Staying on track

It’s not difficult to find out about Sean Sweeney MInstD. A quick Google search and you’ll discover regular blogs and opinion pieces about the company he leads. The CEO of City Rail Link in Auckland is inspiringly clear about the importance of communication and openly slams his industry for what he says is an appalling job at explaining the uncertainty of major projects to stakeholders.

“Many in our industry make out that projects are going to be delivered easily, seamlessly, and with a high degree of certainty, but major construction deals with massive uncertainties that literally cannot be worked through until we get into the ‘doing’. So we try to explain what’s going on, why it’s hard and how we’re making progress.”

A good example of this is the blog Sweeney penned last year following his revelation to Parliament’s Transport and Infrastructure Select Committee that the project will be over time and over budget. Despite this, Aucklanders are still giving what may well be the largest project of its kind in the country a 70 per cent approval rating.

Sweeney’s decision to be a proactive communicator goes right back to his first project management role at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in the ’90s which faced strong public criticism that it was either unnecessary or should be in Auckland.

“We spent eight years leaning into a terrible political headwind. On any given month anyone could write an opinion piece saying why Te Papa was useless and why it would fail, and until we delivered we couldn’t rebuff that argument.

“I realised then that is how major projects are. The press has to write stories and if you don’t give them your side, they’ll just fill in the gaps. And there were plenty of people wanting to have an opinion.”

His theory is the average person is ignorant of projects, therefore building up some knowledge and political capital to explain why it is necessary and how they’re going to achieve it will stand them in good stead when they face major challenges.

Like the rest of the world, the City Link project’s challenge was the onset of Covid-19. Sweeney explained that to the Select Committee early last year. He focused on keeping the project running without worrying about time and cost, instead focusing on his employees that span 45 different nationalities, including 250 international staff. He has been told by government officials the company did better than most with getting workers back into the country, therefore keeping the job going.

His background was perfect for the Covid crisis. Sweeney has learnt how to work in an environment of extreme uncertainty and political pressure, while getting the best out of people. His career has spanned large-scale infrastructure projects, including project manager at Carson Group in New Zealand, executive director of Major Projects Victoria, head of construction at Grocon, founder and managing director of Atelier Projects, and CEO of New South Wales Justice Infrastructure.

In a highly charged political environment that many may steer away from, Sweeney is in his element leading the City Rail Link project where both Central and local government are the main stakeholders.

“All these projects come with politics because they are large and are spending public money. And with these projects, politicians often nail their colours to the mast and will either be criticised – as Phil Twyford was for KiwiBuild – or their reputation will be enhanced.”

Sweeney is well aware the projects he has worked on would not have existed without early political support. “Projects get started because you get in a minister’s ear and explain why this needs to happen for public good, then more ministers need to agree through the Cabinet process where it will either succeed or fail to get funded. You can’t deny that this is about selling visions to people and explaining how they will be enhanced along the way.”

Over and again, Sweeney has witnessed how infrastructure projects have transformed cities. Te Papa changed the perception of Wellington internationally and domestically, as well as increasing visitor numbers and stay, and the well- known transformation of Melbourne from a city best seen in the rear-vision mirror to a popular destination. He believes Aucklanders won’t truly understand the benefits of the new rail until they experience the ease of moving around suburbs for work and leisure.

Sweeney’s career has developed through serendipity, strict planning and a large dose of reality. The Te Papa opportunity came about when he needed a job following the sharemarket crash, his wife was pregnant and like many good Kiwi stories, it started with a conversation at a barbecue.

He laughs at the memory that later he was chosen by museum staff to manage the development, construction and installation of the exhibits because he was “the least annoying” of the project managers on the job. Internationally, this is usually the most high-risk part of a museum development, often coming in 100 per cent over time and budget. Sweeney completed the project with six months to spare and $5 million under budget.

He comes back time and again to his learning at Te Papa and singles out museum project director and head of exhibition Ken Gorbey, who was a strong influence and transformative in understanding how to get the best out of people. “Continually throughout my career I’ve had senior people take me aside, show an interest in me, stand beside me, open doors for me and protect me politically when things got difficult.”

Now the boot is on the other foot with Sweeney singling out employees who he believes are worth investing discretionary effort in. But it is his background and upbringing that has helped influence his decision to set up a social outcomes project at City Rail Link. His parents were ‘10-pound Poms’ who settled in a state house in Tītahi Bay.

For Sweeney, living in the beach settlement in the 1960s was paradise: walking distance to where he could go fishing and swimming. “Fortunate enough to dodge some of life’s nastier bullets,” he was the first in his family to go to university and says he is now pleased to be able to do something about the luck and opportunity that proved elusive for some of his Tītahi Bay peers and those in similar places.

The social outcomes project, which helps train young people and then helps them get jobs and keep them, is a blueprint Sweeney would happily share. But he warns that it takes a massive amount of pastoral support. He learnt this first as head of construction at Melbourne company Grocon, which had a programme training and finding jobs for people who were close to heading down a criminal path or homeless.

“The common view to address this problem is you find these people, you give them a job, you pat them on the back and walk away, but that just doesn’t work. You need to do far more to support them. You see these kids and the battle they must overcome just to turn up for work every day. I grew up in a town with people like that who were my classmates.

“There are good kids slipping through the cracks in New Zealand big time. I took a view that we’re a big construction project, we’re a mega employer and our industry is short of resource. So, surely, somewhere in there, there must be a mechanism that provides these kids with a chance.”

Sweeney is proud of the success rate of more than 80 per cent of the recruits getting and retaining jobs. “It is not uncommon that they are the first people in their wider whānau to have a job.”

While Sweeney’s CV boasts a successful career, it was not without a few false starts. Thrown out of teachers training college, he spent two years fixing cash registers until “an epiphany that the world didn’t owe me a living”. High marks studying a New Zealand Certificate of Engineering (NZCE) got him bumped into the third year of an engineering degree in Auckland where he had the “traumatic experience” of learning differential calculus when his last formal maths had been in sixth form.

Later, working in Australia, he signed up to a master’s degree after realising he was the only one of his peers who didn’t have postgraduate qualifications. He was then talked into doing a PHD by an academic who Sweeney says was “completely lying” about the amount of work necessary. This wasn’t before an interview with a panel of academics “playing tag to beat me up”, just to prove he was capable of completing it. He did.

While Sweeney describes his career as “lucky”, he also admits to strict planning and following the “audacious goals” of working at a high level, internationally, on big projects.

Those goals have taken him to re- imaging petroleum company BP in the Australasian market. He was then sent to the US to turn around a project rebranding petrol stations where his new colleagues told him: “We want you to know we’re completely opposed to you being here. I had to rapidly build up trust which I learnt to do by treating people properly and delivering what I said I’d do.”

The next steps for Sweeney could be a directorship where he believes he could make a difference.