Failure is a Potent Teacher

Failure is a very potent teacher for construction contractors if:

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Leadership Tools: Failure is a Potent Teacher.
  • You don’t define failure just as CATASTROPHIC events that seriously damage your business.  
  • You define failure broadly as ANYTHING that is not adding value to the customer or slowing your progress.  
  • You embrace failure as part of the learning process diving deeply into the Root Cause Analysis (RCA). 
  • You develop a culture and systems so that everyone on the team thinks about the business as a series of interrelated cycles.  Consider all the interrelated cycles from the installation of a light fixture in the field to to the monthly project review meetings to the annual business planning process.  
  • Your whole team views each cycle as an opportunity to improve (PDCA)
  • You have developed structured processes for continuously updating your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) as your team learns then rolling them out across the company improving the whole team’s capabilities.  

Book Resources:

The Five Elements of Effective Thinking

Thinking in Bets

Related LinkedIn Posts:  

Churchill - Failure is NOT Fatal

Fail 9 Times to Succeed




3-Year Business Planning (Basic Overview)
Your 3-Year Business Plan is the equivalent of a Short-Interval-Plan (SIP) on a construction project. It sets specific objectives and key results for the whole team. It allows you to plan your resources and know if you are on track or not.
Impacted Productivity - Fighting Back
Fighting back effectively against labor productivity impacts will significantly improve project outcomes including customer satisfaction if handled properly. There are four interrelated aspects to effectively fighting back.
Allocation of Management Resources
Most new initiatives that contractors try often fall short of expectations due to poor management time allocation during start-up. We work with a lot of contractors and rarely see truly bad ideas or teams that truly can’t execute.