Never Take Employees for Granted
Leaders assume that all their employees know what they’re doing all the time. Sometimes they don’t (new job, new equipment, unfamiliar conditions, poorly developed plans, etc.). Instead of simply assuming, make sure you provide the proper training and support so your people can do their jobs correctly the first time.
Watch Digging Deeper this week as Dennis discusses some of the consequences of taking things for granted and mentions a simple way to avoid this trap. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.
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Good morning everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with the CEO Roundtable program for Contractors. Thanks for tuning in
today.
Today I want to talk about sort of a human tendency, which is to take for granted that other people know what they're
doing. I went to the office today to shoot these blogs and encountered one of my colleagues. He told me the story of, I
guess it's a road building, a civil company, and the owner of this company, of course, had ridden himself on the big
equipment and move dirt around and all of that. He had a fella who was working for him, driving a big piece of equipment,
and he did something stupid. It turns over, had a bit of an accident, and cost him about $300,000 just to rescue the piece
of equipment that this person was using.
That sort of brought to mind the idea that sometimes we just take for granted that people know what they're doing. I
think this happens lots of times in our organizations. We might hire a new superintendent or a new project manager, and
we put them on a job because we've seen their resume, or we heard them talk, and then they get out there and they start
messing up. They don't start messing up because they're bad people, they're doing something they hadn't done before.
We might say, "Oh, I thought you had done that before," and they might say, "Well yeah, but not exactly this type of thing.
So, I had never seen this building system before, or this wall system, or never had done this sort of application that's being
utilized here."
But again, we just sort of assume, and of course you know what they say about that assume word, but we just sort of
assume that people know what they're doing. I see that around construction probably more so today than ever, and part
of the reason is the shortage of qualified people we have available in the industry in all areas. But even on a job site we
have temporary employees out there, we have subcontractors using sub labor themselves who don't really know their
company, and their company's processes and all of that. We might be starting, let's just say, I'll use masonry as an example,
we might be starting some brick laying back on the back quarter of the building or something and they might not be doing
it right. They might not be doing it level, they might not be leaving good seams, et cetera. They might've even started at
the wrong point, so they're not even laying the brick in the right place. Things like that.
Again, we assume that subcontractor knows what they're doing, and I guess as a whole that subcontractor probably does
know what they're doing, but they may have people out on the job who don't know what they're doing. So, if you're the
overall superintendent on that job or you're the superintendent or foreman for that crew, if you assume those people
know what they're doing, you're possibly headed for some rework or some disaster. Given the tight schedules and tight
timelines that everybody's working under there, we really don't have time in construction to be doing anything twice.
Much less in some cases, you actually have to tear things back down to start over again, which takes even more time and
puts a project even further behind.
So, as you go out to work tomorrow, just think about that. Where are the areas where you might assume somebody knows
what they're doing, and think about if you're really taking for granted, or whether you're applying the appropriate
onboarding training, oversight, and support that's necessary for folks that might not know exactly what they're doing.
Just one last word on this. Oftentimes we become experts at certain things we do, and it becomes easy and second nature
to us. I think in the end, that's kind of where this taking things for granted comes from. They're in construction, they must
know this. They're working in concrete, they must know this. Well, the fact that a matter is we've got a lot of people out
there who don't know, so we have to guide them, we have to show them, and as leaders, it's our responsibility to make
sure that all occurs.
Again, try not to take these things for granted. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper. Thanks for tuning in.
