Welcome to the finale of Season 01! Throughout the last eleven episodes, you’ve been challenged on how you can improve for your coworkers, family, and yourself. Today, Alex is going to walk you through where we are in the industry today, and how you can equip yourself to be ready for what’s coming down the road.
Welcome to the finale of Season 01! Throughout the last eleven episodes, you’ve been challenged on how you can improve for your coworkers, family, and yourself. We have covered topics such as managing stress at work, why you can indeed foster a “have it all” lifestyle, and why leading with empathy and compassion is critical in today’s workplace.
To wrap things up, on the Season 01 Finale of No Bullshit with Alex Willis, Alex is going to walk you through where we are in the industry today, and how you can equip yourself to be ready for what’s coming down the road. As budgets get tighter and tighter, it’s critical to understand where you can empower yourself and your team in order to continue to achieve great results on every one of your projects.
In our third segment, The Foundation, you’ll shift gears to emotional intelligence. Leadership involves change management, coaching, and time management. When it’s over, you’ll know how to make your team full of heroes.
Tune into our final segment, The Frame Out, where Alex tells stories of how to engage your team through personal conversations. We then have some final thoughts on Season 1 of Leadership Surge, and what to look out for in Season 2!
Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts as well as the YouTube channel to watch full video episodes and be notified as soon as the next episode is live.
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[00:00:00] Alex Willis: Hey, hey, my friends, welcome back to episode 12, our grand finale for season one. And in this episode, we're talking about the state of leadership development in our first segment, we really painted a picture of what are we up against, right? And how we won thus far by Price is not our way to success.
Price is not our way to success. And for those who don't know what that means, go back to our first segment, the takeoff and check it out. From there, we talked about in the next segment, the level we talked about one major, major foundational skill that you need to really begin to incorporate into your people.
I'm not going to tell you what it is. I'm going to force you to go back and check out that episode so you can hear it and see it. But in this segment, what are the foundational principles you need to really, really begin to work. Number one is, uh, it's going to sound really, really small, but it's actually huge, which is emotional intelligence.
You have to work on emotional intelligence with your people, because here's the deal. Truth be told, my friends, when things get tight, when things get uncomfortable, we are on our worst behavior, right? Not our best, we're on our worst behavior. That's when you get a chance to see people come out, and truth be told, for our leadership team on the front line, they tend to lose their cool on the front line as well as at home.
The more the pressure works, picks up, the longer the hours, the more the pressure, the more the stress, we get real frustrated, right? So, really focusing on emotional intelligence will help, and what do I mean by that? Well, number one is self awareness, knowing where I am. Number two is self management, knowing how to manage myself.
Knowing my crew awareness, what's up with my crew, and then being able to do relationship management, manage my team and help them kind of succeed there. By being able to do that, that will help you a ton with that. Alright, so, so emotional intelligence is something huge that I want to challenge you to think about.
Number two for laying a great foundation for your leaders is change management. How to manage change. And we actually have a entire episode on change management, helping you understand the emotional curve of how people feel as well as how people change and how they do things. You have to think about this because we have to approach jobs differently.
We have to be very strategic. In the last segment, we talked about. Productivity tracking, because we have to begin to allow our people to do some things that they necessarily haven't done in the past. We have to really be open to that change curve and what that could potentially look like, right? Now, one of the other huge things that we need to think about is coaching.
We have to really do a hell of a job teaching our people how to coach. Now, in the past, we've expected people to come in Like what I like to call LeBron James. Just ready to work, right? Hey, this person has all the skill set, they have all the tools, they're ready to rock and roll, they have the great attitude, and we're looking for those type people.
Well, we are at an all time low. With people, just people being able to do the job. Now, let alone having the actual skill set. From what I'm hearing and what we're seeing, the skill set isn't necessarily where it has always been. Now, as a result of that, your leaders have to really begin to free themselves up to really do a hell of a job coaching other people.
So how do you do that? How do you do that? Well, you have to understand the value of coaching. How to really give great feedback, right? How to give creative criticism, right? Or constructive criticism. As well as how to lead, motivate, and inspire. We haven't really talked to our leaders about that. Now, now, understand, the best of the best.
Coaches. Leaders, they understand how to lead, how to motivate, how to inspire, how to paint a picture and a vision. They know how to call out what's in other people that sometimes people don't see what's in themselves. Right? Now, as we're in tough times, it's our leaders being able to do that really, really well.
Being able to coach, being able to lead, being able to motivate, being able to inspire. But better yet, Being able to communicate really, really well and being able to teach concepts, right? Not just expecting people to do it, but being able to have time to slow down. Because you've done a hell of a job of managing your time, which we have a whole episode on time management and how to do it really, really well.
Because as things get tighter, and as you have to work with your crew, you're going to have to do a great job of being a coach, which requires you to have more time. So, you have to be a ninja with your time, so that you can then begin to go and coach other people up. It's the people who can begin to do that and assign those tasks to do a hell of a job.
A concept that we're working with with a couple companies that I want you to think about doing is really beginning to break your teams up into small pods, right? Breaking your team up into small pods and assigning each pod what I like to call a Right? So think about this, you got your foreman or your superintendent who's over the entire job, right?
You have other foremen who are breaking down the jobs into smaller pieces as we talked about in our last segment. And then assigning that small piece to a small pod of anywhere between three to nine people with one pod leader. They know how much time they have to get that job done. You've done a hell of a job explaining it to them, and you've broken that job down in such a way that it's bite sized and it is digestible for them, right?
