Doing Things the Right Way
Construction is, for the most part, a pride-filled world (and we mean pride in a good, healthy sense, of course). When there is tangible proof of the contributions you and your team make to your communities, that lends itself to a healthy culture of proud accomplishments.
Please tune in this week as Dennis revisits the concept a having a prideful culture and offers five tips for instilling or re-instilling pride in your workforce. What innovations have you employed to increase your organization’s pride? What would you add to Dennis’ list? Please share with us in the comments.
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Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with The Family Business Institute Digging Deeper.
Today, I want to talk about something I've talked a lot about in the long ago past, but I haven't really talked about a lot
recently, and that's pride and doing things the right way. We've talked that construction really is a pride-filled environment
in a best case or normal case scenario. We build these things that are part of our community and all of that, and there's
something physical when we're done with our work that shows our accomplishment. And I think it's huge in the
construction workplace as well, and a big factor in culture is really the pride. I think people with pride perform better.
They perform better quality, they get more production, they have better relationships with your customers, suppliers,
subcontractors, they're more engaged in their work, they're more loyal, more likely to stay for a long time with the
company, possibly even their entire career with one company when they have pride in the work and in the company,
they're working for.
So as leaders, what are you doing and what can you do to instill this pride or assure that the company and workplace
operate in a prideful manner and a manner that allows people to feel the pride in what they're doing and the company
they're working for. So, here's a few things you can be doing. Number one, and this may be the most important of all, is
setting high standards. Nobody, I guess, has pride in doing a lousy job or doing lousy work, right? Or doing poor work. You
get pride from doing good work. So set high standards. High standards for quality, high standards for integrity, service,
relationships, teamwork, respect, mutual respect. This is both internally and externally. And civility. Set high standards for
all of those things.
Number two, enforcement. Now, I don't want you to put on your police uniform and be the police at work all day long.
You're not doing this; you're not doing that. That's not really positive enforcement. Instead, what we're looking for is
probably supportive accountability. You want to be support, but you want your folks to be accountable for doing the things
they should do to make sure that a good job is done. But on the police side of that, you also can't allow people to act
contrary to your values or the high standards, or you risk those standards becoming meaningless or having no standards
at all.
You may think you're setting high standards, but they're not translating down through the organization. So, we need
enforcement, but hopefully in the support of accountability, but if you have somebody who just doesn't get it, isn't going
to get it, and is undermining that, you may have to take much stronger corrective action. I'll let you decide what that is.
Number three, reinforcement. Remember I just said enforcement. Number three is reinforcement. So, awards and
recognition, very important part of reinforcement of high standards. Catching people, doing the right things, and letting
them know, thanking people for their performance to those high standards, celebrating wins big and small. All of those
are part of reinforcement.
Number four, make sure mistakes are opportunities for learning and improvement. And this is a big thing. When things go
wrong, it can go one of two ways. People can regain their confidence, regain their pride, or they can get buried and lose
it sometimes for their career. They can lose confidence and not be as good as they ever were before, and that happens a
lot with bad jobs. So how you handle those mistakes and problems is really critical from an organizational culture
standpoint. Very important that the public reprimands shouldn't happen. Reprimand in private, praise in public. Always a
good thing to think of as a leader. But make sure, again, that when you have a mistake, you turn it around into an
opportunity for learning and improvement. Number five, show your pride and enthusiasm and that will help other people
gain that pride that you're looking for. How do you do that? Cheer lead. Really, the rah-rah stuff works. Wear your
company logo, wear it often, wear it with pride.
Outfit your team with the company logo and the company's sayings. I remember Mascaro Construction, I went down to
their room, grabbed a sweatshirt and it says, build with the best. Wearing a sweatshirt that says build with the best, that
tends to instill pride, right? So those are the kinds of things you can do. The other way to show your pride and your
enthusiasm, put your history and your values on the wall of your company, hopefully in some clever, artistic way and a
neat way, but you should have pride in the history of your company, pride in the values that you stand for. Put them on
the wall and let people see them every day. If your people have pride, they're going to be happy. They're going to be
happy working for you, so they're going to be there for a long time, and your company's going to do great things.
Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.
