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Kris Lengieza has been in the construction industry for over a decade now. Currently, he is the director of Business Development, Marketplace at Procore Technologies. The Marketplace team is tasked to oversee the development of integrations and partnerships built upon the Procore platform.
A passionate and long time evangelist of construction technology, Kris has been instrumental in pushing the construction industry forward. Before Procore, he was the Vice President of operational excellence at Stiles Corporation. At Stiles, Kris oversaw a team spearheading key initiatives including safety, training, financials, quality, and innovation.
Over the course of his career, Kris has been credited for the implementation of LEAN, LEED, and VDC principles in several companies. Kris has also received several awards for his work. In addition, he was also recognised as one of the top 40 construction professionals under 40 by BD&C and ENR.
Thanks to his active role in fostering the use of technology and innovation in the construction industry, Kris has become a sought-after speaker for national conferences. He has spoken at Ecobuild, SPAR, BIMForum, and Autodesk University, among others.
If you want to hear Kris’ take on key aspects that affect the AEC industry, don’t miss today’s episode. He also talked about interesting topics like culture, shared pains, and the oversimplification bias.
Read the Transcript Here:
Welcome to the Construction Goals Podcast, where industry experts and leaders reveal the good, bad, and ugly about strategic planning. I’m your host, Santosh. We will dive into the who, what, when, and how of goal setting in construction projects. Most importantly, why you should care. Whether you’re a seasoned leader or a budding entrepreneur, you’ll discover something new in each episode about how to manage goals better in the challenging world of architecture, engineering, and construction. Let’s get started.
Santosh: I’m delighted and honored to be speaking with Kris Lengieza who is the Director of Business Development, Marketplace at Procore Technologies. Kris has been a long-time construction technology evangelist and has been a prominent speaker in several national conferences. Prior to working at Procore, Kris was the Vice President of Operational Excellence at Stiles Corporation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where his team had many initiatives including Quality, Safety, Innovation, Training, VDC, and Financials. Kris has also been instrumental in the implementation of VDC, LEAN and LEED principles at several other companies over the course of his career. Kris has earned a multitude of awards for his work and has been nationally recognized as one of the top 40 construction professionals under 40 by ENR and BDC. Kris, thank you so much for joining me today.
Kris: Absolutely, and thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Santosh: And I wanna make sure, first of all, I don’t know if I’ve pronounced the name of that company, is it Stiles or Stiles?
Kris: Stiles. You were spot on there.
Santosh: Alright. Okay. I could have gone either way but I’m glad it’s Stiles. So, can you tell us a little bit about your role at Procore?
Kris: Yeah, absolutely. So our team at Procore, we manage our marketplace, which if you’re unfamiliar with Procore and our construction management platform we offer many apps, close to 200 right now, that integrate with the Procore platform and our team manages a lot of those relationships, so we’re constantly looking for new technologies, new softwares, new solutions that can really improve the workflows of our customers and our prospects and also the customers of our partners. We understand that there is not really one solution that can literally do everything out there that you need, so you have the need to use multiple tools and it should be that those things are integrated, that they work seamlessly together, so we own those relationships, we discover those technologies, we work with those partners to build the integrations and then to get them into the hands of our customers so they could take advantage of them.
Santosh: Fantastic, and from what I’ve seen, not only from you and your team but just the rest of Procore, the company places a huge emphasis on culture, not only internally but also an enabler for the industry, and can you take a couple minutes to really talk about why you guys are emphasizing culture so much? Why is this so important for AEC companies now?
