Leadership in Construction: The Meeting Structure That Gets Your Team to Agree in 30 Minutes

0:00Your team could agree in 30 minutes on how to tackle a problem you've been arguing about for years. I've watched my clients do exactly that. For over 20 years, I've used a specific meeting structure to help them reach agreement and taught them how to use it themselves. If you're frustrated with meetings, look at the structure before you decide you suck at facilitating or your people suck at participating. Even capable people can spend an hour talking and leave without a decision. In this episode, I'll walk you through that structure so that you can use it with your own team. And stick around for a special offer exclusively for podcast listeners and YouTube viewers.

0:41I'm Eric Anderton. This is Construction Genius.

0:47Eric Anderton: This is Eric Anderton, and you're listening to Construction Genius, a leadership masterclass. Thomas Edison said that genius is 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration. If you're a construction leader, you know all about the perspiration, and this show is all about the 1 % inspiration that you can add to your hard work to help you to improve your leadership.

1:16Choose your own problem as we go. A tile contractor used this question. In what specific ways can we improve quality in the field in the next 90 days? Think of a problem your team keeps discussing without resolving, and write that down. If you're driving, make a note when you're parked. Apply each step to that problem as we go. I've put links to the Meeting Effectiveness Assessment and my Kick-Ass Meetings e-book in the show notes. Make sure that you grab both. You'll find them tremendously useful. The assessment asks whether everyone contributes, whether you can narrow ideas to a priority, and whether you leave with an action plan people commit to.

1:56Kick-Ass Meetings gives you three stages. Generate ideas, gather and prioritize, and action planning. You can use this process as an owner, president, or a leader of a division, department, or project team. Find one problem worth solving. Before you gather your people, choose a problem they can help address. Use your business model to locate it. You want profitable revenue and control over the costs of delivering the work. Between revenue and costs are activities your people can influence, including bid accuracy, change order management, quality, productivity, and materials management. Look at the numbers you track in those areas, then talk with the people responsible.

2:42The reports can show where performance needs attention. The conversations can explain why. Be precise. In what specific ways can we improve communication is still too broad. Narrow it to communication between the field and office, or between two superintendents competing for field resources. Add a time frame such as the next 90 days. Prepare the room without giving it your answer. Write the question where everyone can see it. Check that participants understand it and agree it's worth working on. Make sure people in the room understand the problem and can contribute to solving it. Include people with direct experience of the work and leaders who can help implement the decision.

3:30I recommend 6 to 10 participants for a meeting like this, with 12 as an upper limit. Set the ground rules. Here are three key ground rules. Number one, put away distractions. No one's on their phone. No one's on their laptop. Number two, everyone participates. There's no courtesy invites to this meeting. If you're in the meeting, you're expected to contribute. And number three, no criticizing each other's ideas while we're gathering them. The structure gives everyone time to think and a turn to share. If someone remains unwilling to participate, that's an issue that you need to address outside of the meeting.

4:07As the owner, make your decision authority clear up front. You retain the right to decline an idea, even if it gets the most votes. Explain any known limits before you go through this meeting. If you reject the leading idea, explain why as candidly as you can. There may be information you can't share, but people deserve to understand your reasoning as far as possible. Then resist the temptation to give them a detailed explanation of what you think needs to happen. State the problem and let them do some thinking. Two minutes before anyone talks. Set a timer for two minutes. Have everyone work individually and write down as many answers to the question as they can.

4:52You do this too without announcing your ideas. Encourage quantity at this point. Tell them, write an idea down and then move on to the next one. When the timer ends, ask each participant to select the best two ideas from their own list. Now go around the room and collect one idea from each person. Write the ideas where everyone can see them and number each one. Here's where you speak last. Let everyone else share their first idea before you offer yours. If someone else is facilitating, let that person manage your turn along with everyone else's turn. And as the leader, always go last. Take one idea per person per turn.

5:38The person who usually talks the most gets the same opportunity as everyone else. When I'm facilitating this meeting, if someone is dominating, I'm just going to interrupt. Let me pause you there so we can hear from everyone. I'll make sure I come back to you. I don't hesitate to do that. I'm responsible for making the meeting useful for the whole group. One person can't take everyone else's time. In person, if someone keeps talking after I've asked them to hold back, I found that walking over and lightly touching their arm gets their attention and brings them back to the process. Once you've collected the first round of ideas, reverse the order for the second.

6:18Start with whoever went last. If that's you, that's fine. Everyone else's first idea has already been shared. Then ask if there are additional ideas the group needs to consider. What to do when you disagree. Your job while gathering ideas is to understand them and capture them accurately. The tile contractor's suggestions included a weekly quality control program, freeing foreman from installing so they had more time for quality control, and getting Lily, the quality control manager, into the field. You also need to recognize when someone is still working out what they mean. They may have written down an answer and need to talk about it out loud to clarify it.

7:03If the first version sounds vague or less useful, then you'd expect from someone with their expertise, ask questions. Give them a little room to talk it through. You might ask, what specifically would we do differently? Or, help me understand how that would work. Listen to their explanation, then write down the idea and read it back. Ask, have I captured what you mean? Managing the time takes judgment. Interrupt someone who's taking over and give someone who's developing a useful idea enough time to explain it. Watch yourself when someone's idea challenges an idea that you've introduced. You may want to jump in with a history of why your idea exists or why your way of doing things is the right way of doing things.

