The Art of task delegation for your construction business
Jerry Aliberti • March 11, 2024
The art of task delegation and why it's critical for scaling your construction business so you can finally enjoy the dream all of us entrepreneurs have.
As a business owner, you’ve poured your heart and soul into building your business where it is today. You have dreams of the flexible lifestyle and financial independence that so many entrepreneurs dream of. However, you’re realizing that you can’t do it all yourself and your team is getting burned out, including yourself! As your business grows, so do your responsibilities. You also realize that having your management wear multiple hats and always multi-tasking is making them LESS efficient. You may think it's saving you money but it's causing more mistakes with less accountability.
Delegating tasks and clearly defining management roles allows you to focus on strategic planning and high-level decisions while empowering your team to excel in their area of expertise. Having worked for several large contractors and now working with many smaller contractors, task delegating seems to be one of the largest issues I hear about. The chaos and fast-paced nature of the business keep so many high-level executives from taking a moment to evaluate how they can achieve their goals more efficiently by utilizing their employees better. So many feel they need to just keep hiring and throw more money at a problem when many solutions are staring them straight in the face. In addition, hiring is a necessity when scaling but often times owners find out that the person they interviewed was great at interviewing with a fluffed resume but turned out to be less desirable.
As you continue to grow an employee can no longer be the Super, PM, or Field Engineer, then go back to the office in the afternoon to estimate. This will burn out your staff and you’ll have high employee turnover. You as the owner need to continue to step out of the day-to-day operations so you can work ON your business and continue to build great relationships and implement strategic goals. Just as you need to learn to step away from the day-to-day operations, as you promote your employees to higher positions, you need to have a strategy to support them as leaders as well.
The below sections will explore how business owners can evaluate their current staff’s skills and master the art of task delegation in construction so they can scale their business and run more efficient projects
The first part of understanding task delegation is known your current staff's skills and goals. Take stock of who currently is working for you, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and what are their goals. Provide quarterly evaluations but also engage in small talk in the office or on-site and fully understand what motivates them and what they care about doing. When employees are performing tasks they care about, they naturally hold themselves accountable and reduce making excuses for why tasks weren’t done. Clearly understanding what you have at this moment will reduce a lot of stress immediately and give you a clearer picture of how to proceed.
The next step is mastering the art of task delegation in your construction business and projects. Understanding your current staff's personalities, strengths, weaknesses, goals, and what motivates them is the start. Now you need to clearly define the roles of each of the positions you have. What does a Super, PM, Field Engineer, estimator, etc. all need to do independently every day to get their job done successfully? Once you do that you can match skills with the roles. The steps are as follows:
Clearly define the tasks to be done for each role
Match skills with those tasks
Provide trust. Allow your staff to take on new roles and give them the authority to make decisions.
Don’t overwhelm your employees. Provide realistic and achievable goals. Provide the support needed.
Monitor the progress.
I find that most owners wait too long before they take the above steps. They become so embedded in the day-to-day operations that they no longer have the time to step back and perform these evaluations and put a process in place so they, the owner, can step out of the business and start enjoying the life of an entrepreneur who has a business that runs itself.
In conclusion, successful business owners understand the importance of delegation in scaling their companies. Evaluating the skills of the current staff and effectively delegating tasks are fundamental to maintaining efficiency and promoting growth. Additionally, making wise hiring decisions ensures that your company attracts the right talent to tackle future challenges. By m
They’re in the middle of their final push, closing out projects, chasing retainage, lining up crews for winter work, and squeezing every bit of revenue out of the year.
Over the past 22 years, I've been in enough contractor offices to spot it right away. Many $25-$50 MM million companies have good reputations, steady work, and crews that know what they're doing.
The Challenge So I'm talking to this contractor last week who runs a $60 million construction company, and he tells me he walked into his office Monday morning ready to finally call that developer who's been dangling a 2.5-year project in front of him. This thing is right up his alley, and he knows his team could absolutely crush it. But before he can even grab his phone, here come the interruptions. His project manager needs approval on a change order, his superintendent wants to switch concrete suppliers, and his estimator is asking whether to include some risky scope in a bid that's due today. By lunch, he'd fielded twelve decisions that, honestly, his team should be handling without him. Now my first question to him was about where his lower-level executives were in all this, but for today, I want to focus on something else entirely. Why are so many questions landing on his desk in the first place? Meanwhile, and as you guessed, that developer call never happened, and he's sitting there thinking, "I built this whole company so I could work on growing it, not so I could approve every material swap and schedule change." The Impact Here's the thing that's killing me about this situation. While he's stuck approving routine decisions, his competitors are out there building the relationships that land the next big contract. That developer I mentioned? He requires months of strategic relationship building, but my friend can't block out the time because there's always another operational fire to put out. His backlog should be growing, but instead, he's spending his energy on stuff that keeps him busy instead of stuff that makes him money. The brutal part is his team has gotten comfortable just asking him instead of thinking it through, because why take responsibility when the boss will just make the call for you? The Shift So here's something powerful I've been working on with my clients that you can start immediately, and I'm telling you, this will absolutely change how your business runs. Starting Monday morning, you and your key people are keeping a decision journal for thirty days. Every time someone comes to you with a question, write it down. What they asked, what triggered it, what you told them. Have them track the same thing on their end.
