Why Great Workers Fail as Leaders – Foreman Training in Edmonton

Your best carpenter just became a foreman. Day one, they show up on site and realize the skills that made them great at their trade are almost irrelevant to their new job.

That identity crisis is where the leadership and management development series begins. In this module Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces explains why the first thing a new foreman has to change is not their paperwork, it is who they think they are at work.

Why the series starts with identity

You used to produce the value. Now you produce it through other people

Trevor: Module one is called you, the manager and leader. Why start here rather than something tactical like scheduling or delegation?

Bruce: The identity is what it is all about. We did training this week with a framing company. The first piece, back in December, was about replacing what they were doing with something that actually got the work done. They were continuously late for jobs, and most importantly they could not get their employees to do what they needed to do. The result is profit suck and erosion of margin.

When people move from journeyman to foreman they have to make a transition in their mind. They go from someone who produced the value themselves, and was held accountable for the value they produced themselves, to someone who has to produce value through other people. That shift is difficult, because I was one of the guys, and now I am leading the guys.

The distinction nobody explains

It is not the paperwork

Bruce: Talk to people becoming foremen or site supers and the first thing they think of is paperwork and administration. I am going to be behind a computer doing stuff I do not like, because what has made me happy all my life is working with my hands.

If you are being put into a leadership role, the paperwork is the least of your worries. What matters is being able to get people to execute. And execute does not mean being a jerk, or hammering somebody over the head to get them to do things. It means getting the crew to want to do it themselves. That is the move from a foreman mindset to a leader’s mindset, and they are quite different.

The assessments that come before the module

Behaviour and motivation, not technical skill

Bruce: Without too much psychometric mumbo jumbo, we use what we call Person Profile assessments.

The focus is not on how technically skilled someone is. They would not be in the role if they were not technically skilled, which is both a good and a bad thing. What gets missed, whether hiring or promoting, is whether they have the behaviours the job actually needs, and whether they will be motivated by what a leadership role provides.

Behaviours are not something I can change. I cannot teach people to change their behaviours, and I certainly cannot teach somebody to be motivated by something that does not motivate them. So the assessment identifies natural behaviours, what motivates and drives you, what would likely hold you back, and the strengths that let you move forward.

If something is not aligned with the job, that is the moment for the leader to ask, if I am not motivated that way, how do I pivot? You cannot change the job. You can modify and adapt for yourself.

Emotional intelligence, for people who think it sounds soft

Failure almost never comes from a lack of technical skill

Bruce: I prefer not to use the word intelligence, because intelligence implies a fixed aptitude like IQ. Call it emotional awareness, being emotionally informed. Around ninety nine percent of leaders struggle with it, and that is not a number I made up.

We are good managers when it comes to coordinating, scheduling and planning. We struggle at regulating how we respond to our triggers. Your customer will not respond well if you lose it on them or become dismissive. Your employee has the same brain. They will not respond either, if you do not understand your triggers, how you are responding, and how you are being perceived.

Trevor: A lot of foremen would call that too touchy-feely for what they do.

Bruce: I either hear that explicitly, or I watch them glaze over and disconnect. But we see it over and over. Failure as a foreman or site super does not come from a lack of technical skill. Nine or ten times out of ten it comes from an inability to work with your people for success.

I spoke with a senior construction manager two days ago. I cannot get the guys to take initiative, to be resourceful, to make sound decisions. I teach them, I give them the knowledge, I pump them up, and I cannot get them to do anything. I asked whether he had tried something specific. He said they will not listen to that. I said give it one chance. He did it yesterday and came back calling me an evil genius. I am neither. That is just the power of being emotionally informed and working with yourself in a way that gets people to act on their own.

Confident decision making in the field

What to do the day after a bad call

Bruce: Confident decision making exists so you do not second guess yourself or feel insecure making decisions.

Same framing company. I was going through the mastermind with one of the foremen two days ago and asked about the decisions he had made. He had chosen not to bring the guys back to site after lunch, letting them keep watching the game. As a result they were well behind, weather had not been considered, and the planning was not sound.

He started with, I was just an idiot, I should not have done that, I have cost the company money. I stopped him right there. It has nothing to do with being an idiot. It is about understanding your thinking process, being kind enough to yourself to see what you learned, and continuing to want to make decisions going forward.

Confident decision making is not rushing. It is having as much information available as you can. And when you make a bad decision, you get back on the horse and make a better one. We focus heavily on building that confidence through the programme. It is fine to make mistakes with what you have learned. It is not fine to shy away because a decision feels too risky, because then you are paralyzed.

Safety as an identity, not a form

Everybody becomes their own auditor

Bruce: Alberta does not have a long history of extreme health and safety prudence in the workplace. It is relatively new. And when something new arrives, especially a high compliance subject, it becomes about checking boxes and filling out forms. The field level hazard assessment is the classic example. We work with a waste management company and for the first weeks it was, I just have to get my FLHA done and off I go.

Compliance matters, because if Alberta Health or another jurisdiction audits you they can make life very difficult, for good reason. The problem is that if it is only boxes and forms, you get those visits over and over until you get a stop order, and a stop order is deeply damaging to a business.

So the supervisor’s job is not working hard to check whether everybody has their safety boots and ear protection on. It is setting a culture, an expectation, a value. We all want to leave at the end of this shift with our appendages still attached. We all want to go back to our families with everything intact. That feeling, that we protect ourselves and each other, strengthens into a value in the culture.

And then the same thing happens as with everything else. Everybody becomes their own health and safety auditor. The supervisor does not have to check up on anybody, because they are already doing it. Not about forms, not about boxes. Those are just the record. It is about actually living it while you are at work.

Field application

Seventy to eighty percent of the time, it is not the weather

Bruce: The field application in module one is centred on self. We ask it of anybody struggling to get results from their crew. This week again: I am being harassed by my manager because my jobs have been late, quality control is not where it needs to be, but how can I get QC right when my manager is driving me so fast that things are going to fall?

That is where emotional awareness comes in. Module one focuses on self-regulation. Looking at what is driving you crazy and what is making you miserable, rather than doing what we all do naturally, which is point the finger at an external reason.

This is classic psychology. When I succeed and things go well, of course it is because I am working hard. It is about me. When things fail, when my guys are not producing and my manager is on top of me, it is the weather, the economy, the subs, or materials arriving late or not at all. A good seventy to eighty percent of the time it is not any of those. It is me. That is a tough pill to swallow, so we focus on it significantly.

They go out on site with a phone app they can use while they are working, then bring it back to the mastermind the week after and we go through their challenges and what they did about it. What is critical is that when they come back they get more and more comfortable saying, this is a little embarrassing. It is not embarrassing. It is being vulnerable. Once you are in touch with where you are not strong, we can do something about it. Then they practise and go out again. It is skill upon skill upon skill.

The leadership crisis underneath all of it

Bruce: Business needs to keep moving, and in construction things change fast. I need leaders, I need foremen, I need site supers. So I take my best guy at framing, my best guy at flooring, my best at whatever, and I get him or her to lead. And they have no idea how to lead. They do not even know how to manage.

They are good teachers, because they have the knowledge. But being a teacher or a coach is one thing. Being a leader and driving performance through others is something completely different. It is a new skill.