Break down goals
After building consensus on his leadership team, Miller still has to bring the rest of his 390 employees on board.
“I like to break it down into bite-size pieces, creating a vision that people can really understand,” he says.
His leadership team clearly assigns individual roles while setting goals.
“We try to make it as clear as possible where one role stops and another starts,” he says. “We sit down and identify specifically on a project: ‘Somebody’s handling that component, somebody else is handling that component, somebody else’s job is to focus on another.’”
Those roles may shift as you get into a project and watch it play out, but the key is clearly communicating what you expect up front as well as any changes in that along the way.
“Be open enough to identify if there’s a gap or if there’s a duplication,” Miller says.
While he can assign roles broadly, he lets direct reports and managers flesh those out for their teams.
Gregg Lynch, the executive vice president who oversees the southern part of the South Central region — including Houston, Austin and Louisiana, says clear communication is the key to trickling down goals.
“Delegation really only works when the responsibilities of each individual are clearly defined and communicated, not only to that individual but others down the chain,” Lynch says.
After the annual regional leadership meeting, group leaders meet quarterly to monitor goals and objectives. Monthly, each office offers further updates on their progress. In between all of those meetings, managers reiterate goals with their employees and constantly review their progress.
For example, under the broad goal of safety, one person may be responsible for administering safety talks for other employees and measured on the quality of his talks and how many people attend. The project manager may be in charge of keeping that employee on task and getting subcontractors to participate. And the superintendent may be roaming the site looking for safety adjustments to make during the project.
“So it’s the one goal: Be safe,” Lynch says. “But everybody has a different role to make sure that happens.”
The catch that comes with defining and delegating roles is that you have to stay out of the way and let employees perform.
“You have to trust your people,” Lynch says. “Their authority must be backed up by you and supported by you. So if I have a guy that makes a wrong decision, I can’t hold that decision against him. I put him in the place to make that decision and I’ll support it. I can give [him] advice, but I really can’t second-guess that decision.”
It becomes important to monitor employees along the way so you can keep them on the right path before they veer off.