Now, with being able to do that, you free yourself up to kind of be a head coach now to walk around and be able to see some things. Now, but understand this, if you have a pod that isn't as highly skilled as you may want them to be, And what do you do? Well, you break the job down even smaller in smaller chunks, which causes less error for that unskilled or not as skilled part to be able to do.
So if you can begin to break things down like that, my friends, it helps you become a phenomenal coach doing those things. So think about that. You're emotionally intelligent. You know yourself, you know your team, right? You've done a hell of a job of understanding change. And you understand what people need to do and how they operate with change.
You really begin to cultivate yourself, understand how to lead, motivate, and inspire other people, right? When you can begin to do that, you can begin to paint a picture and set great vision, right, for them. And when you can begin to do that, now all of a sudden, they can begin to see what you see in them.
And by setting them up for success, by breaking them down into these small pods, Giving them responsibility. What you're actually doing, my friends, is you're actually creating other leaders. You're replicating yourself in a way that most times, most leaders never do it. They keep everything to themselves, they delegate out big jobs to people, and then it comes back with huge error, and they're pissed off, so they do it all themselves.
By breaking down these small pieces with your pods, And doing it in time allocating segments, they can begin to see what they have, what's going on, and then begin to come back together. By doing that, you can begin to win and build your team. We like to call this, I learned this from a cool pastor named Dave Ferguson, which he calls it hero making.
He wrote a book on how to make heroes, and this concept is a very, very cool concept. And he has this five step process of how to make heroes. As margins tighten, as you need more leaders, as you have more challenging projects, not enough people to do it, you have to damn sure be able to make heroes. How do you make heroes?
How do you make heroes? Well, the hero making process, step one is this. You begin to pull your leaders in and they work closely with you. And so the first step is, hey, I'm going to do it. You watch and we'll talk about it, right? So it's, it's the leader doing the job. You have your pod leaders watching you do it, and then you pause and allow them to ask questions and you talk about it.
Hey, what did you see? What did you see? So step one is I do, you watch, we talk about it, right? I'm gonna say that again. Step one. I'm gonna do it, you watch, then we're gonna talk about it, right? Step two. What's step two? Step two is, hey, step two is Hey, I do. You help. Guess what? We talk about it. I'm going to do it.
You're going to help me. We're going to talk about it, right? Now, so after step two, now all of a sudden they're not just watching, they're actually getting their hands dirty and they're not doing all the work, right? It's small, bite sized pieces, but you're building your leaders up so they can begin to do this on their own at some point in time.
Now, that takes us to step three. Step three is what? Hey, step three is, hey listen, you do. I watch. We talk about it. You're going to do it. I'm going to watch. We're going to come back and talk about it, right? And it's at this point in time that you can be a master of creative conversation, giving great feedback, giving constructive criticism so that they understand exactly what your vision is and they can begin to see your vision because they saw you do it, they helped you do it, and now they're doing it while you evaluate them, right?
Think about that, right? So, step one, I do. You watch, we talk. Step two, hey, I do, you help, we talk, right? Step three, I forgot, oh man, I messed up, I just told you step four. Step three actually is, hey, you do, I help, we talk, right? So I didn't leave you by yourself, so step three should be, hey, you do it, I'm gonna help you do it, we'll talk about it.
And step four, which I told you was step three before, I know, you're like, what the hell are you doing? Step four is actually, you do it. I'm going to watch you do it now and we'll talk about it, right? And then the last, last, last step, which I love the last step of the hero making process because it's a very, very cool step.
Step five is, hey listen, you do it, bring someone else to watch you, you two talk about it. You're going to do it, you're going to bring someone else to watch you and you two are going to talk about it. You begin to replicate that model over and over and over and over again. Why is that important my friends?
Well, this is the hero making model, and as things get tight, you need more people who can do it the way your all star leaders would do it. So how do you replicate them? Well, it's this five step process that makes it easy to replicate them. And understand, this process, for some tasks, it can be as quick as, and you can do all five steps within an hour.
For other tasks that may be a little more difficult, more challenging, may take three months, six months to do it. Right, for you to get through all five tasks. You as a leader have to decide the skill set of the person versus the challenge of the task and what they can do. Right, if you can begin to do that my friends, you can do a hell of a job of really beginning to replicate yourself in others.
Right, and understand this, while you're doing this, you're going to do it in such a way that you are emotionally intelligent. Right, thinking very strategic, strategic, we talked about that in the last segment. Understanding change and understanding the patience that's required to do change and how that feels and what that looks like, right?
As you begin to really empower other people in a tight economy, great leaders understand how to lead and motivate and inspire, but more importantly, they understand how to empower other people. So understanding how to give power away, but do it in such a way that it's still within your realms. For a small margin of error, allows you to duplicate yourself and get more things done.
In our final segment, we're going to really frame it out. Frame it out on what you need to think about, how you can begin to implement this in your day, and do a great job so that ultimately, you can win, get more things done, right, in less time. So that you can really begin to live life in a way. That's manageable, right?
Not working a hundred hours a week, not missing out on your family, but being able to engage with them and still be productive and effective at work, even with all the challenges that are there. I look forward to seeing you in the last segment. Hey, I want to personally thank you for tuning in to No Bullshit with Alex Willis, the number one go to source for leadership development in the construction industry.
And hey, don't forget to hit play on the next segment.