7:51During this part of the meeting, hear the suggestion fully before you evaluate it. If someone starts criticizing an idea, remind them of the ground rules. We're gathering ideas. Everyone will get a chance to evaluate them and vote. Don't criticize ideas during this part of the process. Hold people to the rules that you've established. If you'd like to see how quickly your own team can reach agreement with this structure, I'd enjoy helping you try it. Exclusively for Construction Genius podcast listeners and YouTube viewers, the first 10 contractors who contact me can get a 60-minute Zoom session with me and their team at no charge.

8:33I would normally charge$3 ,500 for this session. Bring a specific problem you're going through, and I'll run the meeting and show you how to gather your people's ideas, choose a priority, and work toward an action plan. Email eric at constructiongenius.com with kick-ass meetings in the subject line. Tell me your problem and that you heard the offer on the podcast or YouTube, and I'd love to meet your team. Now you've got ideas on the board, let's choose what to do. Turn the ideas into a priority. The tile contractor had 15 ideas. Now the group needed to choose a priority. Ask each person to choose approximately the best third of the ideas.

9:15With 15, each participant selects five different ideas. They can't stack their votes behind one favorite. Have everyone write down their selections before you tally anything. As the owner, keep your preferences to yourself until they've chosen. Then go around and collect each person's selections. Tally them where everyone can see the results. In the tile contractor example, walking jobs more frequently and getting little e into the field each received nine votes. To resolve a tie, clarify what each proposal involves, then have people choose between them. Those two ideas are related, but people still need to know who would do what.

9:57Once you've chosen a priority, ask for a show of hands. Who supports implementing this approach over the next 90 days? I expect people to be straight with me and raise objections at this point. That assumes a willingness to speak honestly. Healthy teams will object even when everyone else appears to agree. If someone can't commit, ask, what would we need to address for you to support implementing this? You're agreeing at this point to try an approach to solving the problem, and you're going to evaluate how it works and make adjustments. If it doesn't work, you can try something else. That gives people a practical basis for committing.

10:35Using this structure for over two decades, teams come to unanimous agreement the first time 95 % of the time. The moment the group reaches agreement. This is the moment that still gets me when I facilitate these meetings. We started with a blank piece of paper. About 30 minutes later, everyone has agreed on an approach to solving the problem. I ask, how long does it usually take? At that point, they laugh. Sometimes the answer is month, sometimes it's years, sometimes never. Because of the clear meeting structure, the same people who struggle to reach agreement have achieved something that previously was tremendously difficult.

11:15Now turn that agreement into assigned work. The problem still needs to be solved. Put the decision on one page. Reserve time for action planning in every meeting that you run like this. You don't want to spend the entire hour discussing ideas and leave the assignments for another day. The one-page plan in Kick-Ass Meetings has three parts. Rally cry, fierce focus, and critical numbers. Here's how a heavy civil contractor used it. Their rally cry was own the cost. That was the overall goal they wanted people to remember and to achieve. Project managers would set up the job for margin success. Superintendents would optimize resources.

11:59Foreman would focus on economic execution, doing the work at the lowest possible cost, consistent with the job's requirements. Those were their areas of fierce focus. Practical work that drives the achieving of the rally cry. Assign one accountable person to each area, even when a group will do the actual work. Then choose the critical numbers to track. Project managers had margin growth. Superintendents had equipment utilization. and foreman had cost per unit install. The critical numbers tell you whether the areas of fierce focus are producing the intended result and helping you achieve the rally cry.

12:40Define the starting point, target, and deadlines. Agree on a review cadence suited to the work, daily, weekly, or monthly. And as the owner or president, let those people own their assignments. If you take every task back, you're putting the work back on your desk after asking the team to take responsibility. Follow up on what people agreed to do. Put the review on the calendar before you finish the meeting. At the review, an accountability conversation can go like this. Three questions. Did you do it? If not, why not? How can I help? The answers may reveal that the area of fierce focus needs changing, or that the accountable person is overloaded or lacks the competence for the assignment.

13:28You may need to change the work or assign someone else. You may also need to hold the existing person more firmly accountable. Use what you learn to decide what needs to happen next. Now come back to the problem you wrote down at the beginning of the podcast. Write the specific question you'll put in front of your team. Identify who needs to attend. Include the people who understand the work and can help carry out the decision. Use the whole process. When my clients struggle after I've taught them the meeting process, they've often skipped a step, accepted a vague question or idea, or let someone dominate the meeting.

14:06Precision and participation matter throughout. Choose a meeting time, leave room for action planning in the meeting, and put it on the calendar. I'd love to help you try this with your team. Again, the first 10 contractors who contact me from the podcast or YouTube get a 60-minute Zoom session at no charge, and I would normally charge$3 ,500 for that session. Bring a current problem, and I'll run the meeting so you can see the process in action. Email eric at constructiongenius.com with kick-ass meetings in the subject line. Tell me the problem and where you heard the offer. Grab the assessment and ebook at no charge from the show notes.

14:46Share this episode with another construction leader who could use it. And please leave Construction Genius a rating and a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're watching on YouTube, like the video and please subscribe. Really appreciate you listening.

15:02Eric Anderton: Send me that email and let's work on your next meeting together. Thank you for listening to this episode of Construction Genius. Hope you found that 1 % of inspiration to help you in the next few days. If you like the show, please give us a five-star review on iTunes, share it with other construction leaders who you think would benefit. And always remember that the show is brought to you by Kick-Ass Meetings. I've been working with construction leaders since 2004, teaching them how to run extremely effective problem-solving meetings that gets their people collaborative.