Making Hard Work, Work Better

Career Period: 2009–2011

A Small Window in a long Career

When I look back over my years in construction, there are certain periods that stand out.

Not necessarily because they were the biggest jobs or the most difficult projects, but because something happened during those periods that changed the way I looked at the work and, ultimately, changed where my career went.

2009 through 2011 was one of those periods.

I was a traveling foreman doing AT&T work across Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and other markets. We were on the road constantly. We'd get up, be in the truck by 6:00 in the morning, get to the job site, work all day, and get back to the hotel around 8:00 or 9:00 at night.

Seven days a week.

Sometimes you actually hoped it would rain because a rainy day might give everybody a chance to breathe.

The customer 3 hours away. They didn't want excuses. They wanted to know when the work was going to be done, and once the work was finished, they wanted the site online.

There wasn't much room for things to go wrong.

At the end of a fourteen-hour day, the things on my mind weren't leadership theories. I was thinking about tomorrow's construction sequence, what material needed to be ready, where the next job was, what city we were headed to, and whether I could somehow get my laundry done.

It was demanding.

And I watched guys burn out because they simply couldn't keep up with that pace.

That made me start looking at the work differently.

If we were going to keep producing at that level, how could we make the work more efficient, so it didn't feel like we were working ourselves into the ground?

That question changed the way we operated.

The Work Wasn't Going to Get Easier

The answer wasn't to lower the expectations.

The customer still wanted the same thing.

The work still had to be done safely. It still had to meet the applicable standards and customer requirements. The testing still had to be completed. The documentation still had to be done. The integration and commissioning still had to happen.

The amount of work wasn't changing.

We had to change how we got the work done.

The jobs were bid for 12 days.

As we developed better processes and learned how to work together as a crew, we got them down to seven days.

We weren't cutting corners.

We were learning how to stop wasting time.

Knowledge Had to Build on Itself

One of the biggest changes was how we developed people.

I had experienced guys, but I also had green hands.

A green hand wasn't going to learn everything in a week. So instead of throwing ten different tasks at him, we'd work on one task until he understood it.

Do it.

Check it.

If it's wrong, fix it.

Do it again.

Keep doing it until he doesn't have to ask, “Is this right?”

Once he understood that task and could make the right decisions based on the applicable standards and customer requirements, we moved on to something else.

That repetition-built knowledge that stayed with the person.

Then that knowledge became useful somewhere else.

Eventually, the person who needed to be shown everything became somebody who could look at the work, understand what needed to happen, and make a good decision.

We weren't just getting the job done. We were building knowledge into the crew.

Everybody Needed to Be Useful

We also cross-trained.

That was important because we were traveling and working long stretches away from home.

People get sick. People need a day off. Sometimes somebody just isn't available.

The work couldn't stop because one person was the only guy who knew how to perform a certain task.

So different jobs became opportunities to teach somebody else.

Over time, everybody became more versatile.

If one person finished a task, he could go help somebody else.

If somebody was out, another person could step in.

We weren't constantly starting over because somebody new came into the crew. I had the same people week after week, and that made a huge difference.

We learned each other's strengths.

We learned how each other worked.

And every job built on the knowledge from the job before it.

That allowed the crew to work more like a team instead of three individuals working next to each other.

Sequence Became Everything

The other big piece was sequence.

When we arrived at a site, there was always plenty to do.

Tower work.

Groundwork.

Inventory.

Labels.

Color coding.

Testing.

Photos.

Asset recording.

Materials.

Outage planning.

Commissioning.

The trick was knowing what needed to happen next before the person doing the current task was finished.

While one guy was working, the next task was being prepared.

The materials were gathered.

The tools were ready.

The information was available.

When he finished, he moved to the next thing.

He didn't have to stand around waiting for somebody to tell him what to do.

That sounds simple now.

But when you're running a crew for fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, those little delays add up.

Sequence eliminated a lot of wasted time.

I Didn't Want Work Stopping Six Hours from the Office

Being six or seven hours from the corporate office changed the way you looked at problems.

If we were missing something, waiting for somebody else wasn't always an option.

So, I carried spare material.

We accumulated enough extra material that I eventually rented a 10-by-20 storage unit and basically turned it into our little warehouse.

If something failed testing, we had a chance of having a replacement.

If something was missing, I might already have it.

Sometimes the crew would finish for the night, go eat dinner, and I'd go get what we needed for the next morning.

That meant we could start the next day instead of spending half of it waiting.

Again, it wasn't complicated.

It was about removing things that didn't need to slow us down.

Eventually, the Work Started Feeling Different

The workload hadn't disappeared.

We were still working hard.

But the crew became more efficient.

They knew what they were doing.

They knew the applicable standards and customer requirements.

They knew what right looked like.

They knew how to help each other.

They didn't have to ask about every little thing.

And because we were getting the work done faster, we had a little more time to recharge.

That mattered.

A crew that's completely burned out isn't going to perform at its best.

We weren't trying to work less.

We were trying to waste less.

And it paid off.

The jobs that had been bid for 12 days were getting completed in seven.

We had fewer return trips.

We had no safety issues.

We didn't miss integrations or commissioning.

The paperwork got done.

And the customer project managers noticed.

When the Customer Starts Asking for You

Eventually, we became the number one requested crew.

There were several customer project managers, and they knew what they were going to get when they gave us a job.

We made their jobs easier.

They didn't have to chase us.

They didn't have to wonder if the work was going to get finished.

They didn't have to keep sending people back because something had been missed.

We made them look good.

That trust eventually led to more responsibility.

I started getting involved with scheduling and directing other crews.

The owner gave me the freedom to operate.

And eventually, the performance of the crew and the trust that had been built led to a Construction Manager position with the company.

Looking Back

Fifteen years later, some of the things we were doing probably don't seem particularly innovative.

A lot of them are probably standard practice today.

But at the time, they made a difference.

And that's what I remember about that period.

I wasn't sitting there trying to invent a leadership system.

I was trying to figure out how we could do a tremendous amount of work without making the people doing it feel like they were constantly fighting the job.

The answer wasn't working harder.

It was sequence, preparation, knowledge, cross-training, and consistency.

The same people working together every week allowed the knowledge to build.

The better the crew became, the less time was wasted.

The less time we wasted, the faster the jobs got done.

The faster the jobs got done, the more time everybody had to recharge.

And the better we performed, the more trust we earned.

That trust eventually changed my career.

That's something I still believe is worth teaching to the next generation of leaders.

The goal isn't simply to get more out of people. It's to build people and processes that allow more to be accomplished with less wasted effort.

That's still one of the best ways I know to improve performance without burning people out.

Then fix the process.

Look at the sequence.
Look at the preparation.
Look at the knowledge on the crew.
Look at where you're losing time.
Look at whether one person has become a bottleneck.

Don't automatically solve a workload problem by asking people to work harder. First figure out why the work is taking so much effort.

When I work with people today, especially those who are going to become the leaders of tomorrow, I try to teach them the same thing I learned back then:

My principle hasn't changed; the equipment has, the technology has; the standards have, the way we manage projects has.

Fifteen years later, I still use the same approach.

The Lessons are Still Relevant Today

It's not always about working harder. Sometimes the biggest gains come from figuring out how to make the work, work better.

Teach people.

Build knowledge.

Sequence the work.

Prepare for the next step.

Cross-train the crew.

Remove the things that unnecessarily slow them down.

Then let the results speak for themselves.

That's a small window into my career, but it's one of the periods that taught me the most about leading people.