THE OPERATING CODE | 007
THE WORK NOBODY SEES
Successful results don't always tell the whole story.
There's a lot of work that goes into getting a job done that most people will never see. The phone calls after hours, the problems that come up when everybody else has gone home, the extra trips, the weekends, and the personal plans that sometimes have to change because something needs to be taken care of.
I've dealt with plenty of those situations over the years, and I understand that they come with responsibility. Sometimes you have to do whatever is reasonably necessary to take care of the customer, support your people, and get the job finished. I've never had a problem with stepping up when the circumstances called for it, but I've also learned that just because a project finished successfully doesn't mean everything behind that success was working the way it should have been.
I've seen what happens when crews are scheduled before all the material is available, when important information isn't ready, or when problems that should have been resolved earlier are left for the people in the field to figure out. Good people usually find a way around those problems. They make phone calls, locate material, rearrange schedules, work additional hours, and sometimes take on responsibilities that weren't originally theirs.
The customer may never know any of that happened. They see a completed project, and from their perspective, everything worked out. But somebody inside the organization needs to understand what it actually took to get there. There's a big difference between a project that went well because everybody was prepared and one that went well because a handful of people worked themselves into the ground keeping it together.
Both projects may have finished on time, but that doesn't mean they were equally successful from an operational standpoint.
Capability Isn't the Same as Capacity
One of the things I've learned is that having somebody who can do something doesn't necessarily mean you have enough people or resources to keep doing it consistently.
You might have one superintendent who knows how to handle a particular type of work, a project manager who can keep several difficult projects moving, or one person everybody calls because they know that person will find a solution. Those are valuable people to have, but an organization needs to understand what happens when they're already committed somewhere else, unavailable, or simply have more work than one person can reasonably handle.
If everything has to wait until that individual becomes available, the organization may not have as much depth as it believes it does. It has a capable person carrying responsibilities that haven't been adequately distributed or supported.
There's another cost to that dependency. Every time you pull somebody away to solve another problem, you're taking their attention away from something else they were supposed to be doing. A superintendent who spends the day working as another crew member may help finish that particular job, but the other crews, schedules, customer questions, and upcoming work still need to be managed.
Sometimes stepping into another role is necessary, and I believe a good leader should be willing to do that. But there's a difference between helping when the situation calls for it and building an operation that regularly depends on people covering responsibilities outside their normal roles.
Sacrifice Should Lead to Something
I'm not suggesting that leaders should refuse to work additional hours or step outside their normal responsibilities. I've done both throughout my career, and I would do it again when the circumstances required it. There are times when a customer needs an answer, a crew needs help, or an unexpected problem has to be handled, regardless of what time it is or what else you had planned.
But when the same people are making the same sacrifices repeatedly because the same problems keep happening, I believe leadership needs to start asking why.
If somebody spends an entire day locating material that should have been available before the job started, we should understand why it wasn't there. If only one person knows how to handle a particular problem, we should consider who else could be trained. And if supervisors are constantly being pulled away from managing their crews to cover work that wasn't properly staffed, we need to recognize what that is costing the rest of the operation.
Those situations aren't always somebody's fault, and they don't necessarily mean the organization is poorly managed. Construction is unpredictable, and even well-prepared teams encounter problems. But when the same situations keep happening, there's an opportunity to learn from them and improve how the work is supported.
The extra effort should accomplish more than getting through another difficult day. Whenever possible, what we learn should help make the next project better prepared and the next person more capable of handling the responsibility.
Understand What Success Really Cost
I believe managing people involves more than knowing whether a project finished on time, met its budget, and satisfied the customer. Those results are important, but leadership should also understand what was required from the people who produced them.
Were the crews properly supported? Did the organization have enough qualified people available? Were responsibilities distributed appropriately, or did a few individuals repeatedly have to cover work that should have been shared? And if the project was successful because somebody went far beyond what was reasonably expected, is that something we can continue depending on?
Those questions matter because sometimes the people holding an operation together are also the people making its weaknesses difficult to recognize.
I don't believe we can eliminate every unexpected problem or every personal sacrifice that comes with responsibility. Construction doesn't work that way, and there will always be times when good people have to step up and do more than originally planned.
But I do believe leadership needs to recognize the difference between somebody making an extraordinary effort when circumstances demand it and an organization continually depending on that effort to compensate for problems it should be addressing.
The strongest person on the team should be an advantage. They should never become the operating plan.
— What Successful Results Can Hide