Leadership lessons from Sizewell C’s joint MD Nigel Cann

The joint Managing Director of Sizewell C, and one of the UK’s top nuclear power station experts, Nigel Cann, gives his best advice on project management, leadership and the elevation of project management to the board. Cann has no less than 45 years of experience in the nuclear sector, working at every level and on numerous types and vintages of reactor, from the first-gen Magnox Station at Dungeness A where he started out in 1980, to the latest Gen III+ EPR designs at Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C. And along the way he’s climbed the ladder from apprentice electrician through maintenance supervisor, plant manager, construction director and now MD.

Given that the UK’s nuclear power programme during much of that time was essentially on hold, it’s a track record of real-world experience and achievement that is likely unmatched. But you won’t catch him boasting - about that or much else. “It would be hard to find someone with the same experience as me”, he admits, (and he’s going to need all that expertise and experience, because there is an awful lot riding on the success of Sizewell C – the 3.2GW nuclear power station currently under construction on the Suffolk coast which recently received a further £14.5bn funding package from the government.) Here, he gives APM his best advice from his highly successful career:

1. From a project management point of view, the risk on megaprojects is in managing the interfaces. That is the gaps in between individual teams and tasks down which things can disappear unnoticed, like the TV remote control down the back of the sofa, only with potentially multi-million pound consequences. “You have to make sure they [the project management teams] are all sharing information and pulling together all the time. It’s no good if one or two project managers are successful. They all need to succeed.”

2. Leave a legacy you’re proud of. After finishing his apprenticeship, Cann rose quickly from electrician to maintenance manager and then plant manager at Dungeness B. “We got some good results at Dungeness, but it wasn’t very sustainable and when I left the performance of the plant dropped off,” he admits. So in his next role – Station Director at Hinkley Point B – he was determined not to make the same mistake. “I was clear I wanted to leave a legacy - one of the marks of good leader is what happens when you leave” he says.

3. Use smart collaboration. At Sizewell C he is using the latest collaboration technology to future proof working methods and help to keep a lid on costs by enabling better informed, faster decision making. “We’ve set up some immersive command centres so we can do online problem solving rather than endlessly passing bits of paper round,” he says. So someone on site can demonstrate or explain the issue to colleagues who may be hundreds of miles away, and get a decision made on the spot that might have taken days or weeks previously.

4. Joint leadership is a recipe for success. Cann is joint MD with Julia Pyke at Sizewell C – there is so much to be done, across such a wide range of disciplines, that the job requires not only the expertise but also the sheer bandwidth of them both. “I come from an operational and construction background, Julia comes from a legal background. We complement each other and there is a lot of cross pollination and trust. There is also a healthy tension -- we don’t always agree but when we don’t agree we do agree on what the best outcome is,” Cann explains. Neither of them could do it alone, he says. “If I were running the capital raise process, I’d be completely consumed by that, I wouldn’t have been looking at the project at all, or at standing up the company.”

5. A seat on the board, please. Cann believes that people from a project background deserve to be better represented in the boardroom than they are. “Project managers should be more valued than they are – the people who run companies tend to come more from a finance and legal background, but the disciplines of project management – what are you going to do? What will the outcomes be, and how will you measure them? – shouldn’t be underestimated.”