Culture of Urgency and Accountability

Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.

Today I want to talk about a culture of urgency and accountability. In construction, just because of the nature of
construction and the fact that you have timelines, deadlines all along the way during a construction project, a culture of
urgency and accountability is really necessary.

And it's necessary both from an overall company standpoint, as well as from a job and jobsite standpoint. So, to have this
culture of urgency and accountability, the first thing is, of course, you've got to have the right people. And thinking about
when you're doing your hiring or you're evaluating your people, what are the common traits that really make somebody
successful in construction?

And we thought about this recently when we were talking about business development here internally and doing some
presentations and webinars, and it really comes down to likeability and drive, for that business development position.
But you could really extend that to the whole of your construction team. You want them to be likable so they can get along
well with customers, get along well with subcontractors, suppliers or in the case of subcontractors, with the GC partners
on the job. And drive is really crucial right down through the organization, in all of the positions.

You also need the ability to organize and prioritize. And those are very important in construction as well. If you don't have
those people in your organization, it's going to be much more difficult to really create the urgency and accountability that
you want as an organization.

One little note, here in terms of urgency, urgency is very important in construction, but you don't want to neglect the
important in favor of the urgent, that can lead you to disastrous results down the line. So, if you have people that are so
caught up in getting the minutia done and lose the big picture, that's also difficult.

So, the urgency that you really want to push for, and you want to have, is the urgency to do what's important and do it on
a timely basis. Now, in terms of accountability, accountability can't just be for results. In other words, okay, job finished,
fine, we made money, we finished on time.

That's all well and good. But if your project manager or superintendent team left a wreckage internally, or customer
relations or subcontractor or supplier relations, any of those things, of course it is not a true success.

So, accountability. To really have it, there has to be for process as well as results. So, the other part of that is it's hard to
hold somebody accountable along the way to really know how we're trending if we're only measuring the result. But are
they using the checklist? Are they having a good turnover meeting, good turnover process? Are they coordinating well
with their team members on their job along the way?

Are they holding others accountable for their timelines that are going to affect their timelines? If you only know how
things are going at the point of results, of course, if you have things going awry along the way, and you don't know it, the
results can be really bad. It's also important as a leader, and this is particular to a job site I'd say, you have to establish
urgency and accountability on day one.

If you're very lax at the start of a project and let's just think of your first meeting. So, we hold our first meeting at the job
site and let just say, people are wandering in 5 minutes, 10 minutes afterwards. You yourself aren't prepared to start on
time. What kind of tone is that going to set for the job?

If you want urgency and accountability, you have to show urgency and be accountable. So, urgency and accountability are
really crucial, both for companies and on the job site and make sure that you're doing the things and setting the example
for everybody else. In Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.