Kris: Yeah. It’s a great question. Culture is so important inside of an organization. Having worked at four or five different firms throughout my career, some of them in construction and now in software, you can definitely see the difference when you work someplace that has a really strong culture, and people have said before, culturally, it’s strategy for breakfast all day. It is definitely true because if the people are not bought into the vision, they don’t understand what the mission is and what you’re trying to do and really embody the values of your company it doesn’t matter how well you execute, people aren’t gonna be able to think on their own, they’re not gonna be able to deliver for your customers, and so that’s why we at Procore and really any company should pour so much effort into building a really strong culture because there will be tough times and the culture will be what holds everybody in that organization together. Things will be really great and that will also be what holds the organization continuing to push forward even though things are going perfectly swimmingly and you could take advantage of it even more. So, culture is really, really important for organizations to understand what is the culture inside of your organization today and then what is the goal, what is the vision of what you would like the culture to be for generations to follow. I had the opportunity to work for a company that was a third-generation, family-run organization and that culture was very different than the culture here at Procore. It’s not that it was bad, it was just a different culture. There was a lot of people that had been there a very, very long time and big reason that they stuck around was because of the culture. It was because that they knew that they would be taken care of. They knew that they were gonna be given opportunities to grow their careers. They knew that the company, at the end of the day, was going to deliver for them and that’s why many of them had been there for generations. So, focusing a lot heavily on the culture of your organization can really set you apart from your competition. A lot of people are using the same tools and have similar materials to work with but how you deliver for the customer, whoever it is you’re building for or whoever it is you’re selling to, will come through based on how strong your culture is.
Santosh: Absolutely, and sometimes the word “culture” can come off as sounding like a cliché and people’s eyes may gloss over, but what I’d like to do through this conversation today is really try to dig into the specific aspect of culture and how companies in the AEC space manage their strategic goals and objectives and what works well, what could be improved, and where real value, tangible value, can be added through better management of goals.
Kris: Absolutely.
Santosh: And in order to do that, I was wondering if we could start with understanding from your experience how do you think leaders of construction companies approach strategic planning and goal setting with their teams? What have you seen in terms of how often is this done, who gets involved, what tools do some companies use? What’s been your observation?
Kris: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, having had the opportunity to serve at many different levels at the companies that I worked at from Project Engineer all the way up to Vice President, I was engaged probably in different portions of the strategic planning. Some of it was on the reception end of delivering the message of what our plan was and where we were going. Some of it was actually being able to take part in the decision on what our strategic plan would look like for the coming year or years, and then towards the end of my time at that company where I was a Vice President actually setting some of that strategic planning, putting in place some of those efforts. What I’ll tell you is that there’s pretty solid consistency across all the firms that I worked for that I don’t think we paid enough attention to strategic planning and really goal setting in what we were trying to do and making sure that those goals were aligned with those long-term plans. That’s why you see a lot of folks in the construction industry right now really grasping at the opportunity in finding ways to actually do more strategic planning, to start to think about succession planning and things like that, about where are they gonna be in the next five years. Construction tends to be somewhat of a short-term vision industry where we’re thinking about the project that we’re running right now or the project that’s coming in the next 12 to 18, 24 months. A lot of companies have a lot of hard times looking past that, like what’s our five-year, what’s our ten-year plan and how are we gonna evolve this company, are we looking to grow, are we looking to grow regionally, are we looking to grow into different markets, things like that, and so I think one of the biggest challenges that they have there is like, “We’re all so busy. I don’t have enough time to sit down and do that,” or it’s left to, “Oh, that’s the President’s job,” right? That one person should own that strategy and I don’t think that’s the way that it should be. It really needs to be something that’s set by the entire organization and that’s where really culture comes in. If you have many people participating in coming up with that vision and that mission and then everybody’s bought into it, then it becomes something that you can goal set against, right? And that you can communicate out to the rest of the team and then hopefully there are some tools that you can put in place to start tracking some of those things. I would say in construction, so much of the goal setting tends to be monetary, right? It’s either financial or it’s risk aversion in the case of like let’s not have any accidents and let’s avoid having risks on the projects. I think a lot of the other goals kinda get left by the wayside and there’s a difficulty in how we could track them in construction, but I think that’s changing. We’re seeing a lot of interest and a lot of change in the way that people are thinking strategically about what the future could bring for their firms and how they wanna evolve that and how they wanna evolve the culture, how they wanna communicate out the mission and vision to their employees and how they wanna engage them in the process of delivering on those goals and making sure that they have the things that they need in hand to be successful.
Santosh: So, what do you think is driving some of those changes? What’s causing those changes to happen?
