The modern strategic facilities manager isn’t simply responsible for the building. They’re responsible for understanding how the building, the workplace and the facilities function support what the organisation is trying to achieve.
That’s a different job to what most people outside the profession think a facilities manager does (ie some version of ‘keeps the lights on’ or ‘sorts the boiler’). And we’ve all gotten a call at 6.40am on a Tuesday because the lift has decided it no longer believes in the third floor.
Buildings need to be kept safe, compliant and working, and somebody has to make that happen. But it’s a description of the job as it was, not the job as it’s becoming.
It uses a lot of the same knowledge, but it asks different questions, speaks a different language and sits in different meetings.
So what changes when an FM starts thinking like a business leader?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. Here’s where to start.
Jump to:
Iwfm-qualifications
Understand the business beyond the facilities function
Strategic facilities management begins with a slightly uncomfortable question: how well do you really understand the organisation you work for?
Not the estate. You know the estate. You could draw the plant room from memory.
The question is whether you could explain, in a sentence or two, what the business makes or does, how it makes money and what keeps its directors awake at night.
Plenty of experienced FMs would struggle, and that’s not a criticism. After all, nobody asked them to delve into those details. The role was defined as “look after the building”, so that’s what they did, and did well. But you can’t make a strategic contribution to something you only partly understand.
A strategic FM can answer questions like these:
- What does the organisation produce or deliver, and for whom?
- How does it generate revenue, and which parts of the business generate most of it?
- What are its biggest operational risks?
- What are its growth plans over the next three to five years?
- What pressures are senior leaders under right now, whether that’s cost, headcount, regulation, competition or reputation?
- Where does the facilities function enable those objectives, and where does it get in the way?
That last question is the really important one.
If the business plans to double its lab capacity, open two new regional offices or move to a hybrid working model, facilities is either part of the plan or a problem within the plan. A strategic FM wants to sit squarely within the first category, and the only way to get there is to understand the plan in the first place.
Stop talking about FM in isolation
Take the last significant request you put to senior management and read it back. Does it sound like this?
“The HVAC system on the second floor is at end of life and needs replacing.”
That’s a true statement. It’s also, from a director’s chair, a statement about a piece of equipment they’ve never seen and don’t particularly want to think about. It comes as an unplanned cost and has no obvious connection to anything they’re being measured on.
Now try this:
“This investment reduces the risk of an unplanned failure that would take a floor of the building out of use, improves our energy performance against the targets in the sustainability strategy, and avoids an estimated maintenance cost that’s rising year on year.”
Same request. Same kit. Completely different conversation.
The second version is about risk, performance and money, which is the language the boardroom already speaks. It doesn’t require anyone to care about air handling units. It just requires them to care about the business (which they already do).
This is the commercial-language shift, and it’s probably the single most visible difference between an operational FM and a strategic one. The strategic FM translates, so that every facilities decision is presented in terms of what it does for the organisation, NOT what it does for the building.
Understand finance
You don’t need an accountancy qualification to lead a facilities function. You do however, need to be comfortable in a room where money is being discussed, and that means knowing the vocabulary well enough to use it without flinching.
At minimum, a senior facilities manager should be fluent in:
- CAPEX versus OPEX, and why the finance director cares deeply about which column something lands in
- Return on investment, including how to estimate it honestly rather than optimistically
- Total cost of ownership, because the purchase price of an asset is usually the least interesting number attached to it
- Lifecycle costs, which is how you explain why the cheaper option is often the expensive one
- Forecasting, so budgets reflect what the estate will truly need rather than what it needed last year plus three per cent
- Cost avoidance, which is real money even though it never shows up on an invoice
- Business cases, and how to write one that a non-specialist can approve with confidence
The FM who understands these things stops being someone who spends the organisation’s money and becomes someone who manages part of its investment. Those are very different reputations to have, and only one of them leads to a seat at the strategy table.
If financial planning is the area you feel least confident in, you’re in good company. It’s one of the most common gaps we see in FMs moving into senior roles, and it’s also one of the most fixable. Building a business case is a skill, not a talent, and it can be learned.
Become comfortable with risk
Operational FM is very good at building risk. Legionella, asbestos, fire safety, electrical compliance, working at height. These are managed rigorously because the consequences of getting them wrong are severe and the regulations are clear.
Strategic FM widens the lens to organisational risk, and that’s a less tidy landscape. It includes things like:
- Business continuity. If the main site is unusable for a week, what happens to revenue, customers and staff?
