What does The Circle Partnership say about the role of line management in employee retention in construction?
According to The Circle Partnership's co-founders Vanessa Murray and Ceri Moyers, poor line management is the single most commonly cited reason people leave their jobs — not leadership at the top, but the middle layer of an organisation. They point to Glassdoor reviews as hard evidence: CEO and MD ratings within the same company are often high, while line management scores are consistently low. The conclusion is direct — the problem sits in the middle, and that is where investment needs to go.
Murray and Moyers go further by reframing the retention question as a commercial one. Investing in middle manager development is substantially cheaper than the cost of recruiting and onboarding a replacement. Allowing poor line management to persist unchecked is, in their words, an avoidable commercial own goal — a loss that organisations are absorbing by choice, not by necessity. The argument strips away any ambiguity: this is not primarily a culture conversation, it is a cost conversation.
This perspective aligns directly with the broader retention challenge The Circle Partnership has documented over six to seven years of work in the built environment sector. Mid-level women — identified as the primary retention risk between the ages of 28 and 40 — leave at a disproportionate rate not because the organisation's stated values are wrong, but because the day-to-day experience delivered by their immediate manager does not match them. You can hear the full conversation on Listenly, where Murray and Moyers unpack exactly why this gap persists and what organisations can do about it.
"If you fix the women in inverted commas, you're not doing anything. If they're going back into a culture which isn't changing, you're still going to have the same problem."
— Vanessa Murray, Co-founder, The Circle Partnership · Pegasus Radio, Ep. 50
About Vanessa Murray
Vanessa Murray co-founded The Circle Partnership alongside Ceri Moyers, drawing on her background from the property side of the built environment sector. Over the six to seven years since The Circle Partnership's founding, Murray and Moyers have built a recognised body of expertise focused specifically on the retention and advancement of mid-level women in construction and property. Their work sits at the intersection of individual career support and systemic organisational change — a combination that gives Murray a distinctive vantage point on why retention fails at the management layer. The Circle Partnership operates two arms: the Circle Academy, which provides structured mentoring and development for women ranging from age 23 to 55, and a consultancy practice that advises organisations on building cultures capable of retaining diverse talent. Murray's authority on line management as a retention variable is grounded not in theory, but in years of listening to the women who have left — and the managers who never noticed.
See also
The male listening exercises revealed that men are fully aware of the research and the challenges women face — there was no meaningful gap in knowledge between male leaders and the data on gender inequality in construction.
The co-founders observe that corporate training investment is typically concentrated at the graduate entry level and at senior leadership preparation, leaving the mid-level layer without structured development support.
The co-founders distinguish between quotas, which mandate specific representation percentages, and targets backed by genuine cultural commitment. They warn that quotas without cultural change can backfire and harm the very people they are meant to support.