Dear Mr. Anderton
When we first sat down, you asked some difficult questions like: What are we about? What do we do every day? How do we do what we do? What drives us? And when you get a group of your leaders together to do that, it really helps people get on the same page.
During that first exercise, you helped us understand what our purpose is, what our personality is, what our plan is, and what our priority is. We probably had an opportunity to do this 10 years ago, but we didn’t take it. I can’t imagine how much further along we’d be if we had.
In that first meeting, even before the real training began, you also taught us about the Triangle. It’s now a tool we use in every personnel review, conversation, quarterly meeting, and interview. It’s a foundation of what this organization is about, and we use it to help everybody understand that. Clients come in and we use this triangle to help them understand what type of contractor we are. It’s hanging on the wall of our conference room and every wall I can find space in this office to hang it on.
You come with a willingness to understand what we’re trying to accomplish and customize your content to fit our needs and goals. I really enjoy being able to sit down with you and present to you the message we want to get across and seeing you take that information and build something to do just that.
These customized training sessions have allowed us to pull our people together to train in an efficient way. Your leadership training sessions have also taught me that there’s a lot of room for me to help my people improve. I’ve been reaching out to them with follow-up calls this last month to remind them of the training and really drive some positive change.
Your enthusiasm really makes the training that much more interesting than just a boring teacher talking about how to write a change order. Oftentimes this training happens early in the morning, but you manage to get us motivated and excited about being there anyway. We always get right in there, and take the mask off, and kill the bear. It’s exciting to me.
This enthusiasm plus how well you understand construction companies and the challenges we face, is important for you to be able to connect with the people we’re training. If you didn’t have that understanding, they wouldn’t give you as much trust. They can sniff out a guy that’s bluffing or trying to teach them something they really know nothing about, and that’s not you.
By then end of the training there was a lot more comraderie between these people. They had a sense of accomplishing something together. In an organization like ours, helping people understand one another’s personalities and where they come from really helps them develop a sense of family. That in itself was a huge benefit.
Before we started working together, I didn’t have a clear understanding of how services like yours would benefit my organization, but now I know I would absolutely recommend your services. In leaner times it may be difficult to make the decision to do this. You’re just trying to survive and even though training your people should take priority, it doesn’t. Thankfully, we are at a time in this economy where a decision like this is easy.
Best,
