Wintle-Camp Coaching

What stood out for the judges about Wintle-Camp Coaching’s impressive, multi-year consultancy partnership with construction business Optima Contracting was the close level of collaboration between the two teams, which “felt much more like a partnership than a client-supplier relationship”. 

Optima engaged Wintle-Camp after several converging drivers pointed out that female employees at Optima were not progressing to senior leadership, and the commercial cost was beginning to show. 

A major contract opportunity, where stronger female leadership representation was expected at bid stage, had been lost, and an increasing share of public and private sector tenders required documented evidence of women in senior roles. Without it, prequalification was at risk. Moreover, multiple long-serving male directors were approaching retirement and, with no internal female successors visible, leadership continuity was a board-level risk.

Baseline confidence assessments, co-designed with Optima’s HR team and administered to the cohort, confirmed that the cultural barriers were behavioural, not capability based. The solution was to “break the confidence ceiling, build a visible pipeline of female leaders and protect Optima against future tender losses driven by underrepresentation”.

The resulting Women in Construction six-month programme was launched in March 2025, with every session rooted in real scenarios surfaced by Optima’s staff. The programme “mapped each participant’s natural authority signals rather than teaching borrowed leadership behaviours”. The results were immediate: after the workshops, staff reported a 96 per cent increase in controlling self doubt and a 72 per cent increase in feeling supported by other women, and 100 per cent said they felt they had improved. Now, the first cohort is ready to mentor the second, with Wintle-Camp stepping into a supporting rather than leading role. 

Women now appear as named senior contacts on bid documents, providing the inclusive leadership evidence increasingly demanded at prequalification; multiple women have been identified as future successors for senior roles, derisking relationship-led revenue and one participant secured promotion to group HR manager after a 10-year journey, citing the programme as the catalyst. Furthermore, prior to engagement, Optima also had no leadership or management development in place, but Wintle-Camp has since co-built leadership development, appraisal training, recruitment training and negotiation skills training.