Stop Doing Things - Peter F. Drucker

Leaders of construction contractors are typically very schedule-focused driving themselves and their teams to meet project milestones consistently.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share

Those same skills that make a leader extremely effective at the project level don’t fully translate at the business level as their careers and responsibilities evolve.

Quote: We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop. Peter F. Drucker.

The tendency as a leader’s role evolves is to keep adding things to their list of responsibilities and to those of their team.  There is no shortage of business books, training programs and even LinkedIn Posts that provide a ton of great ideas.  

What’s important is to regularly pause and reflect about what you can STOP doing to allow for new ideas if they are really better:  

  • Which meetings can you stop having all together in the company?  Which ones can you stop leading yourself? Which ones can you stop attending?  What’s one thing you can do to streamline one of the meetings?
  • What is one small task that you do regularly which you can stop doing?  Don’t rationalize it away as “only a few minutes” - challenge yourself to either stop doing it all together, set it up as a rotating responsibility for cross-training or delegate it.  Do this regularly and you will be surprised at the results.  
  • What is one behavior that is no longer effective in the current role you are in?  For instance a Superintendent on a project needs to be the master of seeing every detail that isn’t right and correcting it quickly.  The CEO of a $50M mechanical contractor is far better served finding everything that is going right and pointing it out clearly to their team leaving the business punch listing to someone else. 



Measuring Customer Satisfaction - Net Promoter Score
One method of measuring customer satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score / System (NPS), which is a simple but rigorous survey methodology.
Exponential Growth of Technology
Technology innovation has always occurred at an exponential rate and has been starting to impact the $1 trillion construction industry at increasing rates.
Creating The "Perfect Field Day"
Contractors build things and that comes down to the men and women in the field. They are the ones adding the value to the raw materials and that is ultimately what the customer is paying for.