All of life is problem-solving and if you’re a leader in construction particularly, your day is filled with solving problems, some of which you may have created and some of which may be created by other people and some of which may be completely out of everyone’s control.
How do you respond to those problems? There’s the “Raging Bull”, perhaps the old school construction leader who drives out to the job site, goes belly-to-belly with the superintendent and spits and swears and slams his fist until he gets his way. Then there’s the new school construction leader (the “Passive Possum”) and he or she hides behind the CC’d emails and refuses to go out to the job site and hopes that texts can solve the problem instead of a phone call or a face-to-face conversation.
Then there’s the Winner, the person who understands that a construction project is a collaboration, that things are going to go wrong and that if they’re going to be able to produce a project safely, quickly and profitably, they have to work with other people.
They have a bias towards problem-solving, towards getting people together from the GC to the sub to the owner, and really looking for ways to solve problems proactively.
Make up your mind to embrace the challenges and be the Winner, the one who looks to solve the problems in a way that benefits all parties involved and put in the hard work to make sure that you’re doing that on a daily basis.
