Overview

The purpose of this series of blog posts is to provide a framework and tools that you can use to dramatically improve your performance as a leader. No matter where you are, from construction crew or design/engineering team member, foreman or project manager to corporate executive, the project management and operations changes happening through lean, and design-build best practices require us to rethink leadership.

Context

The Lean Construction Institute (LCI), the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA), the Associated General Contractors (AGC), the Project Production Institute (PPI), and many others, have developed an impressive array of technical best practice that can and must be deployed to improve the way we design and deliver capital projects. These best practices require new ways of thinking and acting, and that requires a dramatic enrichment of leadership skills. However, there are no equally practical leadership tools being promoted. It’s a blind spot.

Objective

This blog series will introduce you to new ways of thinking about leadership. But that is just the start. What is missing from most leadership writing and training is the tool kit of strategies and specific behaviors that will enable you to become more valuable to your organization and projects. All skills need to be practiced and perfected. This series will introduce you to five critical skill sets that you need to master to lead in today’s collaborative project environment. More than 70 tools we will introduce fall into three interrelated categories:

1. Conceptual Tools – how to think differently about leadership, decision-making, stakeholder engagement, etc. These tools help you see leadership differently and explain the reasons for changes you will make.

2. Template and Format Tools – These tools help you organize the inputs and thinking of diverse stakeholders to make collaboration more productive.

3. Behavioral/Linguistic Tools – Some High-Performance leadership tools are as simple as knowing the right time to ask the right question, and how to use your physical presence, tone of voice, eye contact to encourage purposeful engagement and get to win/win decisions.

Let’s get to it!

What do you think of when you hear the word “Leader”?

Most of us immediately think of someone in a top position, an organization leader, project leader, team leader, political leader, worship leader, etc. “Leader” is a title, a position. Most of us don’t think much more about it. Positional leaders set direction and give directives. Leadership hierarchy is a system meant to establish control and accountability through levels of structure and power. People usually work hard to become positional leaders and jealously guard their territory and power. Some people inherit positional power without formal training.

If a leader is the top dog, they should be accountable for the performance of their team, at whatever level, right? Sadly, few leaders take responsibility for team performance and prefer to be the ones who hold others accountable. Such behavior constrains rather than enables progress.

What do you think of when you hear the word, “Leadership?”

A dictionary might say, “Leadership is the characteristic of being a leader.” That doesn’t tell us much. We instinctively sense that there are a few “exceptional” leaders, but as with schoolteachers, the really good ones are rare, and we struggle to define what makes them exceptional.

We must think more clearly about good leadership not as a rarity, but as an unlimited resource. If we have the audacity to transform this largest of global industrial sectors, we must develop a matching leadership skill set that is practical and learnable. Almost everyone, from time to time, is a coach, a mentor, an example to others, a team member who can influence the outcomes, direction, and the culture of groups in which we work. We need to think of “Leadership” not as a fuzzy “characteristic”, but as the set of strategies and concrete actions anyone can use at any level to create value, to make things better.

What needs to Change?

In the early 1980’s, the Auto Industry and manufacturing generally, realized that superior quality designs and products required the formation of cross-discipline teams. Creativity, cooperation, and a shared focus on quality in every action, decision, and product, had to be “Job 1” for every team member. The old top-down, do-as-you’re-told, directives from contracts-based leadership could not keep up with more collaborative, agile, and creative competitors. When major enterprises have changed their organization structure, design, procurement, and manufacturing processes, leadership practices have had to change as well. Leaders found themselves rushing to catch up to their organization’s new practices! The change in leadership behavior took just as much investment, work, and commitment as every other strategic or tactical change in operations.

Here is an example:

I have written in my earlier Lean Construction Blog posts about my 1980’s experience as an organization change consultant at Ford Motor Company. I was a Senior Associate at San Francisco-based “Interaction Associates” (IA). In 1983, Ford and every other American and European auto company structured their organizations around each separate engineering or corporate function. The Design Center was in one building and worked on every product Ford made. Similarly, Body Engineering, Chassis Engineering, Motor Engineering, Procurement, Prototyping, Manufacturing, and Assembly Operations, each had their own building set apart on a vast campus. Each discipline was expected to be a “Center of Excellence”.

