CREATE THE THINKER

Develop judgment, not dependency.

Nobody taught me how to think.

Looking back over my career, I can't identify one person who deliberately developed me to become a lead, a foreman, a construction manager, or a superintendent. I advanced because of the skills and judgment I demonstrated. When the next responsibility came, I figured out how to handle it.

Early in my career, I managed people much the same way.

Do it this way.

Do it how I told you.

That gets the task completed. Sometimes that's exactly what the situation requires. But if that's the only way we lead people, we're not developing them. We're creating people who wait for the next instruction.

My approach has changed considerably over the last ten years.

Today, when someone calls me with a problem, I don't necessarily give them the answer even when I think I know it.

I ask, “What do you think we should do?”

Then we work through it.

What happens if we do it that way? What happens next? What does this affect downstream?

Sometimes the conversation takes twenty minutes. Sometimes we have two minutes and need to make a decision. The point isn't to turn every field problem into a classroom exercise. The point is to create enough dialogue that the person on the other end starts looking beyond the immediate task.

And sometimes their solution isn't mine.

That's okay.

I've had people propose solutions completely different from what I would have done and still arrive at the same safe, compliant, technically sound result.

My response is simple: “Yeah. You can do it that way. Go ahead.”

I might explain another way afterward, but I don't need someone to copy my solution simply because I'm the superintendent. If their thinking is sound, let them use it. Now they own the decision, and both of us may walk away with another solution in our toolbox.

That toolbox gets built everywhere.

I've spent my career looking at how things are put together. I notice HVAC ductwork in a restaurant. I look at electrical installations in stores. Driving down the road, I'll look at structural connections. I'll look at a utility pole and identify what's hanging on it or how the distribution is arranged.

I recently drove past a football field and caught myself looking at the light poles. There were no climbing pegs.

So how do they access the lights? Those fixtures have to be installed, aimed and maintained. Maybe they use a bucket truck.

I didn't need the answer.

The value was asking the question.

Every job, every installation, every problem and every solution adds another page to the encyclopedia in your head.

Eventually you encounter something you've never seen before, but pieces of it look familiar. You start connecting those pieces. That's where judgment comes from.

That's what I want to develop in people.

I can teach someone where the bolt hole goes. Or I can help them understand why it's there, what connects to it, what depends on its location, what happens if it's wrong and what comes next.

One teaches the task.

The other develops the person.

Not everybody wants that. Some people want to know what needs to be done, do good work and move on. There's nothing wrong with that. Development requires understanding the person in front of you, too.

But when someone has the curiosity and capacity to see more, I don't want to limit them by making every decision for them.

Technology makes that easier today. Send me a picture. Start a video call. I'll mark up the photo and send it back. Thirty years ago, getting that kind of information from the field could be a completely different process.

But the technology isn't what creates judgment.

The conversation does.

The questions do.

The opportunity to think does.

There are times when I still give the answer. Safety, irreversible decisions, structural issues, schedule exposure, cost, or simply the speed of the situation can require direct instruction. Developing people doesn't mean turning every decision into an experiment.

It means knowing when there is room to let someone think.

I wasn't deliberately developed this way. Much of what I learned came from observation, mistakes, responsibility, curiosity and having to solve the problem in front of me.

Maybe that's why I value this differently today.

My goal isn't to create someone who knows how to follow my instructions.

I don't need them to think like me.

I need them to be able to think without me.