Become a Complete and Respected Construction Professional
How do you develop your NextGen leaders? How do they earn respect across the spectrum of the contracting constituencies (employees, owners, trade partners, professionals, etc.)?
Please watch Digging Deeper as Dennis details the pathway for identifying and mentoring rising leaders in your companies for their future success. We’d love to hear what steps you’re taking to groom your NextGen leaders as complete and respected construction professionals. Please share with us in the comments. Thank you!
Give your NextGen high potential people the opportunity to learn the business of construction from industry experts and peers alike. Enroll them in FBI’s one-of-a-kind leadership development program, The Contractor Business Boot Camp. The next class (already at about one-third capacity!) begins Jan 27, 2022 in Raleigh. Contact Charlotte today at ckopp@familybusinessinstitute.com to find out more about the program and the limited-time early bird pricing.
Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper. Thanks for tuning in today.
Today I want to talk about sort of an interesting thing that came up in the last month and came up with a couple of our
fellow contract customers. And each of these were situations where we have mid-level construction people trying to rise
to that top level of leadership in their organization, and a couple of these were family situations. And so, what we're trying
to do is create a goal for these folks, sort of a place they could look toward going to that they could understand and that
we could create a program about around for their development. What we came to is perhaps a great goal for each rising
leader in construction is the title... and isn't an actual organizational title, but sort of the title of a complete and respected
construction professional.
Right. Now think about that a little bit in your organization. Who are the complete and respected construction
professionals in your organization? It may be yourself. You may have two or three key leaders, and by the way, doesn't all
have to be on the operational end. Certainly, there are complete and respected construction professionals also in the preconstruction area, and possibly even from the financial area, you might think of them as a complete and respected
construction professional in your business. As we presented that sort of opportunity to these young people, we found
they were really able to sort of capture that, and everybody kind of sees what that is by seeing who the people in your
organization are that represent that.
When we say complete and respected, that respect oftentimes is both... well, I'm going to say all the time, is both internal
and external. They're respected out there by their customers, oftentimes desired by their customers to do their work, and
they're respected internally as good professionals, knowledgeable, experience, all of that. And when we say complete,
they really understand construction. They understand how it comes together, which makes them good problem solvers.
They're good people persons, people people or however that's get said. But they're good people people and, as well as,
the techniques of getting a construction job done as well. So, it's a pretty good descriptive, I think, that you can get your
arms around.
The other thoughts that came to that is, how many of these do you actually have in your organization? And if you think
about it, when I look at the larger organizations, they have more complete and respected construction professionals, and
that really allows them to grow their business. Probably to the same extent that the number of superintendents you have
is sort of a restrictor in how much you can grow your business and how successful you can be, so is your number of
complete and respected construction professionals.
So, you always want to be building these, not just in a family situation where you may have some young people that are
trying to assume that role and the parents are hoping they can assume that role and become that. But even in the nonfamily situations, you have these young people who are aspiring for something, that this is really a good goal and you can
create a lot of characteristics around this goal with regard to experience knowledge, leadership, ability, again, people
skills, organizational acceptance, if you will. And because you can sort of identify the characteristics, you can also sort of
measure people's progress along this. I think if you looked at your own organization and you said, "Who are my complete
and respected construction professionals?" I think you're probably going to have a lot of clarity about that, who they are,
who are the ones that are on the cusp and who are the ones down the line with potential to get there.
So, anyway, think about that, use that goal, if you will, for growth of your young people, and I think you'll find that if you
can develop more of those complete and respected construction professionals, you're going to have a more successful
business and you're going to have much more opportunity for growth.
Again, thanks for tuning in. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.