Interestingly, leadership of each of these siloes came almost exclusively from another silo: Corporate Finance. In yet another, smaller building at the edge of the campus, the coordination of vehicle product development was assigned to the “Program Management” organization - to whom none of these other disciplines reported. This siloed organization structure focused on excellence and fiscal discipline in each component organization, and none of it focused on the overall excellence of the whole product.

The Japanese saw no utility in duplication of administrative overhead and separate facilities for each discipline. They created multi-discipline teams for each product line with experts from each discipline’s center of excellence. They reported directly to the Vehicle Program Manager. To US and European auto companies this was a completely foreign organization structure, an unfamiliar culture of collaboration, and a rejection of success as measured by the size of each discipline’s empire, defined by budget and headcount.

Ford’s individual discipline focus should sound very familiar to anyone who has worked in construction. Forty years ago, the Auto Industry was forced to reinvent itself. Today each building on the Ford campus is dedicated to a particular vehicle family with multidisciplinary staff reporting to the Program manager. But we still set up separate contractor trailers, separate budgets and reporting structures for each participating company in a project. We use contracts and directives to try to manage workers who report up through their separate companies.

The change at Ford did not happen by accident. Ford didn’t know what it didn’t know. Don Peterson, Ford’s CEO, hired W. Edwards Deming, one of the fathers of “TQM” – Total Quality Management, who had helped Japan transform its industrial sector after WWII. Deming set the stage for rethinking technical operations. Then Ford hired Interaction Associates for their expertise in the design and leadership of collaborative organizations and change efforts. A guiding principle was, “the change you want is the change you must start with”. Roughly translated, “leaders must model the change they want to produce.” Leaders had to change too!

Ford’s product development transformation process was called, “Concept to Customer”. The transformation process had to model how the new product development process would work. If Ford was going to focus on collaborative product development with input from every stakeholder from Concept Development through Final Assembly Operations, the organization redesign process had to model how that collaborative stakeholder involvement would work. “Concept to Customer” was assigned to a leadership Core Team. Cross-discipline Business Process Design teams were organized by phases of the new product development process, rather than engineering disciplines. Each process redesign team had a senior leader, helped by team facilitators from IA.

The only process transformation team that spanned all the other development phases was the “Program Management” redesign team, which I facilitated and coached. Ford was moving from a “weak” Program Manager model to a “strong” Program Manager model. The traditional leadership culture, exemplified by Henry Ford’s famous statement about the Model T, “You can have it any color you want, as long as it’s black!” was not going to work anymore. The role of the leader in the new system had to be redesigned to fit with the new product development process. A whole new set of skills, strategies and tools had to be developed and implemented. Collaboration must be facilitated, not dictated.

IA, arguably the global leaders in the facilitation and training of collaborative leadership skills, provided a comprehensive set of leadership strategies and tools for adaptation and adoption by Ford.

Among the revolutionary thinkers to get IA’s public leadership training in the 1980s were LCI‘s founders, Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell. They immediately saw the importance of collaborative leadership practices for the construction industry. Whether facilitating a Design-Build Partnering Session, or a Last Planner System® production control session, a new set of leadership practices was essential for success. However, in the nearly 35 years since LCI and DBIA embraced collaborative leadership, we have failed to match the lean project delivery tool kit, with an equally rich leadership tool kit.

This series of blog posts will explore key concepts and tools needed to manage Integrated Project Delivery. I call this toolkit of concepts, skills, and best practices, “High-Performance Leadership”. These posts will introduce many of the essential elements practiced in a new two-day “High-Performance Leadership” training, introduced in 2023 for the Northern California LCI Community of Practice. Every concept and best practice we discuss in these posts will add to your personal leadership tool kit and help you make enhanced contributions to any team, project, or company improvement effort. Your leadership skills can make a difference.

We look forward to your comments, questions, discussion, and examples as these posts are published. This topic could not be more important or timely.

Keep an eye out for Post #2 in this series in which we will introduce how “High-Performance Leadership” reframes and enhances everything you already know about leadership. Each subsequent post will add one or more practical tools or strategies you can practice immediately. Let’s raise the bar on leadership to match the needs of our new integrated project delivery methods!