THEY DON’T SEE WHAT YOU SEE

One of the harder things for me to learn when I started being responsible for other people was understanding that they don't see what I see.

That sounds simple now, but it wasn't simple to me then. I would look at a job and see what needed to happen next. I could see where we were going to get ourselves in trouble, what needed to be ordered, what somebody should be doing while we were waiting on something else. I could see the urgency in getting something done today because I knew what tomorrow looked like.

And sometimes I couldn't understand why everybody else didn't see it too.

Part of that was experience. I had already made some of those mistakes. I had already been on the job where something small turned into something big. After enough years, you start recognizing things earlier.

But part of it was me too.

I've always been committed to the work. This was never something I looked at as just a job. It became my career, and I treated it that way. The weather didn't matter much. Long days didn't matter much. If we had something that needed to get finished, I wanted to finish it.

Then you become responsible for other people and eventually realize you can't expect everybody to be exactly like you.

That doesn't mean lowering the standard.

It means understanding what you're working with.

Sometimes the crew is tired. Sometimes they've been working twelve-hour days for six days straight and they really do need a day off. Sometimes somebody has something happening at home. And sometimes, yes, somebody just doesn't have the commitment the job requires. Those aren't all the same thing, and it took experience for me to understand the difference.

I also started realizing that if I could see farther ahead than the crew, maybe my job wasn't always to wonder why they couldn't see it.

Maybe my job was to do something about what I could see.

If they're working, is there paperwork I can take care of?

Are there pictures I can submit?

Is there material I can order?

Is there a question I can get answered now so they're not standing around tomorrow waiting for somebody to call them back?

What can I do to keep them doing the work that actually moves the job?

That changed some things for me.

I stopped thinking that every problem was solved by asking people for more. Sometimes the better answer was figuring out how they could accomplish more with the time and energy they already had.

And I think that's one of the strange things about experience.

The longer you do something, the more obvious certain things become to you. You forget that they weren't always obvious. Somebody probably had to show you once too. Or you learned it the expensive way and never forgot it.

So when somebody doesn't see what I see, I try to remember that.

They haven't stood where I've stood yet.

And if I can already see the problem coming, maybe that's exactly why I'm standing where I am