contractor where his dislike of strong-arm “subbie bashing” tactics led to an early resignation, Chivers joined Killby & Gayford, a family-owned East London contractor with a venerable history and a project CV that included work for the Royal Household and 10 Downing Street.

He joined as managing director designate for its building division, thanks to his training agenda and director-level experience. In 1998, with no family members to assume control of the business, Chivers and five other directors led a management buyout with finance from 3i. In 2007, there was a reshuffle and a refinancing, as two directors exited and three joined.

Sorry tale

Chivers, speaking with evident regret, casts the tale of what happened next as an object lesson on the need for more business-savviness and commercial astuteness around the industry’s boardroom tables. By 2011, as new projects had their start dates deferred, the contractor’s cashflow was being stretched. The new investor, Growth Capital Partners, hired a consultant who gave the company a gloomy prognosis, then announced it wanted its money back and called in the administrators.

Chivers says his error was failing to realise that the new investor never saw Killby & Gayford as a long-term investment: “We had a good board from a technical perspective, but what was weak was the ability to stand up and say, ‘You’ve got it wrong.’

“The bit I didn’t spot was that Growth Capital Partners was a different animal to 3i – it was essentially a fund that had investors that were guaranteed a return. The fund had fulfilled its guarantees, but we were expendable because we just had an investor who wasn’t interested in our model. I learned some expensive lessons.”

A colleague at the time remembers Chivers as decisive, and “a glass half-full person”: “In the early days of the downturn, I remember him saying the industry was talking itself down, people needed to take a more positive attitude.”

With hindsight, however, doesn’t that attitude looks dangerously complacent? The former colleague thinks not: “That’s the nature of construction. And when you’ve got a company that’s 150 years old, with lots of legacy systems and baggage, it’s harder to be agile. They had done those incredible contracts – this was a company that had worked for the Queen – and maybe there was a feeling they’d been around a long time and would weather the storm.”

Learning curve

Chivers takes up the president’s role after two years in the green room, serving first as junior and then senior vice president. He has had some time to get used to the CIOB limelight, but says he’s still adjusting: “Once you’ve got over that initial high, you think, ‘How the hell am I going to make a difference here?’ But it’s provided me with the opportunity to work with like-minded people to improve the construction industry, and I’m privileged because I’ve got that opportunity.”

In fact, former CIOB president Peter Jacobs says he has always associated Chivers with a deep-rooted commitment to skills and training. “Ever since I’ve known him, it’s been about young people, the skills gap and the future of the industry. At trustees’ meetings, that’s when he comes to life.” And he’s a good person to have in the driving seat, says Jacobs. “He doesn’t mess about. If he’s got views, he puts them forward strongly.”

One immediate output of Chivers’ focus on training and education will be an improved CPD offer. A new “academy” is due to be launched this year that hopes to provide MOOCs (massive open online courses) and video modules, as well as “real world” courses delivered by training partners. The idea is to divide up buildings into different sections – preliminary works, foundations, frame etc – and offer CPD training for each area.

He also highlights an initiative to strengthen the institute’s three-way connections with major employers and CIOB-accredited universities, making sure that both sides realise the importance of the institute. “We’re talking to employers about why CIOB is relevant to their business, and why the academics should be producing more courses to train people up to MCIOB. We want the universities to understand we want to help them produce people who fit in naturally to construction and aren’t just risk transferers, just passing the problem down the chain.”

World domination

Chivers’ challenge will also be to move the institute forward on the world stage, helping to implement the institute’s new five-year strategic plan, which very much has an international scope: “The global strategy is not intended to sound like world domination! But it is intended to support our members who are already around the world, their aspirations, and it’s about trying to get the name better recognised, so that it people see the name CIOB, they automatically accept you as a proper construction professional. That’s where we need to be.”

And strengthening that subliminal linkage between the letters MCIOB and a recognition of professionalism is, ultimately,  his priority. In a revealing video interview for the CIOB, he says: “When someone says they’re a proper chartered member, it means they can be relied upon to give a proper expert opinion on something, and they can be relied upon in what they do. And, if they’re doing the right job, they can be relied upon to do something ethically as well. It’s an implied term, because it’s part of our conditions.

“We have a code of conduct, and we need to be able to show the public at large that’s what we do, and what we are.” That’s Chivers’ challenge, in a nutshell.