The Accidental Manager Problem – Site Supervisor Training in Edmonton

Eighty two percent of the people who become managers have little to no leadership training. Eighty two percent.

That means the person running your crew, managing your subs and making decisions that affect your margin was probably promoted because they were great with a hammer, not because anybody taught them how to lead. Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces on the accidental manager problem, what it costs, and the structure of the Leadership and Management Development Series built for construction.

What an accidental manager is

Promoted into a role nobody prepared them for

Trevor: You use the term accidental manager a lot. What does it mean in construction?

Bruce: It is a real problem. There are a huge number of vacancies across the construction industry in North America, and what makes it worse is that leadership roles are being filled by people who are not ready. Site lead, getting ready for foreman, foreman, site super and beyond.

It is not the company’s fault. It is the situation. It is the limited resource capacity we have. So we promote people into roles they are not ready for.

What it actually costs

This is not a soft skills problem

Bruce: The cost is astronomical. We have talked about turnover and the cost of turnover for years, and it runs up to a hundred and fifty percent of somebody’s annual base salary.

On top of that, in construction, you have safety incidents. You have jobs and projects delayed. You have margin erosion. How many redos, how much material, how much labour. It is enormously impactful on the margin of the business.

And by the way, you have now lost your best carpenter, because he or she is the manager, and they are struggling, because they were never prepared for it.

Why the courses you already pay for do not fix it

Retention in the field, not attendance in a room

Trevor: A lot of companies say they do send people to training. Lunch and learns, safety courses, the odd seminar. Why is that not enough?

Bruce: The learning that happens in a traditional classroom is fine. You get maybe thirty, if you are lucky forty percent retention or engagement in the room. But once they are back in the field there is no focus or intention on how much is actually sticking. We are lucky to see ten to fifteen percent, and the highest I have seen is twenty or twenty five percent retained well enough to apply.

Why do we want it applied? Because we want impact. When I spend money training my crew and my leaders, I want a return. A lot of owners send people hoping the site supervisor training will be good, and then it is the last thing anybody thinks about. We turn a blind eye, because we do not want to think about the money we just spent when nothing tangible changed. And what has not changed is the margin erosion, the delayed jobs, the safety incidents and the turnover.

How the programme is structured

Twelve weeks, six modules, and a return you can point at

Bruce: Owners ask where they will find the time for their site supers to do this, because jobs are coming up and it is busy. We took that into account.

Twelve weeks, six modules. The big difference is the retention component, and how the sponsoring company gets a return on the investment.

Week one is a short burst of classroom, two to three or four hours. Then they go into the field and apply it, which is the challenge component. When they come back, some clients skip a week, which is fine, we run what we call a mastermind.

The mastermind is where participants get together with the facilitator and talk about how they actually applied what they learned. It is also peer group challenge, and there is far more learning and accountability in a peer group than there is with a supervisor always looking over.

Here is what we did not expect. When one site super crushes it and another struggles, they start helping each other. Where previously it was that site super for their jobs and this one for theirs, with collaboration only being social, you now get real mentoring relationships forming in the field around the challenges in front of them.

The research behind it

70-20-10, and why almost nobody runs it that way

Bruce: The well known model is 70-20-10. Seventy percent challenge, twenty percent developmental and relationship work, ten percent classroom. It is a phenomenally effective model and it is not used often, because it takes far more investment in structure and in focus on retention.

Typically business flips it. A good eighty percent classroom and twenty percent field, if you are lucky. That is the problem. You get a little retention, but not solid retention, and not the accountability you are looking for.

Put it into practice here and the classroom is the ten percent in week one. The field assignment is the seventy percent. Coming back and holding each other accountable is the developmental twenty, and that extends back into the field again. Put the seventy percent challenge together with that developmental accountability and retention becomes inevitable. They learn it, and they start applying it their way, within their team.

Who it is for

Site supers and foremen already in the role

Bruce: It is specifically customized for construction, and it is not a cookie cutter programme. We do not run the same thing from one company to the next.

It is for the people already in a leadership position who need the development. Site supers and foremen. The old line is stop working harder, work smarter. Say that to a construction leader right now and you will not get a warm response, because they work extremely hard. But it is true. Their lives do not have to be that hard when it comes to leading and managing people. There are far more efficient ways.

The mission of the programme is to liberate. To give them something more efficient, something that sticks, and something that belongs to them. It is theirs. They own it.

What the company has to commit

Bruce: Weekly, combining the classroom, the in-field assignment and the mastermind accountability session, we are looking at about eight to ten hours. That is not only the participant. There is a relationship and engagement between the site super and their manager, because it is a collaborative process.

While they are in the field they have an application on their phone or tablet, and it feeds their supervisor what is going on. The facilitator engages with that supervisor directly. The eight to ten hours is all of that combined. It is a small investment of time for the return.

Where it starts

Bruce: A big part of this programme is the leader truly understanding themselves. What are their natural behaviours? What are their natural drivers and motivators? How does that affect their team? We also use emotional intelligence assessments, to give people a foundation for what to expect from the training.