‘Driver Skills’ and On-the-Job Capacity Building
The missing link in PPP success.
Too often, public and private organizations struggle to bring complex infrastructure projects from inception to commercial and financial closing.
In my article of May 27, 2025, "Where Does Your PPP Project Get Stuck?", I explored how public-private partnerships (PPP) unite a vast ecosystem of stakeholders — governments, developers, investors, lenders, regulators, contractors, and the public — each with distinct goals, constraints, and timelines.
I emphasized then the need to negotiate not just the deal, but also the relationship itself.
Yet negotiating the relationship requires a specific skillset that is often absent — and one that can only be developed through sustained on-the-job training.
The missing critical skillset
Working on complex infrastructure projects across frontier and emerging markets in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, I’ve seen a recurring challenge. While project leaders and developers strive to navigate highly sophisticated project landscapes, public — and increasingly also private — organizations are often ill-equipped to manage the extraordinary complexity of balancing multiple stakeholders and conflicting interests.
This leads to roadblocks, delays, and the outright cancellation of critical projects — a pattern familiar to anyone deeply involved in this sector.
The root cause is not a lack of technical, financial, or legal expertise, but a missing critical skillset — one that’s essential for moving projects to closure.
The Driver Skills that actually move projects forward
While project development and advisory roles cover many essential functions, the most complex projects require something more: a highly refined skillset that is often undervalued, overlooked, or stretched too thin.
These are not routine capabilities. They are the skills that bring order to chaos — requiring the judgment and leadership to orchestrate divergent interests, align multiple stakeholders, guide internal teams and external advisors, and integrate legal, technical, and financial structures into one coherent, executable deal — all within environments that are often highly complex, politically sensitive, and institutionally sophisticated.
I call them the Driver Skills, and they include:
Coordination Across Ministries and Within Organizations: The ability and credibility to align policies across ministries, foster cross-sector communication, build consensus, and lead government process — while also navigating internal complexity within developer-investor organizations.
Stakeholder Alignment & Engagement: Going beyond management to genuinely align interests, build trust, communicate transparently, and resolve conflicts. This requires a nuanced understanding of motivations and the behavioral agility to bridge divides.
Sophisticated Negotiation Skills: interest-based negotiation, multi-party facilitation, smart risk allocation, and managing power imbalances. True negotiation in complex environments goes far beyond transactional exchanges: it demands profound behavioral insight, emotional intelligence, and the ability to read and influence complex interpersonal dynamics – skills that are often underestimated even by seasoned professionals.
Overall Project Leadership: The overarching ability to persistently and credibly lead a project through obstacles to real closure.
The absence of these Driver Skills is often what turns promising PPPs into delayed or failed opportunities.
While organizations may not be accustomed to engaging external senior project executors with these Driver Skills — a profile distinct from traditional external advisors — doing so can make a critical difference, especially in complex or politically sensitive projects. Yet over time, these capabilities should also be developed in-house.
Capacity building must go beyond the classroom
When Driver Skills are lacking, building them must become a priority.
Many governments are supported by Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) through PPP capacity-building programs, which offer vital technical training and institutional strengthening, ensuring governments can serve as informed and capable counterparts throughout the PPP lifecycle. But these programs often focus on frameworks and processes, not the practical leadership capabilities required to actually deliver projects.
To be effective, they must expand their focus to include:
The Driver Skills outlined above
Genuine on-the-job coaching and training
The same goes for the private sector. While gaps are more visible in public institutions, many developers and investors face similar internal weaknesses — especially when it comes to aligning stakeholders, negotiating complex agreements, and keeping momentum through deal fatigue.
How to embed Driver Skills in practice
Capacity building in these areas must be practical, sustained, and embedded in real project work.
For Governments:
Direct Involvement: Ensure government staff are directly involved in stakeholder egagement and negotiations — learning by doing.
Mandate On-the-Job Training: every advisor — legal, financial, technical, strategic — should be required to provide coaching as part of their role. DFIs can play a key role in enforcing this.
Bring in External Project Leadership When Needed: appoint senior external experts with proven Driver Skills to lead at critical moments, while training internal teams on-the-job to eventually take the reins.
For Private Companies:
Engage Staff Actively: involve junior and mid-level team members in the most difficult negotiations and alignment efforts.
Leverage External Expertise for Growth: bring in external leaders with Driver Skills not just to deliver — but to coach, mentor, and build your team’s long-term capacity.
Capacity building is everyone’s responsibility
On-the-job coaching is not a ‘nice-to-have’ — it’s a responsibility. It’s a duty for senior professionals and for every advisor involved in a complex infrastructure project.
When I support developer-investors, I make it a point that my team grows from each interaction. The same applies when I engage with government counterparts. If the team across the table lacks sufficient knowledge, I coach them. A deal is only sustainable if all parties truly understand what they’re signing up to.
My greatest satisfaction comes not just from closing deals — but also from hearing, sometimes years later, how someone learned and grew through our work together.
Closing Thought
Our collective responsibility doesn’t stop at delivering the deal.
It lies in helping every participant grow professionally so that the next project goes smoother, faster, and with greater internal ownership.
That’s how we build durable infrastructure partnerships. That’s how we deliver results.
And that’s how we make sure the next project is driven with confidence — because the capacity is there.
