A lot of managers in the construction industry rose up through the ranks. They started out as great “workers,” which led company leaders to assume they would also be great “bosses.” But that is rarely the case. Being a great manager, much less a great leader, requires certain skills, instincts and training.
“Leadership is a craft,” says Bart Gragg, creator of Blue Collar University, a training and development organization for managers in a variety of blue collar fields. “Like any craft, leadership has to be developed. It’s relatively straightforward to develop hard skills like welding and pipefitting. That’s because it’s easy to see the progress and where additional training may be needed. Plus, with a lot of hard skills, once you become a master, that’s it. But becoming a great leader is a never-ending process.”
Gragg was a highly rated speaker at CONEXPO-CON/AGG in both 2020 and 2023. Prior to becoming a speaker, author and consultant, he rose up through the ranks in the demolition and oil-and-gas segments of the construction industry. He, like many construction managers, had to figure things out as he went along.
According to Gragg, successful construction managers have certain invaluable skills.
why they have to make them. Understanding the why is a big part of becoming a good manager.
The average person is not born with skills like that. Those skills need to be developed. The good news is that they often can be, along with a handful of essential character traits a good manager needs to have.
7 essential character traits of good managers
1. Credibility. Managers need to be trusted, and building trust requires the ability to exhibit empathy. That’s different from sympathy, where you just feel bad for an individual. Empathy requires managers to truly see things from an employee’s perspective. It also requires managers to recognize that the old-school, authoritarian way of bossing people around isn’t effective. “If an employee feels like they are constantly being degraded or even picked on, how are they going to trust their manager?” Gragg asks.
2. Deal with conflict. Conflict is often viewed as a bad thing that should be avoided. “In reality, conflict is just a disagreement you can learn from by taking an interest in the other person’s point of view,” Gragg says. That doesn’t mean you’ll wholeheartedly change your mind to go along with the person you’re having the disagreement with. But by taking the time to hear their point of view, managers can handle the conflict head-on and show a willingness to learn, which will also help to establish their credibility.
3. Communicate with clarity. Good managers know how to have effective conversations that help establish expectations with team members, clients, vendors, contractors, inspectors and others. “Conversations create clarity, and clarity is the foundation of the next essential trait, accountability,” Gragg explains.
4. Establish accountability. Once an expectation has been clearly established, a good manager is able to do their job more effectively. For example, when two parties agreed on something, but it wasn’t executed as discussed, it’s easy for the manager to say, “Can you help me understand what happened here?” In some instances, there might be an entirely valid reason. Sometimes there isn’t. Either way, a good manager is willing and able to hold their people and partners accountable, as well as themselves and even their superiors.
5. Decision-making and planning. Good managers are able to focus on results with a willingness to take risks to achieve them. Good planning helps mitigate some of those risks and stumbling blocks, which is why it’s another essential trait a good manager must develop. “Good planning ties back to communicating with clarity and establishing accountability,” Gragg says.
Many of a manager’s biggest decisions are made during the planning process. According to Gragg, those decisions should always involve the people those decisions will affect.
“Keep in mind that your ‘team’ includes more than your direct reports,” Gragg points out. “Your team includes vendors, contractors and other stakeholders. Good decision-making and planning are never done in a vacuum. They go hand in hand and are best made with differing viewpoints. When others have input, you get more varied information and ideas that individually may not make much sense, but together show a clearer, bigger picture.”
6. Develop their people. It takes commitment and effort for most people to develop their personal leadership skills. But good managers also find the time and energy to help bring out the best in their team members.
“Good managers look for that one thing that’s stopping a person from getting better and growing,” Gragg says. That might be a hard skill where a little refresher training might be necessary. At the same time, employees must feel comfortable about going to their manager with questions and challenges. “Bringing out the best in people involves a combination of observation and listening,” Gragg explains.
A teaching concept known as scaffolding can help close many of those skill gaps. “Scaffolding is about building a support network of trainers, training resources, people and processes to help an individual or team move to the next level,” Gragg says.
Another principle of scaffolding suggests that the teacher gradually remove support beams as the student gains competency. Gragg doesn’t completely agree with that.
“I think managers can reduce some of the scaffolding so employees have to begin doing things on their own. But that scaffolding is still there if you need it,” Gragg explains. “Furthermore, as time goes on, that scaffolding may grow wider and deeper as conditions change (i.e. economy, technology, regulation, etc.). So keeping that scaffolding support in place is important, even though you might not use it very often. It’s always nice when you have a training need and you can say, ‘I know a person who can help with that,’ or ‘I know a process that can help us work through that.’”
Where do the pieces of scaffolding come from? Gragg says a scaffold can be a combination of training videos, outside experts and, perhaps most importantly, inside experts. The scaffolding is primarily fostered by the leader.
“When a construction company can get to a culture of peer-to-peer accountability and teaching, it has created something enormous,” Gragg says.
7. Self-discipline. Good managers recognize that leadership is another craft they have to master, just as they had to master certain hard skills for their previous job as an engineer, pipefitter, equipment operator, mechanic, etc. Good managers also possess the self-motivation and discipline needed to seek out information, learn, improve, and master their new craft.
“Managers can read books and watch YouTube videos, and even go to workshops and seminars,” Gragg says. “But remember, leadership is a contact sport. Until you actually have to lead, it’s hard to truly understand what it takes. Once you get started and get a feel for it, you can start to recognize what you need to learn in order to master it. All of that requires self-motivation and discipline.”
It also requires the upper management of a construction company to see the value in investing in their blue collar leaders. When everyone makes the commitment to better leadership, that’s when construction managers can truly be successful.
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