26 APR 2018 BY BINYAMIN ALI
In at the deep end
A catalogue of support failures
Opening up
Breaking barriers to engagement
Trad Group CEO Des Moore speaks to Binyamin Ali about the mental breakdown he suffered as a 26-year-old and the lessons construction can learn from experiences like his.
Trad Group CEO Des Moore speaks to Binyamin Ali about the mental breakdown he suffered as a 26-year-old and the lessons construction can learn from experiences like his.
“For at least a month, there were days I just wouldn’t get out of bed and try to face the day,” says Des Moore, Trad Group CEO and president of the NASC.
He’s telling me about how, at the age of 26, he suffered a mental breakdown.
“The only reason I got through it as I did is because my wife Debbie fully supported me and managed to get me through it,” he recalls.
Mr Moore has come a long way since this difficult experience. We meet in his office on the seventh floor of Bank of America House in Bromley, south London, where Trad is based.
For a long time, only a handful of people knew about this period of his life because, in construction, you just don’t talk about this sort of thing – especially if you’re ambitious. “I kept it to myself because I think it was always [the case] – and still is now – that people would actually perceive it as being a weakness, and a barrier to you being promoted to a senior position where you end up with a greater level of responsibility,” he explains.
“In fairness, I probably haven’t felt like that for the last 10 years.”
In at the deep end
Perhaps unsurprisingly for the CEO of a major scaffolding contractor, Mr Moore started out as a scaffolder himself.
Having learned the ropes, he decided he was ready to take up a position with more responsibility and started looking for opportunities to retrain.
This led to a role as a supervisor. “I don’t think I was even a trainee supervisor; I became almost like an instant supervisor and was given a book, a big A4 diary with about 40 men in it,” he says.
What level of training had he received before being given the job? “None,” he laughs, as if bemused by the recollection.
Mr Moore spent two weeks with the supervisor who was leaving the role. He was then told who his contracts manager was, and that was it. His responsibilities included supervising works, arranging equipment and – most importantly – paying the wages of the 40 workers under his watch.
The year was 1982 and at the time, pay was determined day-to-day. Mr Moore would assess the work everyone undertook at the end of each day and pay them accordingly.
“I ended up with many situations where the men believed they should have been paid more than what I did pay them,” he says. As a result, there were at least two occasions where he was chased around a site by scaffolders holding tubes.
Despite these incidents, he kept his head down and refused to shirk his responsibilities. “Eventually, with the work pressures, the level of work and no support, eventually I just burnt out,” he says with an apologetic shrug.
“From what I can recall, I actually just one day left the car and the keys [and] went home. And I just froze. I couldn’t do anything.”
Mr Moore was dating his future wife Deborah at the time but still lived by himself. “She came and got me. I think I was somewhere up in the city. I didn’t even know where I was, I couldn’t remember now,” he says, racking his memory for details. “[Debbie] came along with a friend of hers and I remember them taking me to get some treatment.”
His recovery would take six months.
A catalogue of support failures
As we discuss what he went through during this time, one thing becomes clear: he believes the root cause of his breakdown was the lack of support available when he started the role.
“It was a clear example of just giving someone a position with no training that they couldn’t actually cope with, [and with] no support mechanism. And they must have seen the signs clearly,” Mr Moore says. “We had some sort of informal training, but it was a very pressurised position. I wasn’t given any real support with it. I had to no mentor, so to speak.”
Only one person from the company went to see him while he was unwell – a contracts manager who Mr Moore credits, along with his wife, with getting him back on his feet.
In the early 80s, HR departments – if they existed at all – were a far cry from those in place today. But the lack of an HR programme to help him back to work was not the biggest issue, Mr Moore argues. “That would have been irrelevant to some extent anyway. It was really the support mechanism that should have been in place when I was appointed.
Interview BY BINYAMIN ALI