Kris: Yeah. I think a few of the things that are driving those changes are there’s just not enough people in our industry right now so we’ve all heard about the labor shortage or the workforce shortage, and if you think about it, that’s not just skilled labor, it’s really just there’s not enough people coming into construction and that means going to work for general contractors or specialty contractors or even owners, and so we’re all competing over staff, we’re all competing over talent, and so one reason that they’re putting so much more emphasis on culture and strategic planning and the ways that people can grow their careers inside of their organizations is they wanna keep the people once they get ’em, right? Construction has been a very transient industry for a very long time where people leave and move around companies based on the projects that people have. I think what people are realizing is that you wanna keep that top talent there, you wanna make sure that they’re growing their career, wanna grow that leadership from inside of your organization and so that’s why people are putting so much more focus on it today. I would also say that there is a lot of opportunity now for our industry to learn from other industries. I think for so long we’ve been like, oh, things are great, it’s construction, people are always gonna build, but people are starting to think about how our industry is changing and therefore they’re starting to think that they need to be more strategic in how they’re planning for the future. People have been hearing for a few years now that there’s some disruption coming in the construction space, whether that be modular or prefab or different ways of building, different ways of designing. I think that’s starting to get people to think about how can my business evolve in the future which drives them more towards strategic planning and drives them more towards that succession planning conversation as well because we did have a lot of people retiring out of our industry and that includes the leaders in a lot of these companies, and so, you need to have a plan on how to address that. Otherwise, you’re gonna have a big void when those folks retire and leave.
Santosh: For sure. And you mentioned that some organizations there’s this thinking that strategy and goal setting is the President’s job or the top leadership’s job. So, let’s make it real for those environments. Let’s assume that they do take that approach and it’s really only left to the President, the CEO, or top leadership to worry about goals and strategy. How does that hurt the rest of the organization? What’s the cost of doing that?
Kris: Well, I think the cost of doing that is not having the buy-in from the rest of your organization. If individuals are not part of the process of coming up with what the future can look like, they’re gonna have a hard time getting behind the message. There’s only so many times that you can just blindly follow the people in front of you. If you are a part of making the route, making the path to success, you’re gonna have an intrinsic value to wanna see it succeed because you’ve contributed to it. And I think that’s one of the things that smaller organizations possibly suffer from this more than maybe some of the larger is there’s not enough interaction between the fields and the people who do the work every day and those who, some would refer to them as sitting up in the ivory tower and that are making these decisions, so people really have to understand, one, why is this our plan, and also feel like they’ve been able to contribute to the plan of how we’re trying to get there. If you do that, then people will get behind it. People will engage with it. People will do what they can to drive it forward without a doubt.
Santosh: So, historically, does that go against the grain of how construction has been managed? When you have contractors coming in and leaving, does that promote more of an authoritative, top-down kind of style?
Kris: Absolutely. I mean, construction has been very command and control for a very long time. The guy at the top sets the plan and then pushes that downwards but I’d say that it’s definitely changed. I think one of the things that actually drove some of the change to that is there was a big gap of leadership that happened when we went through the last recession and the construction industry took a tank. You had a lot of middle management that left the industry and went to do other things and just never came back. And what’s interesting about that is you then, as things got good again, had very, very senior people, Vice Presidents and Presidents and CEOs who had been in the industry for a very long time and then a crowd of people that had been in the industry for like five, six, seven years who were hung on to because they were cheap and they could do the job but there was a big lack in the middle so there was not that natural progression of passing down of information and management skills and things like that and I think what’s interesting is some people would call it, well, it’s millennials feeling like they have to have a say in everything whether or not it’s their role or not but I think also as you have these young people who had to make a decision one way or another because there was nobody else to do it for them and now feel that they do have more ownership, right? They have more ownership of what their job is because there was no one else to tell them what to do and so they wanna contribute to the planning and the strategic planning as well and I think that’s partially one of the drivers to why we’re seeing more interaction all the way up and down the command chain is that people feel more comfortable being involved in that conversation. Leaders are starting to learn that they need to listen all the way down to the dirt, right? All the way down to the people who are actually putting the work in place, and if they don’t, they have very little chance of their strategic planning succeeding and them reaching their goals.
