Do you find yourself regularly searching through your emails trying to find information from your project foreman that you know you read, but just can’t remember what exactly it said? Think about how much waste this activity contains. Can you imagine if you were organized in a way where you could dramatically reduce the number of times you have to rummage through your email folders? Or even better, can you imagine if all of your…
Do you remember when you were in school and your teacher would assign a team project? You either loved or hated team projects because you knew that every group ended the same; there were always a few that led the group and did a majority of the work, the few that contributed, the one that argued every point, and the slacker who did absolutely nothing but still got the same grade. It was bullshit, and…
For the last several months I noticed that Kelly has been leaving his door open all throughout the day – even when he is in meetings or at lunch. In my last two years of working at Jenco I’ve never known him to have his door open all day – he’d shut it during meetings or when he was super busy, but now it’s open 90% of the time. So I asked him, what gives?…
Collaboration is a skill that asks people who work together to look beyond personal interests towards outcomes that will benefit the entire group. Collaboration is a great way to address challenges, since it has the potential to tap each person’s creativity when finding a solution to a problem. The workplace, similar to a sports team, is a competitive environment. Jenco is continually competing with other electrical contractors for more work from our customers and each…
Are your skills helping your business organization gain momentum? The right hand man of Warren Buffet and a fellow Billionaire, Charlie Munger once said “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart…” What I hear with that quote is rigorous learning, surrounding yourself with networks of strong thinking and…
Are your teams producing Shock and Awe or is the mood in your hallways more of resignation? As someone who leads teams to define the game of life worth playing for them, the biggest hindrance I find to success is resignation. To me resignation looks like: Heads down, limited interaction, the absence of caring…waiting…hiding…cynical. It isn’t a pretty sight. We live in a substantially more connected world now than even a couple of years ago so why is it…
The nature of people in our business is the desire to fix things. This has been one of the pleasures of working in the construction industry; working with men and women that see something that’s not functioning and collaborating together to make it work better. One of the major challenges is to have our solution be more cost effective and valuable to the customer. Ultimately, we all have to satisfy our customers which means we…