Under Construction!!
Gratefulness for the Team Builders Who Build... Buildings for us to Live Work and Play In!
Before I was a Team Building (and Leader Development) Coach I was in construction. I was a construction worker, a master electrician, and a contractor. Although humans have been building together since the dawn of civilization it is both astonishing to me what we can do and dumbfounding how bad we sometimes are at doing it.
One of the things that you need most on a construction team is people who are passionately committed to making something ordered, strait, plumb, square, and who can maintain that commitment while working in an environment that is chaotic, messy, unhygienic, unceasingly noisy, and perhaps most significantly, defined by the things we are willing to put off or ignore “until later”
There are material piles in the way, vehicles blocking access, and if there is a route to safely evacuate in the event of an emergency, it changes daily. Sometimes hourly. If you want to get somewhere to do a thing, you do not want to start from here because the best walkways are filled with dangers and guarded by red danger tape. The second and third best ways of getting to where you need might still open, but will they remain open long enough for you to get there? And if they are, will you be able to remember where enough of them are to cobble together into a navigable (if highly impractical) route. Once you get there it is lamentable how often things are not yet to the stage of completion where you can start your the work you have trained, supplied, prepared and shown up to do.
Things we take for granted in a finished building like fire suppression systems, adequate ventilation, and emergency exits are in disjointed stages of completion. Emergency exit doors get screwed shut from the outside. (WTF?!? How is this not a human rights violation??) Once that problem is solved, you may find that the emergency staircase that would otherwise get you safely to ground level has not arrived yet, and that first step is a big one! Or you will be lucky enough that your exit door is in place, working correctly, and by some miracle opens correctly out onto ground level… or at least it will once the ground has been put in… right now it is still a long way down into a muddy hole that does not look fun to climb out of with your now freshly fractured fibula!
When you talk to the gnarled veteran down in a hole getting it done in the cold wetness the story is always has the same headlines too.
“This job is a sh*t show!”
(or a gong show, depending on who we are censoring for. It is a direct quote) When I’m talking with Gnarly V, I always ask,
“Do you remember that job where they gave you everything you needed to do your job, the space to do it, all the information you needed, but they gave it to you before you needed it?”
Every single time the answer is an emphatic yes! Then I ask them what the name of the job was, the name of the company running it, or who they were working with at the time and somehow they always change the subject before they could remember. Because it is always like this. We are always making it up as we go along, there are consistently more changes than there should be, and despite all evidence to the contrary, we keep telling ourselves that the last one was better and the next one will be too!
Ask them if they remember the one where the washrooms were never clean, the plans kept changing and they had to keep tearing their work apart and starting over, and they will prattle off a list. Ask which site had say, the crane flip over or the slurry tank almost flushed into a pristine forest and I’ll bet their memory recall gets really crystal clear!
In spite of all of these obstacles, building still get… built. Somehow without all of pieces we need, without adequate information, without a real plan that could survive contact on the ground we still do the work. Chaos gets turned into coherence, ideas get hammered into plans, agreements are altered and pushed forward, and what we begin we finish.
Am I saying that we should let a lot of things slide? That the mess, the incoherence, the unfinished plans are all OK? Since you asked, I will say our work forever will be to endeavor for better planning, for clearer communication, for improved agreement keeping.
Where I am going with this though, is into gratitude for the people who are boots on the ground getting it done while we are refining our planning, our clarifying our communication, and our integrating our agreement keeping.
These are the people turning chaos into coherence, stuckness into momentum, and deficiencies into substantial completion.
These people look at a crater in the ground with confidence knowing that together they can conjure into that hole whole buildings towering into the sky!
So the next time you see UNDER CONSTRUCTION signs; or your street is blocked off by trucks, cones, and workers in hi vis vests; the next time you see someone with mud on their boots and grime under their fingernails, instead of focusing on the inconvenience, consider saying thank you for the person who lives in this truncated wasteland, so that you do not have to!
Here is to the women and men out in the elements, getting it done so we can have shelter, the people leaving their homes each day so we can have homes.
Terry Barkman is a thought leader in Team Building & Leader Development. His speaking, writing, consulting & coaching are motivated by seeing more connected, effective and focused people come out on the other side. On land, at sea, from boardroom, to retreat center, to the ultimate sailboat experience; he will bring sustainable navigation to you and your organization!
Terry puts people first, ideas second, flow third.
Grammar matters any time it can be in service to the big three.
Terry Speaks ~ Photo Credit Anita Alberto
