Construction is often described as an industry where you win small but you lose big. All businesses and industries carry an element of risk, but construction projects can go wrong in so many ways and in so many places.

We’ve worked with all sorts of companies in the construction, from hugely successful residential construction companies to one that went broke and everything in between.

Download our guide Top 5 Critical People Challenges Construction Leaders Can Resolve in 2022 to transform the way you think about Construction management training.

Why Construction Demands Great Leaders

It’s a tough business that demands leadership at all levels. What they have in common is a strong leader at the top, but the really successful cultivated leaders at the next level who could work without them, who had developed the commercial and technical judgement to take on and execute projects profitably.

Read more about the core skills that make great Construction leaders here.

How Bad Construction Managers are Bad for Business

It starts with pricing, getting the right balance between competitiveness and margin. A single mistake on a big programme sent one former client out of business. Your confidence in price is a measure of your confidence in the ability of the team to protect margin – avoid rework, maintain efficiency and continuity, wrangle subbies and keep the client happy.

Detail is critical, but no owner or leader can oversee every aspect of a big job. They have to train their people to have the same awareness that they do. A construction company leader told me he could look at photos of the various construction sites, zero in on something relatively innocuous like an unsecured covering or some signage missing, and then ask his GM how the project was going. Seven times out of ten, his follow-up questions revealed a problem that wasn’t apparent to his GM. 

What he has to do now is get practiced at explaining the connections between an unsecured covering and what that might mean. Then the GM has to exercise the same kind of leadership with their team, and so on all the way down to the leading hand on a site.

It’s a tough business, unusual for the number of moving parts and external factors that come into play. Strong leadership is essential throughout the business, because the weakest link could undo the whole thing.

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