Santosh: So it sounds like this shift has already happened or is well underway and there is more of an interest from leadership to listen and have a more inclusive approach. Do you still feel that there are still gaps in alignment across different levels or do you feel that there is less gaps in alignment and for the most part organizations are pretty aligned right now?
Kris: There’s definitely still gaps. This doesn’t just automatically happen overnight. I think every organization is a little bit different. You could have some organizations that will have leaders that will grab on to this concept of really engaging all the way down and they’ll do very well at it but then there will still be plenty of organizations who don’t feel that that’s the right way and they’ll go with kind of that command and control model and just push down the strategic plan and tell people what to do. And it would be pretty apparent if you talk to people in those organizations on how bought in they are to the overall success of the company. You can even look in some cases at the bonus plan structures of some of these firms and how these people are compensated, right? If you look at it and they’re very project-based bonus, that encourages people to think only about their job, the project they’re working on and nothing else. If it’s a company-based bonus, that encourages them to think about what’s globally best for the company as a whole, and I think probably in reality there’s some blend in the middle because if you’re all one way or the other, it can be difficult because you don’t feel like you can actually affect the larger part but if you’re only thinking about you and yourself and your project, then you may be missing opportunities to help out other teams. And I was actually part of one of the companies I worked for in the past, as they went through that evolution of like bonus plans it was very interesting to see how people reacted to that and what they kinda ended up with was you got three tiers of your bonus and a third of it was based on how the company did, a third of it was based on how the project did, and a third of it was based on your individual performance and I think that’s a great way to look at it because you can definitely control how you perform, right? Hopefully, you do the things that are important to make your project perform but still also a third of what you should care about is how the company as a whole can benefit from the things you can do for other teams as well.
Santosh: Right. So, do you have a project or a company you can remember where this alignment was a problem and how did that play out? What was the tangible loss or pain felt by that company?
Kris: Yeah. Unfortunately, I probably have more than one example. It’s interesting as you work on projects to see how the leaders on those projects develop, right? And what’s interesting there is if you have one person that has taken charge on a project and has just said, “Hey, it’s my way or the highway, it’s the only way we’re gonna do this,” it’s okay if everybody has bought in on that, but sometimes something starts to go wrong and whether or not it be their fault or not, other people then will start to question, “Okay, well, is this really the right way or should we be doing something different?” but they don’t feel comfortable enough to bring that up to have that conversation, right? And so that introduces a little bit of doubt into the leadership and there’s not a conversation happening between those people to say, “Hey, okay, we’re looking for any idea we can come up with here to get this thing back on track.” It’s more like, “Okay, well, here’s how we’re gonna get it back on track.” And what ends up happening there is you either get people that will sometimes check out. I’ve seen people literally just quit in the middle of the job and be like, “I disagree with this, I’m outta here.” Or, unfortunately, sometimes people will go the other extreme and try and I don’t wanna say like overthrow ’cause we’re not talking about a government here or anything like that, but they’ll try and do things to push that person out of power, you’ll have these power struggles, and that’s why I think it’s so important to have alignment across the team, that everyone can participate, and setting the goals and the strategy for that project and that’s why whenever I worked on projects, even if I wasn’t the leader, I always to try to sit down with the team and be like, “Hey, first thing first, what’s our goals for this project? What are we actually trying to get done?” Right? Don’t say under budget because that’s a given, you need better goals than that, and then get everybody to come up with things that they want. If this job ended this way, we’d all feel good about it, and then, okay, cool, what are we gonna do in order to get to those goals? I mean, what are the tactics we’re gonna put in place to deliver on them? And that really engages people because if they then feel like they have their little piece that’s feeding up into one of those goals, you know darn well that they’re probably gonna do their best to make sure that they do that thing well and then if they know what the other things that need to be done, the other tactics that need to happen to make it work and they see them slipping somewhere else, they should feel comfortable bringing it up and saying, “Hey, I noticed that we’re not doing this really well over here, I’ve got some extra time, I’m willing to pitch in and help out,” or, “I’ve got maybe a better way of doing this.”
