Shaping people and places

What do the Sydney Opera House, Singapore Flyer, Terminal Three of London’s Heathrow Airport, New York’s Lincoln Centre and the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad have in common? These architectural splendours do not merely highlight the skyline of their respective cities; they also narrate the strong track record of Arup – a global design and engineering consulting firm.

Arup has developed a particularly strong presence in Singapore over the past 40 years, both with its local staff and the projects that it works on. As a result, Robert Care, CEO of Arup Australasia, says the company now has a natural affiliation with the city state. “Arup has helped shape Singapore, as indeed Singapore has also helped shape the firm,” he says.

Its design and engineering staff are currently helping with the $1.2 billion, 35-hectare Singapore Sports Hub project. Other major icons to have passed by Arup’s plate include the Marina Bay Sands integrated resort, the Helix Bridge, and the Singapore Flyer. Care says that ongoing success has only been possible because of the hard work of its employees. “People talk about people being the most valuable resource,” he says. “In a firm like ours, they are the only resource.”

Care says this naturally leads the firm to focus heavily on its talent development strategies. “We entrust our future to our staff. So to assist them, we promote and enhance developing talent and provide an environment for all members of staff to grow personally and professionally.”

This is also the rationale behind Arup’s strong decision not to curtail its training and development budget or recruitment even during the recent economic downturn. That firm commitment to ensuring talent is nurtured and given room to prosper helped Arup land a coveted Hewitt’s Best Employers Award last year.

Building leaders

The foremost challenge, Care outlines, is finding good people with scarce skills. It’s a war for talent that applies to all countries in which Arup operates. Even more difficult is to retain those same talented staff - though Care says Arup’s attrition rate is below the industry standard.

Beyond that, development of leadership is a vital concern in Arup’s HR management. “Leadership is probably the most fundamentally important thing that we can foster in our organisation, because people can be called upon at all times to be leaders in all sorts of levels. So we put a lot of emphasis in teaching people leadership skills.”

Care says all leaders are expected to coach those that they work with in order that they may one day take over. “It’s about people’s behaviour and doing things the right way,” he says. “It’s about correcting things when they go slightly wrong very quickly so that the whole atmosphere is one that generates doing things the right way.”

Apart from that, Arup has formal training programmes. Some of these are conducted electronically, while others are executed in traditional classroom format. Care says the company has four “well-defined” leadership programmes, catering to the highest of nine grades of leadership and supervisory roles. “When we get to grades six and seven, we have one leadership programme, and for seven and eight, we have another leadership programme,” he says. “Even in grade nine, for senior people like myself, we have a leadership programme.”

The fourth leadership development tool, held every second year, is the Jack Zunz Forum. Named after a former senior partner with what was then Ove, Arup and Partners, this programme is held over a full week and allows leaders to expand further on their previous training. “Then there are (also) opportunities for coaching and mentoring after the event,” Care says.

Coaching senior management

Building and maintaining a culture that values continuous coaching is always a challenge, Care says. However, he finds the best way is to lead by example. “For instance, if I behave in a way that indicates that I don’t think I know everything, I can persuade the people who directly report to me to behave in the same way,” he says. “It becomes a lot easier to persuade people that they need to open up to new thoughts and new thinking.”

Care has recently taken a coach external to the firm and there are other senior executives who have coaches. “So, even I, at almost 60, believe that I can actually learn things by having a coach,” he says. “People see that and understand it’s alright to not know everything and be able to continue to learn.”

It’s not just outside parties doing the coaching; internal mentoring is also taken very seriously at Arup. The company once considered mentoring a “bottom up” procedure. As people came in at those lower levels, management took it upon itself to mentor them. Today, Care says, the system is much more robust.

The “top down” mentoring programme began slowly around two years ago. The organisation chose 12 of its most senior leaders, including Care, and provided them with an external mentor for six months. As well as typical mentoring, the leaders learned how to mentor others themselves. Then, for the next year, those 12 senior leaders mentored one or two other managers one rung below them on the career ladder.

Care had two mentees during this initial 12 month programme and is currently mentoring two more senior managers. Interestingly enough, in the first two years, one of the people Care was mentoring went on maternity leave. And even through that maternity leave, he continued to provide mentoring to her, so that when she returned, that valuable investment was set to mature.

Care says Arup now puts every employee through that formal programme. In this way, staff are not only appropriately and effectively mentored on career development opportunities within the organisation, they are also taught in a formal setting the process about being a mentor themselves. “It is a very powerful process and it is being very well received by all our people,” Care says.

Walking the talk

Outside of formal mentoring, Care has close relationships with another 12 (junior) leaders from Arup, meeting with them every six weeks – either face to face, or by phone or video conference – and helping to address any concerns they have. As a leader, his involvement with HR activities in Arup cannot go unnoticed. Care spends about half of his time in addressing HR issues, coaching, and mentoring his leadership pipeline. He also works closely with the HR leader in this region and is a member of the Global HR Executive, advising on HR policy and implementation.

He says he enjoys working with people and unleashing their potential. The most interesting thing in HR management, he feels, is to help someone to grow and “seeing them actually developing and taking responsibility”. Even simple things, like seeing younger managers taking ownership of a problem (and solution), helps inspire his belief in the company’s future.

“I have learnt a lot and I am still learning,” he says. “I have learnt that if you work at developing your people, the business results will come. It’s very interesting to have that sort of understanding but it’s another thing to put it into practice and watch it while it happens.”

Importantly, Care says the emphasis needs to be maintained through good times and bad. “Holding your nerve and having faith in that ideal is very worthwhile. Of course, that does not imply avoiding tough decisions for the greater good.”

In the end, as a CEO, Care sees his role as supporting his people to deliver Arup’s goals and objectives. “My purpose is to inspire a shift in others that promotes extraordinary change; to make my people look good, not for them to make me look good,” he says.