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Welcome everybody out to podcast number 1327. In this podcast, I'm excited to continue the reading of elevating pre-construction planning, and today we're going to talk about team balance. Stay with us.

This is the Elevate Construction Podcast, delivering remarkable content for workers, leaders, and companies in construction wanting to take their next step. Get ready to step out of your comfort zone with Jason Schroeder as he encourages you to do better, live a remarkable life, and expect more. Let's go! Welcome everyone.

I hope you're doing well and staying safe out there. I've got a little bit of an update before I go into the book. First of all, I hope you're enjoying it.

This is really good information, and I'm trying to make it as interesting as I possibly can. Let me say this. At the Lean Belt site, we are going out to bid officially for the non-startup, except for the first five contractors.

We're going out to bid on June for the rest of the project, I think, June 7th. One thing that the awesome folks at High Street recommended, and I think is a cool idea, is to throw out a message if there's any trades out there that would love to work with us at Lean Belt that would travel, and come here to Phoenix, and want to do a cool job with us, and help us get under budget, and do some really cool things, please reach out to me. We would love to have you here.

That's just a quick message ahead of me reading, and I hope to hear from some of you. My number is 602-571-8987. My email is jasons at leanbelt.us. All right, let's get right into it.

Let's go into the team component balance, the team. Once you have a functional team with the right behaviors, goal, and leader, you will need to purposefully maintain balance. In Built to Fail, Todd Zabelle explains that when you exceed the capacity of a system, you extend the cycle time and throughput time.

If you overburden the project team, the time it takes to complete work increases, and you have an increased risk of errors. Overburden can come from too much administration, wasteful paperwork and permissions, useless meetings and requirements, too many changes to the project without additional help, too much owner-driven variation. So if you want to prevent wasting a necessary time, keeping your team balanced and healthy is your top priority.

The easiest metrics to evaluate are people and positions, work schedules, and team conditions. So let's go ahead and get started. Number one, people and positions.

Here are the questions you will ask to understand balance. Do you have the right people on and off the team? Are team members in the right roles? This is the moment to gauge if you have too few people doing too many roles or if you are utilizing people for roles that are better suited to someone else. The more you know your team, the better able you are to assess that everyone is functioning well in their proper role.

Consider removing high-performing assholes from the team. Yes, they accomplish a lot, but they are generally not worth the damage they do to team morale. Number two, personal organization and schedule.

Here are the questions you will ask to understand balance. Does each team member follow leader standard work and have a personal organization system? Are standard coverage schedules followed for the team to have a good blend between work and home? Are there any team members overburdened? When you are a leader, no longer in authority, you will truly care about the people on your team. You have the power to improve their working conditions and should never abuse that power.

When you can see someone is working too hard, it's unacceptable to intentionally exploit them for the benefit of the team. Would you want your child to be treated the way you are treating your team? Use your skills to leverage the wisdom of the team and help everyone to pull equally. Furthermore, insist that the team is transparent about their personal organization system schedules and leader standard work and that it is all seen at a glance.

Make them visual and share them in a common place so you can be a protector of their time. Shift your mindset from feeling like you need to squeeze more work out of everyone to how can I get people home on time? Three, project conditions. To understand balance, ask if there are any project conditions that overburden the team.

The following issues need to be assessed. Design changes and change orders. Isolate the changed areas and keep your team's focus on contract work.

If they have the capacity, they can work on the changes. If they don't, you need more trained help and the owner needs to pay for it. Constant variation.

If your team experiences variation, you need to create consistency anywhere possible, especially in meeting systems, agendas, standard work planning, and processes. Every time you add a one-off or new task, consider the cost in time to absorb the variation. Not enough on-site or remote support.

If you don't have the resources for the project, get them. Hire additional people, ask for company help, or outsource some of your needs. Sometimes projects fail simply because we don't have enough coverage.

