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 final segment, The Frame Out, Alex tells stories of how to engage your team through personal conversations. We then have some final thoughts on the 1st Season 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, my friends, welcome back to episode 12, the grand finale for season one, but don't worry. Don't worry. You don't have to worry or cry. We are coming back for season two and it's going to be even better, bigger. I mean, you name it, we're bringing some great people in construction on the show. As we speak right now, we have people lining up to bring our guest list.
Right. Some great guests to help us become better leaders, right. To help Alex pull this off. So, so in this last segment, the frame out, we're going to frame out just kind of, what do you need to do? What do you need to do? Well, I want to challenge you to structure your day in such a way, my friends, that you really begin to think about.
Your own personal education, all right. Where do you need to work? Where do you need to work? Where do you need to focus? And I'm not talking about massive amounts of time. I'm talking about listening to podcasts, audiobooks as you're driving into work. These are small techniques that you can begin to listen to in anywhere between 10 to 15 minute segments to start working on your leadership skill set.
I'm not talking about the technical skills. You are masters of that. At this point in time, you have to become a master at leading others, right? So, understanding where you struggle will help you a ton. You can begin to listen to those and really work on that. On top of that, I want to challenge you to challenge your crew to do the same thing.
And what does this mean? Well, this means that you need to go out and really begin to have great conversations, what I like to call leadership engagement conversations, right? What does that look like? to be able to... Talk to your people, know where they are, know where they struggle, ask them questions frequently, right?
So, on our show notes, we'll give to you 10 minute conversation starters, 30 minute conversation starters, as well as annual reviews that you need to think about. Oftentimes, in construction, we don't talk to people until the shit hits the fan. That's when they hear from their leaders. In tight times, when we need high productivity, high performing teams, you need to talk frequently.
Often. Right? This is those conversations. Hey, listen, how are you today? What's going on? Hey, what are you excited about? What's most challenging for you right now? Hey, how can I help you? Hearing those things and understanding what they need will help a ton. As a leader, your job, my friends, is to remove all challenges out of their way so that they can do the job.
That's needed, right? It's not necessarily for you to do the work. You are that force that goes before them, clearing the path, clearing the way, making their job easy. And how do you do that? Well, you have to do a great job of ear hustling. If you can begin to ear hustle, you can begin to see where they are, what's going on and begin to help them out, right?
By doing that, man. You begin to elevate the engagement of your crew. Now, there's something called Gallup, right? Gallup is a huge company in Omaha, Nebraska, if I'm not mistaken. And they do a hell of a job of understanding data on companies and employees. Here's what they found. The more engaged an employee is, The more engaged an employee is, the better productivity you get from them.
So in tight times when I need my team to be the best, I need to do a hell of a job of understanding the power of engagement, the art and science of engagement, so that you can do a great job of engaging your people really, really well. Some of that is asking those tough questions, right? And you need to really kind of think about, how do you walk around with what I like to call a play, a play sheet, right?
So, a play sheet would have like, things like green, yellow, and red on it maybe. It doesn't have to be as crazy as my play sheet here. But what does that green, yellow, and red do? Well, Red is a challenging conversation that you may have to have with them because they're not cutting the mustard, they're not getting the job done, so hey, I'm not going to avoid it, I'm going to have a challenging conversation with them, and you put that down.
Yellow is, hey listen, I need to just... Uh, encourage this person to give them a little motivation, to let them know, hey, you're doing a great job, but hey, here's where we can make some small tweaks and improve. And agreeing is saying, hey, this person's killing it, they're killing it. Let me go and give them props and let them know how well they're doing.
Right? By you being able to do that, my friends, you can do a hell of a job motivating and increasing engagement with your team, which ultimately has a huge, tremendous impact on your project. Now, right, so, what are some other things I want you to think about as we talk about the frame out? Well, it's going to be imperative that you look ahead, right?
And ideally, I want to challenge you to have a six week look ahead, alright? I know some of you are flying by to see the opinion, you're like, What you talking about, Willis? I get it, I get it. But as we talked in our segment, the level and the foundation, we talked about being very strategic. Right? And to be strategic, you have to look ahead.
Now, with that six week look ahead, you need to think about a few things. Alright? You need to be able to identify critical challenges that could slow you down. Things like, hey, do we have the material? Do we have permits? Do we have the skilled laborers to be able to do it, right? Do we have approvals to move forward?
If you don't have those things, if you look ahead six weeks on your program and your plan, and you don't have those things, you should circle whichever ones you don't have, because that's going to be a challenge for you, right? So, if you can begin to think about that, man, and begin to look ahead, all of a sudden, you're starting to work on a challenge that's already six weeks ahead, so by the time you get there, hopefully, You or somebody on your team in one of those pods that you've assigned it to can do a hell of a job of getting things done, clearing the path, right, so that your workers can do a heck of a job.
Note to yourself, as we close season one, right now we are in a time, my friends, where we need leadership like never before. We need leadership at home, in your community, as well as in construction. Understand, leadership is leadership. You can begin to practice. And all of these areas, I want you to understand the more you practice, the better you become at it.
It's not something that you just naturally get. I hate that people say, well, leaders are born. Eh, I believe leaders are born and made, right? And I can be born with a set of skills, a set of things that I'm just naturally good at. But man, if I don't work at those to perfect those and constantly learn and grow, I'm never going to reach my full maximum potential.
All right. So this is the time and tough times to realize who you are, what you have. Alright, and these are the times where you can do a hell of a job of studying and learning to sharpen your leadership tool belt so that you can become a phenomenal leader. By doing that my friends, you can inspire and encourage others, you can cut down the stress in your life, and you can do a hell of a job of leading your company through challenging times.
So I want to remind you, we're here for you, we're here to help you, we want you to succeed, we want you to be the best of the best. So, doing times like this, a lot of the skills that I've mentioned today, you can go back and listen to other episodes in which we've talked about things like delegation.
We've talked about things like understanding the colors and the personalities so you can lead, motivate, and inspire people based on their color and personality type. We've talked about change management, right? We've talked about how to work without stress. So, that as things get tight, you can still be cool, calm, and collective as you go through it.
The more you begin to practice that, the more you begin to hear it, you can begin to change your mindset from a, uh, an old mindset of old thinking, right, to a growth mindset, right. Uh, not a fixed mindset, but a growth mindset. A growth mindset says, listen, listen, there is no challenge to greet. Yep, maybe I'm not there today.
But I'm not there yet. Right. It uses those type words, right? If you can have that positive upbeat, that kind of motivation, that kind of mentality, my friends, there's nothing you could do. So, hey, hear me out on this. I want to thank you for tuning in to season one with me. It's been a hell of a ride. I want to thank two people, Evan as well as Nick.
They've done a hell of a job on the show. Without them, we could not have done this show at all. I want to thank you for tuning in and I want to promise you, promise you, promise you, we're just getting started. Trust me, season two will kick season one's ass, my friend, with what we're doing. So until next season, I'll see you later my friends.
So 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. Be sure to subscribe to YouTube or your favorite podcast platform so that you can be notified when we drop that next episode. Trust me, you don't want to miss it.
And hey, please do sneeze understand. We're here for you, my friends. We are here to make you phenomenal leaders. We want the best for you. So, please, please, please leave your comments, leave your concerns, leave your challenges, because we want to answer those so that we can truly help you be phenomenal both at work as well as at home.
So until next time, see you later, my friends.