Santosh: Right, right. So, if we were to look at these four dimensions of goal setting and I’ll ask you to rate each dimension on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 being the industry does this very poorly or doesn’t do it all and 10, they’re knocking it out of the park, it’s not a problem at all, and the four dimensions are defining goals, then communicating them, then tracking them to closure, and then assimilating learnings, right? So let’s start with the definition of goals. On a scale of 1 to 10, where would you put the industry?
Kris: I think we, as an industry, actually do a fairly decent job of setting goals. People will put them in place, they’ll have good reasoning behind them of what they would like them to be, and so I’m putting that probably like a 7-8 area where we do a good job, we could definitely improve, but we do a pretty good job of coming up with what goals should be on a project. Now, in general, how well those things are communicated is probably where some of the failures start to happen. Does everybody know that these are our goals for this coming year? I can tell you that I think that’s where we miss a lot of times. If people don’t understand what the goal is and how we came up with the goal, it makes it really hard for them to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, right? So I think if we start to kinda lower that down and put that probably around a 5 or 6 on how well we actually communicate those out to not just middle management so they understand but really like literally all the way down to boots on the ground on the field should understand what the goals are for this year and what we’re trying to get done.
Santosh: Absolutely, and then what about the third dimension of tracking goals to closure over whatever period, you mentioned a year, so how good is the industry at tracking goals to closure?
Kris: Yeah, I think we fail pretty heavily here. I think we do some of it but not in a meaningful way and I think where some of the failure comes in is introduced by not everybody knows what we’re supposed to be tracking and I would say the other thing is not everybody understands the goals or the goals weren’t set so that they’re really measurable, so if they’re not really measurable, it makes them to really hard to track so I’d say probably around a 4 or 5 here as well, like we could do a much better job of tracking the status and the progress of our goals and I would say like it probably sounds like, oh, my God, Kris is just crapping all over the construction industry here, they don’t know how to set goals, they don’t know how to track things. I would say that tracking goals is a challenge no matter what industry you’re in.
Santosh: True.
Kris: I would tell you that almost every industry that I’ve seen, now coming over to software and talking to different people in this industry and then sitting and listening to my dad who’s in the manufacturing space and some of the goals that they have, I think everybody has a long way to go on ways that they could really improve their tracking of the goals that they have. Now, there are the obvious easy ones, right? Financial goals are probably the easiest ones to track and everybody tracks those, but it’s the other ones that really I think start to fall by the wayside because everybody’s like, “Oh, well, as long as the money’s okay, we’re good,” and I think that’s where we have some significant room for improvement.
Santosh: Way to stick up for your industry, Kris.
Kris: Hey, man, I’ve been in this industry for long enough. I love this industry and, yes, I may be hard on it at times but there are plenty of other problems that we can solve too. We do a lot of things really, really well and I’m really proud to have spent as many years in it as I have.
Santosh: I wanna talk about another area before we get to learning but in tracking which is also a problem across industries in terms of dealing with changes in priorities mid-course. Have you seen examples of this and how well does the industry deal with such changes from a goal setting and strategic perspective?
Kris: Yeah. It’s really interesting that you bring that up. I actually think this is an area where in construction we do a pretty good job of shifting gears, right? Of being able to pivot and say, “Hey, listen, we thought this was a really important goal. Some other things have happened. We’re gonna put this on the back burner and we’re gonna go and we’re gonna move on and put more focus on this other thing or this other goal.” And I think a portion of that is just kind of our nature as an industry that we spend so much time of like we gotta get the job done at any cost, we’re gonna finish, we’re gonna deliver for our clients that a lot of times we are very willing to say, “Hey, listen, we thought this was important but we just can’t do it right now and so we cut it off pretty quickly.” Now, sometimes maybe too quickly, but I think we do pretty good changing those priorities. I see it, now being on the software side, it’s definitely different, like where people get into things and they really wanna stick to what the long-term plan is and stay on those goals and sometimes it’s really hard for them to shift those gears as quickly. I think that’s what makes good organizations really be able to move fast is that they’re able to shift extremely quickly and say, “Hey, listen, this was important but, you know what, it’s not as important as we thought it was, we’ve learned from that and we’re ready to move on.” I think construction in general, because every building we build is a unique prototype, I think we’re so used to not ever doing the same thing over and over again that it’s easy for us to shift sometimes. Coming from a construction background and living and breathing construction technology for so long, it really came into perspective for me one day when I was thinking about some folks that I was talking to that had been on a job for like three or four years and I said these people started the job with one technology and had gone through two different technologies before they finished the job. I think in a lot of other industries, people would have said, “Well, let’s finish this run. Let’s just continue and get this done and then we’ll switch over,” but if you did that in some cases that may be three, four years before you could take advantage of something that would take significant work off your plate. I’ve seen great examples of this and I’ve also seen the other side too where people have refused to change until they finish, but I think that really shows you too the resiliency and the ability to shift pretty quickly in the construction industry.
