The Power of Peers

Hello everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with Digging Deeper. Please remember to send in your comments that you may have,
any suggestions for future blogs that we can do for you.

Today, I want to talk about the value of peers and peer relationships. During the recent upheaval and the upcoming
economic upheaval we're largely facing in our business, what I found is our members have relied on each other more and
more during this period and with great value and great results. When it came to developing our responses to the virus on
the job sites and things like that, everybody has been able to rely on others for policies and procedures that they put in
place. We're able to take from those instead of having to recreate the wheel as we went through all of these new
adjustments we had to make, people learned and learned very quickly from their peers what they were doing and were
able to adopt and adapt and really save themselves a lot of time and accomplish a great deal through their peer
relationships.

Really, I think if you think of using peers and having peers and using those relationships on an ongoing basis, the value
really has stood out during this period and can help you as you go forward. Among the things, of course I already
mentioned, of course there's the work saving. Instead of having to create the wheel when you have a new initiative or
new idea, you can borrow those things from your peers and that's really helpful.

The next aspect that I found was there's a lot of critical thinking that goes on and can improve when you utilize your peers.
In construction, and really in any business, especially as a business leader, you're kind of stuck in your own world and you
kind of see your own environment, but that limits your thinking at times and limits really the quality sometimes of the
things you may come up with alone. When you expand and draw in your peers and you bring in their thinking, you're able
to come up with better ideas, better plans and maybe even see the weaknesses that you didn't see when you were kind
of stuck in your own realm.

We also have our own flows of information, some of which may be true or untrue. Recently as people were applying for
the government programs have come along with this upheaval, people had different sets of information. Did you have to
come under the 39 plus million threshold to get some of this payroll aid or not? People were getting different messages.
What I found is our members by reaching out, we're able to get the right information, we're able to move forward and
make the applications that they otherwise might've been frozen for.

The other thing we get with our peers as we see the different challenges they're facing, how they address and overcome
those challenges, and that helps us when we address our own challenges, helps us both see different solution sets perhaps,
but also helps us come to better judgments as we face those challenges just by seeing the other's challenges and hearing
those challenges.

The other thing it does is lets us know that we're not alone as we face these challenges and that can be a great comfort
and a great psychological support. I think again, as we face more challenging conditions today, that psychological support
we get from others, not just by seeing that others are going through it too, but by actually getting the direct support of
those others by getting them to lean in and weigh in with ideas and support, emotional support as well as direct support.
Those are truly things that have uncommon value I think for you as leaders.

Now, as you think about who are your peers, of course we run peer programs for contractors, but if you're a
superintendent or you're a project manager, think about who your peers are or who they can be. It may be your fellow
superintendents that have the ideas, or have already crossed this bridge, have already done that, already have this
experience that they can weigh in for you, or they can be a support system for you as you face some uncertainty or some
difficult situations that you're facing.

It may be cohorts in the industry, it may be your association. The AGC has been amazing and I know the ABC has as well
in these times in coming up with information and support and support system for their members. As a project manager
or superintendent, these people may be anywhere in your organization, and really, I encourage you to and in these difficult
and trying times to call on those peers, open yourself up for advice and support and all of that, and it'll help you get to the
other side.

Again, this is Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper. Thanks for tuning in.