Ryan Englin runs Core Matters and built a software platform called FieldCon. He came back on the show to talk about the two things most construction leaders avoid: holding people accountable and running performance reviews. Do both badly and your best people leave. Do both well and the whole jobsite changes.
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Accountability Starts With a Commitment, Not a Stick
Most accountability problems aren’t accountability problems. They’re clarity problems.
“You can’t hold somebody accountable to something if they’ve never committed to it,” Ryan says. That commitment is the whole foundation. Skip it and every follow-up conversation feels like an attack.
Here’s what most leaders do. They tell someone what they want, then they walk away because they’re busy. Three weeks later the thing isn’t done and they’re frustrated. But the employee never agreed to it. He never repeated it back. He never said he was on board.
Ryan’s fix is one question at the end of every handoff. Tell me what you heard. Do you agree. Are you on board. Ten seconds now saves a painful conversation later.
Why Waiting Makes the Conversation Harder
Eric named the real reason accountability feels so uncomfortable. Time.
The longer you wait between the commitment and the conversation, the more the pain builds. Ryan told the story of a foreman who started showing up late. Great guy when he was there. The superintendent let the first week slide. Then the second. Then three months went by and it felt too weird to bring up at all.
If they’d said something the first morning, it stays a ten-second conversation. Instead it turned into a confrontation nobody wanted.
That’s the same reason performance reviews are so hard. Once a year means a year of stored-up frustration dumped in one sitting.
Focus on the Outcome, Not the Person
Walk in with a stick and people get defensive. Walk in with an agreed outcome and the conversation changes.
“Hey, you’re late again” is an attack. “We agreed you’d be here on time to support the crew, and that’s not happening” is a fact you both already signed off on. Now the employee isn’t defending himself. He’s looking at a gap he already committed to close.
Ryan put it plainly. When you get good at focusing on the outcome and not the person, these conversations get a lot easier.
Accountability Is Kindness
Eric made the point that kindness gets confused with niceness. They’re not the same.
“Kindness is being willing to tell someone the truth,” he said. Niceness stays quiet and lets someone fail for a year.
And sometimes the truth cuts both ways. That late foreman turned out to be caring for a sick family member. Nobody asked. The conversation was still necessary. He was still letting the crew and the client down. But you can hold the standard and come alongside the person at the same time.
Ryan ran a training with 15 service managers who were fiercely loyal to their contractor. Every one of them had a personal story. The company helped me through something. That loyalty was earned, one hard season at a time. We talk about a labor crisis in the trades. Give people a reason to stay and a lot of them will.
Redesign the Review Around the Gap
Ryan’s redesign of the performance review is worth stealing.
Stop grading performance once a year. Deal with performance in real time. “I don’t discipline a puppy for peeing on the floor three weeks after he peed on the floor,” Ryan says. “He would never learn.”
Use the review for something else. The gap. The manager rates the employee. The employee rates himself on the exact same questions. He thinks he’s a five, you think he’s a three. That gap is the conversation. And it’s really an evaluation of you as a leader. If a top performer thinks he’s a three, you haven’t told him he’s a five.
Run them monthly or quarterly, not annually. Ten people, ten minutes each, two and a half hours a month, and everybody knows where they stand. Then focus on one or two gaps that move the needle. “You chase more than one rabbit, you lose them both.”
FieldCon: Reviews From the Tailgate
Ryan built FieldCon to take all of that off the manager’s plate. The manager answers a short assessment. The employee answers the same one. The system writes the review script. The manager records the conversation on a phone at the tailgate, and the platform writes the whole review. No typing. No sitting behind a computer.
The feedback he keeps hearing: nobody ever taught me how to do this, and now I feel confident.
Ryan’s First Visit to the Show
This is Ryan’s second time on Construction Genius. His first episode is worth a listen if you’re hiring.
How to Hire Better People Faster, Ep. 247: https://www.constructiongenius.com/podcast/how-to-hire-better-people-faster-ep-247 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2QIlFE88F-U
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About Ryan Englin
Ryan is the founder of Core Matters, creator of FieldCon, host of the Titans of the Trades podcast, and author of Hire Better People Faster. He works with businesses that are done losing great people to fixable problems and helps them build teams that stay and perform.
Connect with Ryan: Core Matters: https://corematters.com/
FieldCon: https://fieldcon.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanenglin/
Core Matters on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/corematters
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