Get them ready
One of your most important responsibilities as a leader is to remove obstacles that make it harder for your employees to do their jobs. Lack of knowledge or lack of proper training is certainly an obstacle and so it’s your job to make sure they are prepared for different scenarios.
“We’ve gotten better over time allowing people to mature in their roles and to build confidence in themselves,” Smith says. “If you put people in situations way before they are prepared, you don’t allow them that ability. Their confidence isn’t yet there. If you don’t have the support system built in, you’re letting them down as a leader. … Our job is to make sure the support system and the resources are in place and to set direction and align and provide the necessary resources for everybody to be successful.”
It starts with making sure you have the right people in the right positions with the right amount of training.
“Then you have to make sure you continually develop them,” Smith says. “I don’t care what business you are in. I don’t care what seat you are in. You can never be finished with the learning process. It’s having our guys step back and understand what they can control and having the wherewithal to adapt when things do change. They know that change is inevitable and that things are going to happen that they had no way to affect because it was out of their control.”
One of the biggest challenges in the construction business is the coordination of schedules for various tasks that need to be done with multiple projects in a short time frame.
When those situations occur, Smith doesn’t want his people wandering around wondering what to do next. He wants each person to know what his or her role is so the process can operate smoothly. So he makes sure his employees have a chance to run through those scenarios and see what works best.
“We stage these events called kaizens,” Smith says. “That’s a cross-departmental team that comes together from job sites and it’s a number of the job contractors that come together and we get to the meat of the matter and cut any excess out of the process. That whole lean process is to minimize the steps it takes to get to an outcome. It’s all about improving your processes.”
You have to do the prep work up front so you know what needs to be done with a project. Then you need to be able to convey that knowledge to your people and put them in a position to deal with it successfully.
“We are only successful here when the team works well together and understands one another,” Smith says. “They have to be honest with one another. If one department is not supporting another or an individual isn’t hitting the expectation, we have to be honest. We’re doing them a favor in the short term and the organization in the long term and the customer a favor all the time.”
