A leader, as opposed to a manager or “boss”, has a formidable responsibility to not only manage the current business, which generates significant revenue and needs continual incremental innovation to hit short-term success targets, but also to champion transformational innovation that will lead to future success.
Unfortunately, I have found that most construction professionals are biased toward focusing on the current business. Observing the calendars of my consulting clients for a decade indicated that most of their scheduled time was allocated to managing current business operations and occasionally incremental innovations. Activities related to long-term transformational innovations rarely appeared except on special occasions like seminars. In short, construction professionals were day-to-day managers that rarely grew into leaders even as their companies grew under them.
From Manager to Leader
High energy day-to-day construction professionals who have built successful companies do not suddenly awaken one day and realize they have evolved into a business leader. Rather, the growth from boss or manager to leader is a gradual step-by-step experiential process that must be learned and practiced gradually in proper ordered steps. The first four necessary steps from boss to leader are as follows:
Step 1. Delegate Operating Decisions – Managers like making decisions – after all, to some extent it’s the ability to do so that made them successful.
- It is human nature to resist delegating decisions in our personal areas of expertise.
- This behavior is reinforced by another common management bias – putting the urgent ahead of the important.
Construction professionals who successfully manage organizations as they grow beyond the one man show give their complex organizations the leadership bandwidth they demand.
Step 2. Articulate a Long-Term Vision – Changing existing work processes and cultural norms to accommodate transformational innovation is challenging in any organization but the unique complexity of the construction industry compounds the problem.
- Functional leaders in a construction organization have widely diverse goals and performance score cards. The leader of a large construction organization must articulate a long-term vision that everyone in the company can identify with and benefit from. The accountants, marketers, estimators, project managers, superintendents, foremen, and tradesmen must all be invested in making their unique contribution to achieving the company’s long-term goal.
Step 3. Build the Right Team – Every legendary football coach answered the question, “How do you win so many games?” with the same response: “I don’t win games, the team wins games. I just find the best players.” The construction professional who has evolved from being a “manager” to being a “leader” no longer hires relatives, friends, and neighbors but rather recruits experts in each function who buy in to his/her long-term vision for the company. In other words, he/she builds a team of trustworthy competent people.
Step 4. Allocate Sufficient Assets – For decades in the failed projects completion business, I repeatedly found that we were finishing jobs for otherwise successful contractors who had grown beyond the working capital necessary to complete a large complex project. In other words, they had failed to allocate enough working capital to finish the project. It is the job of the leader to not only articulate a long-term vision but also provide their trusted team with the tools to get the job done.
Inspire Leadership
- “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs
- “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett
- “No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.” – Andrew Carnegie
- “When you hire good people and you provide good jobs and good wages and a career, good things are going to happen.” James Sinegal
- “You have to be honest and authentic and not hide. I think the leader today has to demonstrate both transparency and vulnerability and with that comes truthfulness and humility.” Howard Schultz
These quotes from renowned business leaders demonstrate leadership far beyond my humble attempts to explain it.
I’m speaking directly in this series of blogs on construction business leadership to the many construction professionals who have succeeded in building their start-up companies or next generation businesses into dominant players in their field and are now perched on the brink of the next leap forward.
Next week we’ll connect the dots and paint a portrait of a modern construction industry leader.
For more information on the manager to leader process, read more here: LEADER
For a broader view on building an effective team, read more here: TEAM BUILDING
To receive the free weekly Construction Messages, ask questions, or make comments contact me at research@simplarfoundation.org. Please circulate this widely. It will benefit your constituents. This research is continuous and includes new information weekly as it becomes available. Thank you.