Too many assignments. If your project team has too many projects, side projects, corporate projects, or assignments creating context switching and wasted time, you need to focus them. Too many people on the team above needed levels.

Sometimes having too many people will cause you problems because communication gets harder with larger teams. So if you've panicked and added too many people to help you, consider right-sizing your team. Too much waste in their environment.

Waste can drag down a team like nothing else. You must have your Paul Akers goggles on as the leader and remove any waste or wasted efforts from your team. Unhealthy conflict.

This is the ninth waste in construction. If your team is experiencing unhealthy conflict with the owner, designers, contracts, requirements, or other relationships on the project, it must be addressed and remedied immediately. This is the responsibility of the leader.

Use the scorecard to assess your team. Each person on the team will fill this out monthly, aggregate the overall score, and dig deep into topics that have lower scores. It's a remarkable way to keep the team balanced and stable.

Here we go, I'm going to read it to you. Team in roles. Each member of the team in their proper role to ensure success.

Team balanced. The team is balanced and not working too much. Overloaded, disproportionate responsibilities, unorganized, etc.

Leader standard work followed. All leaders have and stick to critical standard work each week. Team standard work followed.

The team is following their standard work with good hours, balanced meetings, and standardized schedules. Individual and team work-life blend. Team has an appropriate blend of work and work life and family life with neither aspect negatively affecting the other.

Individual health of team members. Team is physically and emotionally healthy and taking care of mental and physical needs. Team stabilized.

The team is stable, focused, driving forward, determined, and aligned. Healthy conflict. The team is practicing healthy conflict and eliminating unhealthy conflict.

Health of team chemistry. The team can relax and have fun together. Company or team politics.

The team avoids politics and placing their status above the needs of others. Wide or team health. The trade partners, designers, and owners reps are organized into a well-functioning team.

By the way, going back to the company or team politics, I don't want the team to place their status above the needs of others. It means the team avoids politics and avoids placing their status above the needs of others. I wanted to make sure that was clear.

OK, labor quality quantity. There's enough labor and quality labor is being performed on the project. Bus organized, let go, move people.

We fire, move, and promote people as needed and deserved. Design and engineering balance. The engineers and architects are fostering balance on site and within the team.

RFI is acceptable. The RFI's remain at an acceptable number not impacting the project with burden or imbalance. Design changes within reason.

The design changes are not negatively affecting the construction site and team. Design responsibility balanced. Contractor and designers are balanced in the ongoing design efforts.

Here's the deal. You can literally score this on a monthly basis and do a quick double check of whether or not you're heading into trouble. And then once you do the score and aggregate the scores amongst the team, you can do something about it if you find there's a problem.

So let's go ahead and do the reflection, balancing the project team. The purpose of this component in the first planner system is to ensure your team stays healthy throughout the duration of the project. Team building efforts will be overrun.

If you are not able to balance the changes your team will face as outside elements join your team. The project owner, owner's rep, designers, trades, and even your own corporate policies have the potential to create an imbalance as you struggle to incorporate them and their demands into your own team dynamics. Once you and your team are over capacity, your project will begin to spiral.

And I will mention here off the record, a downward spiral. Simply put, the energy to control the project cannot be more than the combined team energy they have to offer. Your focus is to keep them balanced with high morale at all costs.

Component scoring, one to 100%. Are you shielding your project team from impacts that will cause imbalance? Are you reducing variation and creating flow within your project leadership team? Does your team have all the right people on and off the bus? Does your team have all the right people in all the right seats on the bus? What is your final score taking the average of all answers? If your score is below 80%, what specific actions do you need to take to elevate your team and leadership? Everybody, the next one we're gonna cover is individual balance. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast and on we go.

Please join us next time in elevating the entire construction experience for workers, leaders, and companies coast to coast. If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to share with your construction colleagues and help us spread the word by rating, subscribing, and leaving a review on your preferred podcast listening platform. We really appreciate it.

We'll catch you next time on the Elevate Construction Podcast.

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