- Compliance, not just as a set of certificates, but as a live exposure that changes as regulation does
- Operational resilience, meaning how well the organisation absorbs disruption rather than simply avoids it
- Supplier dependency. How many critical services sit with one contractor, and what happens if that contractor fails?
- Asset failure, particularly of the assets nobody thinks about until they stop
- Reputational risk, because a building that fails publicly is a story, and stories travel
The strategic FM doesn’t just manage these risks. They can articulate them to the board in terms of likelihood and impact, prioritise them against each other and explain which ones the organisation is choosing to accept and why. Governance and risk are explicitly senior-level responsibilities in the IWFM framework for a reason.
This is where facilities stops being a back-office function and becomes part of how the organisation protects itself.
Develop leadership and influencing skills
The most senior FM in an organisation is rarely the person who knows the most about HVAC, cleaning specifications or compliance schedules. There will be people in the team who know more, and that is exactly as it should be.
The senior FM is the person who can:
- influence stakeholders who have their own priorities and no obligation to share yours
- negotiate, with suppliers, with budget holders and occasionally with the people who sit in the office with the best view
- communicate with directors in a way that gets decisions made rather than deferred
- manage competing priorities without either burning out or making promises the estate can’t keep
- lead change, which is a euphemism for persuading people to do things differently when they were perfectly happy with the old way
- get people behind a strategy so that it survives contact with reality
None of these are technical skills. All of them are learnable. And they matter more the further up the organisation you go, because at senior level, being right isn’t enough. You have to be right and persuasive, ideally in that order.
Use data to make better decisions
Nobody is asking facilities managers to become data scientists. But what a strategic FM does need is the habit of using evidence to make the case for decisions. Most facilities functions are sitting on more useful data than they realise:
- energy consumption by building, floor or asset
- maintenance history, including reactive versus planned work
- occupancy and space utilisation
- service performance against SLAs
- cost per square metre, per head or per service line
- incident and near-miss records
- customer and user feedback, however grudgingly it was given
Individually, these are operational records. Combined, they’re the basis of a strategic argument. “We should consolidate onto three floors” is an opinion. “Utilisation data shows the fourth floor averages 31 per cent occupancy and costs us £180,000 a year to run” is a business case.
The data was always there. The difference is that somebody decided to use it.
Think beyond the current financial year
Operational FM lives in the present. What needs doing this week, what the budget allows this quarter, what must be compliant by the audit.
Strategic FM lives partly in the future, and that’s a habit worth cultivating. A senior facilities manager should have a view on:
- Asset lifecycle. Which major assets are approaching replacement, and is the organisation prepared for it?
- Estate strategy. Does the current portfolio match where the business is going, or where it’s been?
- Future workplace requirements. How will people use the space in three years’ time, and does anyone know?
- Sustainability, including net zero commitments that were made in a press release and now need delivering in a plant room
- Technology, from building management systems to sensors to whatever the CAFM vendor is promising next
- Skills, both in the FM team and across the supply chain, and whether they will still be adequate as the role changes
- Future regulatory requirements, because compliance is a moving target and the strategic FM prefers to see it coming
Thinking long-term is about making sure that when the board asks “what will the estate look like in 2030?”, the FM has an answer.
Develop the skills to operate strategically
Everything above adds up to a fairly demanding brief. Understand the business. Speak commercially. Handle finance and risk. Lead people. Use data. Think years ahead. It would be reasonable to wonder where an FM is supposed to acquire all of that knowledge and capability while also, presumably, still keeping the building open.
Some of it comes from experience and some of it doesn’t.
Strategic review, governance and risk, innovation and change, financial performance, sustainability, property and procurement strategy are complex areas, and the FMs who handle them best usually didn’t get there by accident.
As the role becomes more strategic, FMs need structured development across leadership, financial planning, risk, sustainability, governance and strategic planning, in the same way that their operational skills were built deliberately in the first place. That’s exactly the territory covered by the IWFM Level 6 qualification, which is designed for senior FMs operating at, or moving towards, strategic level.
The 6.40am lift call may still happen. But the person taking it will also be the person who, later that day, explains to the board why the lift modernisation programme is a business continuity investment rather than a maintenance cost. And that, in the end, is the whole difference.
Chris Morris – Xenon Group Director
Chris has spent the past 15 years working in the field of Facilities Management training and qualifications, teaching facilities managers how to be the best they can be.
A strategist and creative thinker, Chris is also a former chair of the IWFM Rising FMs group, a contributor to Facilitate magazine and iFM.net and a firm believer in the value of identifying and developing the strengths of an organisation’s people.
