Before the First Shovel: Building Partnerships That Hold Under Pressure
Inside the 2026 Brandon Hall Group Gold Award-winning leadership program built by ISL and Incito
Inside Leadership with Jenn Lofgren and Shawn Gibson
Before a shovel ever hits the ground on a major construction project, the relationships that will shape the next several years are already taking form.
Owners, engineers, contractors, and trades may all be working toward completing the same project, but they come to the table with different responsibilities, pressures, and priorities. Over the life of a complex project, friction is inevitable.
What matters is how the group responds when it happens. Do they have enough trust to stay in the conversation? Do they understand the pressures their partners are carrying? And when the contract doesn’t provide a clear answer, do they have a shared way to work through it?
At Incito, we facilitate construction partnering sessions that help stakeholders build that alignment early and establish how they’ll communicate, make decisions, and navigate challenges as the project evolves.
What does it take for multiple organizations to become one project team, and stay that way when the pressure hits?
Where friction starts
Traditional project kickoffs spend significant time on what needs to be delivered. There is often much less discussion about how people will work together when delivering it becomes difficult.
Major projects typically begin with detailed contracts, schedules, scopes of work, and defined responsibilities. Those structures are essential, but over a project that may span three to seven years, they can’t anticipate every decision or challenge the people involved will eventually face.
The harder moments often happen in the gray areas: a third party delays something the project team cannot control, a change creates pressure for one organization that the others don’t fully see, or a decision needs to be made where the contract leaves room for interpretation.
Each organization is also operating within a different set of pressures. A municipality may be navigating public scrutiny or political considerations. A contractor may be managing schedule and commercial constraints. An engineering partner may be accountable for technical or regulatory requirements that are less visible to everyone else.
Many leaders are also working across organizations where they have influence but no direct authority, even when another stakeholder’s decisions can materially affect the project.
Without that context, it becomes easy to interpret another organization’s behaviour as unreasonable or adversarial. Issues move into formal channels faster, positions harden, and a project problem can quickly become a relationship problem.
Some claims and disagreements may be unavoidable on complex projects. Circumstances change, contracts have limitations, and legitimate differences in interpretation happen. The opportunity is to keep escalation from becoming the default way the organizations work together.
Build the Team Before You Need It
When working with Incito, partnering starts well before the formal session. We interview leaders from each organization to understand the existing pressures, potential friction points, and what this particular project will require from each stakeholder.
Those conversations shape the session. One project may need more clarity around escalation. Another may need to spend more time understanding roles, expectations, or previous history between partners.
An important part of this work is what we describe as “speed to trust.”
Project partners don’t have years to gradually build trust before they need to rely on each other. They may be making consequential decisions together within weeks, so part of partnering is accelerating the relationship-building that would otherwise take much longer.
That includes helping people see the expertise in the room and understand each other beyond their organizational roles. As one participant reflected, it was “one of the few project kickoffs where we talked as much about people as we did about plans.” Another said, “We stopped seeing three organizations and started seeing one project team.”
As neutral facilitators, we aren’t there to tell the project team what the answer should be. The expertise already exists in the room. Our role is to surface the conversations that need to happen early and help the group translate them into shared commitments about how they want to work together.
Those commitments become the Construction Partnering Charter, built by the people who will actually need to rely on it.
As one participant put it, “The charter wasn't written for us, it was written by us.”
Agree on How You’ll Work Through Conflict Before It Arrives
Disagreement on a complex construction project is part of the work. The greater risk is reaching those moments without an agreed way to navigate them.
The Partnering Charter establishes how stakeholders will communicate, raise concerns, make decisions, and escalate issues when the contract alone doesn’t provide enough direction.
There will inevitably be situations where a decision needs to move beyond the people closest to the work. It helps when the organizations have already discussed what should be escalated, when that should happen, and how to do it without surprising one another.
Partnering also creates space for stakeholders to understand the project from perspectives beyond their own.
In one recent session, we asked participants to consider another partner’s responsibilities, the pressures they believed that organization was carrying, and what it might reasonably need from everyone else. Each group then had the opportunity to review what their partners had identified and fill in what was missing.
The exercise surfaced how many important pressures remain hidden simply because they aren’t part of someone else’s everyday experience. Public and political pressure on a municipality may be easy for a contractor to overlook, just as scheduling or commercial pressures may be less visible elsewhere in the partnership.
Understanding those realities doesn’t mean agreeing with every decision. It gives people more context for why their partners may be responding the way they are and creates a more productive starting point for disagreement.
One participant described it this way: “I gained a better perspective on how each partner sees the project differently, and realized we all have the same goal.”
What Partnering Looks Like Across the Life of a Project
The initial partnering session is only the beginning.
On a project that continues for years, leaders move into different roles, new trades and team members join, and the pressures around the work change. Without reinforcement, even a strong Charter can eventually become another document sitting in a site trailer.
Depending on the project, stakeholders may come back together every four to six months, or more frequently when needed, to revisit their commitments and address what has changed.
The Charter can also become part of regular project routines. It can inform onboarding for new team members, show up in toolbox meetings and project conversations, and provide something concrete to return to when a difficult decision arises.
That continuity matters because the people who attend the original partnering session may represent only a small portion of everyone who eventually works on the project.
When partnering is sustained, stakeholders have a stronger foundation for addressing issues early and managing pressure together, helping protect both working relationships and the project itself.
After one session, a participant reflected, “You accelerated six months of team development in one day.”
Through our partnering work with organizations including the City of Calgary, Graham, and ISL, we’ve seen many of the same principles that shape strong leadership teams apply across construction partnerships: trust, perspective, and clarity about how people intend to work together.
Protect the Project by Investing in the People
Contracts and project plans provide essential structure, but they cannot anticipate every challenge that will emerge when multiple organizations spend years delivering something complex together.
There will be unexpected decisions, delays outside the group’s control, and moments when different organizations see the path forward differently. How those moments affect the project depends in part on the relationships and agreements built before the pressure arrived.
Partnering is most valuable when it begins early, but it can also help groups reset when challenges have already surfaced and existing ways of working are no longer serving the project.
If the contract didn’t have the answer tomorrow, would your team know how to work through it together?
If you’re preparing to launch a major construction or infrastructure project, or looking to strengthen an existing partnership, learn more about Incito’s construction partnering facilitation.