Santosh: That’s interesting that a short-term orientation in that case can actually be an advantage, right?
Kris: Yeah, absolutely.
Santosh: To have that agility, and perhaps what’s necessary is that short-term agility and still being able to work within a larger term construct and know what repercussions those would have and not be one side of the pendulum or the other, right?
Kris: Yep, absolutely.
Santosh: And what about now the fourth dimension of assimilating learnings and looking at your strategic planning process over a certain time and then using those learnings to improve or change the way that you’re setting goals for the future?
Kris: Yeah. It’s really interesting. I think this is really hard, like if you get this right, you’ve really gotten all the other things previously pretty much whipped in order to get this right because you have to set good goals, you have to have been able to communicate those goals so people knew what they were doing, and you have to have been able to track really well on those goals and only then can you then say, “Hey, we learned from this, we really were way too aggressive on our goal here, we’re gonna learn from that and do a better job of setting the number, the expectation for this coming year, this coming quarter,” whatever it may be, and so that indicatively is just I think a hard thing to do. I think the other thing that’s really a struggle in this area is capturing the learnings. So, without really good regular check-ins and really good tracking, you can’t understand what was going on and you have too much of a recency bias. You only remember like, “Hey, what was going right in the last month or so?” versus, “Hey, what were all the things that went wrong throughout the course of the entire project, the entire year?” or whatever it may be, and that has been a challenge in construction to capture those learnings, those lessons learned just in general to be able to capture a lot of that information, and so I would say like we probably rate fairly low here but I think it’s a function of being able to do the other pieces of it really well and as we get better at those other pieces, I think that inherently we’ll get better at learning from the mistakes or the opportunities that we have in the next planning cycle going forward. We’re just too new to it at this point, that I couldn’t say that we’re good at it at all.
Santosh: Right. So you started at 7, came down to about a 5, then you said for tracking things to closure is probably — that’s pretty good so maybe that’s like a 7 or 8, right?
Kris: Yep.
Santosh: And then learning, is it back down below 5?
Kris: Yeah, I think it’s probably somewhere around a 4 or a 5, somewhere in that range.
Santosh: So if you were to look at any of these areas and there’s probably an opportunity to move the needle a little bit but I think the real question is what tangible benefits would an organization see from moving the needle in any of those four areas and how will that really translate into the benefits that the company is after?
Kris: Yeah. I think if you can do a really good job of communicating and tracking the goals, whether or not you’ve done a great job of setting the goals, I think folks will really grasp that, right? Because they’ll know what the goalposts are and they’ll know what the score is at the end of each quarter and at the end of the game, and I think improving in those areas I think has almost exponential benefit because you then will get better at learning how to set better goals and what things did and didn’t work and therefore will be able to set better goals and maybe even be able to engage more people in the goal setting process because they really understand how you’re gonna track it and how you’re gonna communicate it and that there is a goal setting effort going on so, therefore, they will want to be part of it, right? So if I was in a position of leadership inside of a construction company, I’d really, really focus heavily on communicating those goals out very clearly to all the teams and then tracking them really, really well and making sure that we’re communicating where we stand on them at any given time throughout the course of the lifecycle of them. Because then when it comes time around to set them again, other people will become more used to that process and they’ll know what to expect so then inherently I think they’ll contribute better to the next round of goals because they’ll have seen how the process works. I think I was somewhat fortunate in that in coming into my role working at Procore because Procore has been doing goal setting and OKR processes for some time now and I came in and there were already goals and metrics and a way to track them and we still have some improvement especially in my team on how we track some of these things but I saw how that process works so then when it was time for setting the goals for the following year, I kinda was familiar with the process. Even though I wasn’t part of coming up with them the first time, I still bought into it and understood what we were tracking, I still knew how I could contribute to those tracking items, and then when I was asked, “Hey, what should we be focusing on moving forward?” I kinda knew the framework. So, back to if I was focusing on something there, definitely put a lot of emphasis on communicating them, just making sure everybody really understands, and then also communicating the tracking of them and how you’re tracking them and where we stand at any given point in time.
