ICE Coffee Break - Leadership in action: stepping up before you feel ready

Overview

As part of the ICE Pathways offering – Career Pathfinding and Leadership Success, we are launching a series of coffee break events focused on the key pillars for building a successful career. Each session will explore one pillar in more detail, providing a space for discussion, shared experience, and practical insight.

These events are aimed at ICE members with 8+ years’ experience or those who are professionally qualified, although open to anyone at a similar career stage. They are designed to support engineers navigating the transition into more senior roles, including managing people, winning work, building networks, and maintaining team wellbeing.

This session builds on a previous ICE Pathways Coffee Break, which introduced the Five Pillars for Building a Successful Career. It focuses on Leadership in Action, exploring what it means to step up and lead effectively within complex project environments.

Drawing on experience from some of the UK’s most complex infrastructure programmes, Kerry Bangle, head of complex projects advisory at WSP, will present and lead the session exploring leadership in major project environments.

The session will provide a high level overview of key themes, with opportunities to explore specific topics in greater depth through discussion with the speaker.

• Stepping into leadership roles before feeling ready and recognising the signals that you are trusted to do so
• Leading through uncertainty, public scrutiny and competing stakeholder priorities
• Balancing technical credibility with influence in major project environments
• Strategic networking, sponsorship and collaboration when delivery teams span multiple organisations
• Connecting teams to purpose and outcomes when pressure, pace and complexity are high
• Authentic leadership behaviours that build trust with project partners and local community