Dinner 2 - Manchester

"Give me a copy and I'll read it": inside CLIC's second dinner

A senior QS was once asked to talk through clause 31 of an NEC contract. His answer, recounted around the table at CLIC's second dinner, has stuck with everyone who heard it: "Well, if you give me a copy of the contract, I'll read it and tell you." He wasn't unusual. Somebody else described a project director three years into a job who had never opened the contract at all.

That was the heart of the second CLIC dinner, held at Banyan in Manchester's Corn Exchange in July 2025. A larger group this time, around an oval table, senior commercial leaders drawn mostly from water and utilities but reaching into civils, infrastructure and consultancy. Same rules, same absence of a sales pitch — which, as one first-timer noted, is the thing people least expect. "Everyone thinks it's going to be a sales pitch, and it's anything but."

Adapting under pressure — but never on purpose

The room agreed that commercial teams have become reactive by default: locked in fire-fighting, rarely proactive, dealing with last-minute design changes and packages that "start before they're even priced properly." But the diagnosis was sharper than "things change." As one member put it, "the projects don't fail because of the changes — they fail because no one re-sets the plan when the changes happen."

The human cost was the part the room lingered on. It isn't the volume of work that burns people out, several agreed; it's the constant reprioritising, the priority list that "changes before you've even finished the last one," with ops pushing forward and commercial scrambling after and nobody owning the change in between.

Are we building leaders, or promoting survivors?

People get promoted because they're busy, or because someone left — not because they're ready. "Senior" goes on the badge before the person has ever run a claim or handled a difficult conversation alone. "We've got managers who can run a spreadsheet but can't have a difficult conversation," one member said. Another named the quiet mechanism behind it: "No one teaches you how to manage people — you just copy what your boss did, good or bad."

Leadership training, the room noted with some resignation, is "the bit that always gets cut when budgets are tight." The frustration wasn't that people don't want to develop their teams; it's that there's no time, no structure and no priority set from the top. Firms, as one member framed it, are setting people up to fail and then wondering why they aren't stepping up.

Contract-aware, or contract-afraid?

This phrase landed hard enough that it may become a permanent part of the CLIC vocabulary. The room's view was that most disputes could be avoided if people simply read the contract at the outset, and that commercial too often gets involved only after the contract is already compromised. Contracts get treated as a legal thing to reach for in an emergency — "the fire alarm," as one member said, when "the contract should be the map."

The consequence is that operational teams who don't understand the contract don't know when to act. One member's metaphor made the point stick: "A contract is a gun — and they've got to give me the bullets." The fixes were unglamorous and practical: normalise contractual literacy through training, get commercial in earlier, and share accountability between ops and commercial rather than treating the contract as one department's problem.

Commercial as a value driver, not red tape

The final session asked whether commercial is a growth lever or just administration. The honest answer from the room was that it's still mostly seen as a blocker — valued "only when we stop a disaster, not when we prevent one." The projects that went best were the ones where ops and commercial were aligned from day one, but that alignment is rare, and many teams, the room agreed, "only begin to see the value when they start losing money."

The rallying line of the night doubled as a challenge to the profession: "Commercial needs teeth — or we're just post-event admin." The way forward the room settled on was for commercial to reposition itself as strategic — in earlier, speaking in delivery terms, driving value rather than only policing cost.

What the room took home

Two things recurred in the feedback: relief at discovering everyone struggles with the same things regardless of sector, and the value of a couple of hours of genuinely honest talk with peers. The "contract-aware versus contract-afraid" framing stuck; so did the appetite to make competency standards a topic in their own right next time. The conversation, as ever, continued in the pub afterwards.

CLIC is an invitation-only network for senior commercial leaders in UK construction and infrastructure. Dinners operate under Chatham House Rules. If you lead a commercial function and want a seat at the table, apply through the site.