Santosh: Absolutely, and I understand that you first coined the phrase “shared pains” or at least were part of the group that came up with an initiative around this term for the AEC industry and are there some specific shared pains that you think can be addressed through better management of goals?
Kris: Yeah. I mean, absolutely, going back to that communicating and tracking it, right? So if you were to just sit down at the beginning of a project and discuss some of those shared pains not just internally to your organization, you think of project teams as all the players that come to work on a project, communicating what the pains have been in the past and what the goals should be to resolve those pains would be a great start in the right direction. I talked earlier about engaging more people in the goal setting. Well, get all the key players to sit around the table and discuss on what they want to go right and what a successful project looks like for them on that project and then set the goals for the project then continue to track them and communicate them and then make sure that every person that steps foot on that jobsite that comes on for orientation or that comes to an OAC meeting understands what those goals are and how they can contribute to them I think is a huge advantage, so by starting off by understanding all that pain, we understand that we have a lot of shared pain, it’s a pain for all of us, and then we could set goals on how to resolve it and hopefully that all goes well and then it turns out to be a blockbuster project for everybody involved.
Santosh: So, you know, there is so much wisdom out there. There are so many goal setting strategy frameworks that people can dip into, I think you mentioned OKRs. What do leaders and project managers in the AEC really need to actively implement a mature framework in their teams?
Kris: I think it’s critical to just keep it simple at the beginning. Imagine, there’s a lot of different frameworks out there but if you keep it simple, it’s easier to communicate, it’s easy to track, and it’s easier to get by. If you come up with these really elaborate goals that have really complicated calculations on how they come up with them, it’s gonna be really hard for people to understand how they can influence it, so just keeping it simple. If I’m a project manager and I’m trying to set the goals for the project, like don’t go for too many, a few, three, four probably is pretty good, and then start to think about, okay, well, how can each person contribute to those and what are the roles that they’re gonna play to make that successful? I think that’s the biggest thing. I mean, you can use any of the methodologies that are out there but if you make really clear and concise and simple goals, it may sound silly, but, I used to always say like — everybody would say, “Oh, okay, well, what’s our goals for this project?” “Well, we gotta finish on time and we gotta finish under budget.” Okay, well, that’s an assumption, we never don’t, so let’s put those two aside, what would be the other ones? And people sometimes would like kinda sit there and like, “How about have a happy customer?” Like how about having a customer that’s willing to write you a recommendation at the end of this job. That was always my goal on every project that I ever worked on was to be able to walk to the owner or the project manager for the owner and be able to get them to write me a letter or recommendation. That means that they were happy, that means that I did a good job for them, and, in some cases, them being happy was not necessarily a direct correlation to whether or not the job went well, right? Because you could have a job that for a number of other outside factors didn’t go as well as it could have but they know that you did everything that you could to make sure that it went as well as it could have, and so that still means that they’re happy, so even though, hey, we didn’t finish on time, I still have a happy owner, or, hey, we did go over budget, but the reason we went over the budget is because we gave the owner the opportunity to spend some additional money to expand their project because we found some other savings and things like that, so that’s why I always tell people the on time, under budget thing is not always the indicator of whether or not it was a good project. Would they hire you again? I had an owner where he had like I’ll call it a pretty bad project, like there were some things that came up on the site that were unforeseen concessions, no matter to anybody, it wasn’t anybody’s fault but pushed us out on schedule, pushed us definitely out on dollars, and I asked the owner at the end of the job, I said, “Hey, listen, I know this didn’t go the way that any of us really thought it would, but would you hire us again?” and he goes, “Oh, I would definitely hire you guys again because this could have gone way worse.” He’s like, “I know for a fact that if there were other people on this project, they would have used so many of those things to leverage that to make more money and you really focused on the fact that, “hey, we were gonna minimize the pain for everybody and that was really important to me so a hundred percent,” so that was always in the back of my head, I always wanted an owner or an owner rep at the end of the job to write me a letter of recommendation and that always kept me finishing strong too, because no matter what, if the project’s two years long, they’re not gonna remember what you did for them eighteen months ago so you gotta make sure that you push across the finish line and get all the things that they need and get them done.
