33. Seize the Opportunity, Jane Barron, 25 September 2023

 

Jane Barron is a founding member of the Company and has a fascinating career history. She successfully challenged an industry which was very male dominated at the time. She volunteered to give a webinar for our Associates about her remarkable career and the importance of taking advantage of opportunities.  Her webinar is on the Company website and everyone is encouraged to watch it.

After her very up-beat and positive presentation I asked her how she coped with the setbacks as I often found I learnt more from the knock-backs than the successes.  I thought that it would be useful for all of us to hear how Jane responded to these challenges.

Rather than summarise the whole of Jane’s presentation I would like just to share her response to me, which she graciously expanded on after the webinar.

This is an expanded response to a question from the audience asking ‘how I coped with set backs’ eg when a project I was working on was cancelled or went wrong.  I couldn’t think during the Q&A session of anything much that I would consider a set back but having considered further realised that I did but that I took learning from them so saw them as positive experiences. 

Response

You do not generally learn very much of value from your project if nothing goes wrong because your brain has no information about what can happen ie the risks and pitfalls that could make it go wrong, and how, next time, to avoid them.  If you keep your senses receptive to what is going wrong or understand why a project was cancelled you can learn a huge amount to make you a wiser, better technical guru or project manager in the future as you know what to look out for.  My boss on the last HS2 contract that I worked on phoned me up when the announcement was made cancelling/putting on hold the Leeds branch (we were working on the Manchester branch) and asked me how I had predicted five years previously that this would happen.  I responded that it was clear from the client’s body language in 2015 (or thereabouts), when they were briefing us for our tender submissions, that the client team had much more confidence in the Crewe to Manchester branch making it to and through Parliament than the Leeds branch.  There had been too many changes to and arguments over the latter during most of the intervening years since contract award that meant it would be a very uncomfortable journey through Parliament, probably costing a lot more money and taking more time to build, thus destroying the business case.  The Manchester branch on the other hand had only changed minimally during that time, except for the design of the stations.  The client team made the point during the briefing for our tender submission that they had overseen consultation on this branch for around 10 years and felt that the local population were reasonably accepting of it.  If you work on political projects as I did (the ones that use tax payers’ money) you just have to accept that they are liable to be cancelled if there is a more urgent requirement for the money elsewhere or when a general election changes the party in power.

The first major project I worked on and used for my civils qualification was cancelled: a huge 34 feet deep sewage pumping station in Libya. But I had worked on it and gained a lot from the experience and passed the Chartered Engineer interview and exam with ease.  My next large project was on site at a sewage treatment works for one of the water companies where we had combined sewers which one weekend delivered combined effluent to the site and flooded all the excavations with raw sewage; there was bad ground and many other issues to deal with as this was the late seventies and health and safety hardly existed, or if it did the contractor turned a blind eye. I was one of very few women in the profession at that time and was seriously and crudely challenged by the contractor trying to make me back down on arguments over claims. It was a difficult time for me but again, I learnt a lot to take forward. And that is how things were in those days but it was hugely valuable for the development of my mental attitude (resilience) and ability to work with and round other people’s behaviours. I found similar issues all through my career but chose the battles I wanted/needed to win and refused to give in to depression or feelings of failure on the others.

In later years when I was coaching younger people I would always ask them what they learnt from working on their cancelled or failed project or tender and what that told them for their next venture - wherever that may be.  I would ask them if they are numbers or words people ie whether they are more comfortable with data or language and then explore options going forward on that basis. I also explore their lifetime ambitions and personal constraints if they are prepared to share the latter and, most importantly, I give them time - for them to talk and me to listen. I was once asked to help someone who had essentially had a mental breakdown because of the stress of their job on top of a stressful situation at home. Our first three sessions were four hours long each time plus four hours travel for me.  For the first two sessions I used open questions to prompt and mainly listened and digested what they told me. Then we started to work on tools they could construct and use to take them forward, based on the way their mind worked and took in information.  This took quite a few months with me gradually removing my props and them using their own. They also managed to sort out their home life the issues there being significantly reduced simply by being shared. Within a year the person was back to being a valued specialist, had gained a professional qualification and was promoted. I was so delighted for them!

When dealing with a new graduate who wants to quit their chosen line of work with their current employer I listen to the reasons and suggest that it is early days for one that has not yet gained membership of a professional institution, and help them to seek different work, possibly even with a different employer, or simply a transfer with the same employer to a different country. We often have then remained in touch and sometimes worked together again later. Someone who was a member of my team about 15 years ago recently got in touch for some advice saying they needed ‘the cutting edge wisdom of my brain and my instant recognition of their situation’ to shape their work style and tools for maximum effect.  What we worked through was largely covered in my presentation to which this note is attached.  As I said in response to another question in the Q&A session ‘my work was my hobby and I was lucky enough to get paid for it’ and I got paid very well.

Jane Barron

25 September 2023