Your team could agree in 30 minutes on how to tackle a problem you’ve been arguing about for years.
I’ve watched my clients do exactly that. For over 20 years, I’ve used a specific meeting structure to help construction leaders reach agreement and taught them to use it themselves.
Before you decide you suck at facilitating or your people suck at participating, look at the structure. Even capable people can spend an hour talking and leave without a decision.
The process I teach has three stages: generate ideas, gather and prioritize, and action planning. Here’s how to use it with your team.
Start with a precise question
Choose one problem your team can help address. Look at bid accuracy, change order management, quality, productivity, or materials management. Your numbers can show where performance needs attention. Conversations with the people responsible can help explain why.
Then write a question specific enough to produce useful answers.
“In what specific ways can we improve communication?” is still too broad. Narrow it to communication between the field and office, or between two superintendents competing for field resources. Add a time frame, such as the next 90 days.
A tile contractor used this question: “In what specific ways can we improve quality in the field in the next 90 days?”
Write your question where everyone can see it. Check that the participants understand it and agree it’s worth working on.
Set the rules before you start
Invite people who understand the work and can help carry out the decision. I recommend six to ten participants, with twelve as an upper limit for this format.
Establish three ground rules:
- Put away phones, laptops, and other distractions.
- Everyone participates. There are no courtesy invitations.
- No criticizing ideas while you’re gathering them.
As the owner, explain your decision authority upfront. If you reserve the right to decline an idea, even when it receives the most votes, say so. Explain known limits before people begin. If you reject the leading idea, explain your reasoning as candidly as you can.
Then state the problem and let people think. Resist giving them a detailed explanation of the answer you want.
Give everyone two minutes to think
Set a timer for two minutes. Ask each person to write down as many answers as possible. Encourage quantity. Write an idea down and move to the next one.
Do this yourself without announcing your ideas. Everyone needs an opportunity to think before the boss influences the discussion.
When time is up, have each person select the best two ideas from their own list.
Go around the room and collect one idea per person. Write each idea where everyone can see it and give it a number. As the owner, share your first idea last.
Reverse the order for the second round. If you went last in the first round, you can go first now. Everyone else has already contributed an idea. Then ask for any additional ideas the group needs to consider.
Manage the conversation without cutting off useful thinking
One person can’t take everyone else’s time. When someone dominates, I interrupt:
“Let me pause you there so we can hear from everyone. I’ll make sure I come back to you.”
I don’t hesitate. I’m responsible for making the meeting useful for the whole group. In person, if someone keeps talking after I’ve asked them to hold back, I’ve found that walking over and lightly touching their arm gets their attention.
You also need to recognize when someone needs to talk through an idea. A person with considerable experience may give you an answer that initially sounds vague. Ask questions before dismissing it.
“What specifically would we do differently?”
“Help me understand how that would work.”
Listen, write down the clarified idea, and read it back. Ask, “Have I captured what you mean?”
That distinction takes judgment. Interrupt someone who’s taking over. Give someone who’s developing a useful idea enough time to explain it.
If people start criticizing, remind them that evaluation comes later. Hold them to the ground rules. That includes you, especially when a suggestion challenges a practice you introduced.
Choose a priority and check commitment
The tile contractor generated 15 ideas. Suggestions included a weekly quality control program, freeing foremen from installing so they could spend more time on quality control, and getting Lil E, the quality control manager, into the field.
Have each participant select approximately the best third of the ideas. With 15 ideas, each person chooses five different ones. They can’t stack votes behind one favorite.
Everyone writes down their selections before you tally anything. Keep your own preferences private until people have chosen. Then go person by person, collect the selections, and tally the votes where everyone can see them.
Walking jobs more frequently and getting Lil E into the field each received nine votes. To resolve a tie, clarify what each proposal involves, then have people choose between them.
Once the group selects a priority, ask for a show of hands: “Who supports implementing this approach over the next 90 days?”
If someone can’t commit, ask, “What would we need to address for you to support implementing this?”
People need to be willing to object, even when everyone else appears to agree. You’re agreeing to try an approach, evaluate the results, and make adjustments.
This is the moment that still gets me. We started with a blank page. About 30 minutes later, everyone has agreed on an approach. When I ask how long that usually takes, people laugh. Months. Years. Sometimes never.
The agreement matters. The problem still needs to be solved.
Turn agreement into assigned work
Reserve time for action planning. The one-page plan in my Kick-Ass Meetings eBook has three parts: Rally Cry, Fierce Focus, and Critical Numbers.
A heavy civil contractor used “Own the Cost” as its rally cry. Project managers would set up jobs for margin success. Superintendents would optimize resources. Foremen would focus on economic execution, doing the work at the lowest possible cost consistent with the job’s requirements.
Those were the areas of Fierce Focus. Assign one accountable person to each area, even when a group does the work.
Their Critical Numbers were margin growth for project managers, equipment utilization for superintendents, and cost per unit installed for foremen.
Define the starting point, target, and deadlines. Agree on a review schedule suited to the work: daily, weekly, or monthly. Put the review on the calendar before you finish the meeting.
At that review, an accountability conversation can start with three questions: “Did you do it? If not, why not? How can I help?”
The answers may reveal that the work needs changing, the accountable person is overloaded, or the assignment requires competence they don’t have. You may need to change the assignment or the person responsible. You may also need to hold the existing person more firmly accountable.
Use the process with your team
When clients struggle after I’ve taught them this process, they’ve often skipped a step, accepted a vague question or idea, or let someone dominate.
Use the whole process. Start by writing one specific question and identifying who needs to be in the room.
Take the Effective Meetings Assessment to assess participation, prioritization, and commitment in your meetings. Download the Kick-Ass Meetings eBook for the process and one-page plan. Both are available at no charge.
A special offer for readers of this post
I’d love to help you try this with your team. The first ten contractors who read this post and contact me get a 60-minute Zoom session with me and their team at no charge. I normally charge $3,500 for this session.
Bring a specific problem. I’ll run the meeting with your team so you can see how to gather ideas, choose a priority, and work toward an action plan.
This offer is good through December 31, 2026, and is limited to the first ten contractors who contact me.
Email eric@constructiongenius.com with “Kick Ass Meetings” in the subject line. Tell me the problem you want to address and mention that you read this post.