Santosh: That’s very interesting, because just by articulating that goal, it did drive different behavior than just saying we’ll be on time and on budget, right?
Kris: Right, absolutely.
Santosh: And that’s why I wonder if there is sort of an oversimplification bias when it comes to goal setting and people, well, yeah, the goals are simple, everyone knows what the goals are, why do you need to even talk about it? Well, you do need to talk about it because there are more nuanced ways of controlling energy and direction and I wonder how do we avoid that oversimplification bias and actually get people to pay attention to this as a real process?
Kris: I think it really does come back down to communication. If you get people talking about it, just sitting around. My favorite thing to always do is construction people love to eat so just bring lunch, right? You can usually get somebody’s time to sit down and talk, like, “hey, let’s sit down and just talk about what our goals for this project are, and just say, hey, no idea is a bad idea, let’s take on budget, on schedule off the plate and let’s figure out what other things we would want if at the end of this job we said these things were true it would be a great project”, right? And so there were some good ones, I had some superintendents and stuff like that that came up with some really interesting ideas, like it was the first time we were using a subcontractor, right? And so for them, one of the superintendents came over one time, he goes, “I wanna make sure that this subcontractor does such a good job for us that we’re able to use them again.” And I was like that’s a really good goal. Like, hey, this is building our stable of additional people that we have to come work on jobs. It was in a trade that was really hard for us to find good, solid subcontractors that we like to work with so he’s like I have this one, we’ve never used them before, I wanna make sure that they’re successful so they wanna bid more work to us in the future and I wanna make sure they’re successful and good so that we can use them again and I know that they’re gonna deliver and I don’t have to go into it, so that was a really good way of thinking about it instead of saying like, “Hey, I got this new guy, I don’t know how it’s gonna go.”
Santosh: Right, right. So, lastly, Kris, what advice would you have for leaders and project managers in this industry?
Kris: How much time do we have? No, I’m kidding. It’s interesting. I played a lot of different roles and in each one of my roles, the one thing that I found to ring true really well was if you really focus on just being transparent, making sure that you communicate really, really well with the teams that you’re around, things will work themselves out. Really it’s focusing on building those teams. That will drive, it may not pay off in the short term but it will definitely pay off in the long term and that’s where the culture comes in. If you put your people and you put trust in them and you are transparent with them and you involve them in the process, that will grow the culture on your team, that will grow the culture on your project, that will grow the culture in your organization and that will mean that you’ll be successful, because people will work hard. They will work hard because they don’t wanna let others down around them, and so, no matter how good you are at doing takeoffs and estimates or writing contracts and things like that, being transparent and building trust inside of those teams is extremely important.
Santosh: Couldn’t agree more. Tons of nuggets in our conversation, Kris. I think we touched on so many areas and there is probably a lot more which we can explore. Thank you so much for your time today.
Kris: Absolutely. Greatly appreciate you having me on and thanks a lot.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Construction Goals Podcast. I’d love to hear about your experience with goals and strategic planning, or answering questions you may have after listening to the show. You can e-mail me at santosh@goalcheck.in, or visit www.GoalCheck.in to submit any feedback or questions. I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks for listening!
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Construction Goals Podcast. I’d love to hear about your experience with goals and strategic planning, or answering questions you may have after listening to the show. You can e-mail me at santosh@goalcheck.in, or visit www.GoalCheck.in to submit any feedback or questions. I look forward to hearing from you.
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