Welcome everybody out to podcast number 321. Are you growing your own superintendents in-house? 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 everybody. I hope you're doing well.

I am out in... Excuse me. Sorry, I got something stuck in my throat there. I am out in South Carolina, so I've been flying out here all day.

I'm out here with Adam Hoots with Langston Construction. Tomorrow we're doing a boot camp. Pretty excited.

I'm out back. What time is it? It's 11.18. But I don't think it's that... It's definitely not that... So it's 8. 8.19 in Arizona. I better get to bed soon.

But anyway, I'm out here outside. The crickets are chirping. I don't know if you can hear that.

I'm under a beautiful moon, beautiful weather. It's just a great day. And the hospitality out here is great.

So having a great day. The boot camp tomorrow is all on schedule, ready to go. We're going to come out of the gate, just swinging.

Going to provide a wonderful experience. So today we're going to talk about developing superintendents. You've heard me talk about this subject before.

And if you've heard this before, I apologize if I'm covering this again. But I'm going to cover some specifics tonight. I'll make this a short podcast so that it's convenient for you driving to work.

But I really want to get to the point of where we're building and creating and coaching and forming and making superintendents from the beginning. And I was talking to a potential client the other day about superintendent boot camps and talking about how wonderful they are. And I said, we talk a lot about it because a lot of people order the superintendent boot camps.

But the field engineer boot camps are the granddaddy of all boot camps. That's where you have two one-day in-person technical trainings. We read three books.

We go through a text study, lots of preparation. And then we go into a week-long, all five days, immersive boot camp where they have to perform to actually build something. And then they have a six-month certification.

And the amount of change that people go through in that camp is unparalleled. I've never seen training anywhere, even in some of the advanced leadership trainings that I've been to, take somebody through that much immersive training with that much impact. So my point with that was when I was talking to this potential client is, if you really want to grow great or build great supers or have great supers, you're going to grow them.

You're going to build them. You're going to train them in the zero to five year mark. Now, the problem is with my advertising.

I'm saying the term field engineer, and most people don't know what that means because, you know, I grew up with Hensel Phelps, you know, the Hensel Phelps of the world, the Keywits, the, you know, the Turners. Like they know what field engineering is. Not everybody knows what that is.

What it is is doing the layout and control, the survey, the lift drawings, the frontline safety and quality management as a builder before you become a superintendent. Now, some people might have folks doing that and call it a project engineer position, and I think that's totally fine. I think that's great, actually.

And, you know, more power to you, right? I think I'm advertising it wrong. What I mean is a builder boot camp where you have your foreman, your zero to five year superintendents, your field engineers, your college graduates coming in. The best thing to do is to get them started out right.

So that's what we're going to talk about tonight. First of all, at Elevate, we do project recovery, training, boot camps, consulting, organizational health consulting. Call us if you need any of these.

If you have a question or you want to attend a boot camp. And if you want to sign up for the TACT certification and the next super boot camp that we have on July 26, please let us know. I just got six more attendees signed up today.

Please let us know. So what am I excited about? I'm excited about enjoying life. I was at the airport today and I had this moment.

You know, we have help now. I have more help at Elevate and we'll continue to get more help. I had this moment where I was a little bit caught up.

We're ready for tomorrow. We have a remarkable experience coming. And I was like, okay, I finally enjoy this.

I still am amped all the time, but I'm not stressed. I'm not burdened. And I sat there just feeling a sense of wonder and accomplishment about where we're headed, where we're headed with the business.

And I realized that I had finally after five months hit a point where I do feel balanced, where I feel like my personal organization systems are in place, where I've adjusted things to where they're working. And so when I talk about personal organization, when I talk about these things, yeah, you start a new job. You have an adjustment period.

You start a new project. You have an adjustment period. You get married.

You have an adjustment period. You have children. You have an adjustment period.

So just like me, I have one. And I haven't been working with a work-life balance for the last five months as I grind through this, this startup of this business. But I will tell you that today I was like, okay, all right, I'm feeling it.

We're heading in a good way. I'll have reflection time. I'll have time to be healthy.

I've been to the lake the last two weeks, which I need or else I go insane. I need to, you know, some people go jogging. I need to go out and get on the wakeboard or the knee board and go swimming with the kids.

Like, that's my release. That's my outlet physically and just make it work. So I just want to let you know that that's what I'm excited about, is finally hitting that balance after five months.

So tonight I'm going to skip talking about fans and feedback. Actually, I can't. No, I'll actually do that really quickly.

Let me get back over here. Well, I'll circle back to it because I had my survey open. Let me not waste your time tonight, but I'll definitely circle back to this tomorrow.

But here's your conflict. You're not spending time developing your people right from the start. And it's better.

Somebody once gave me an analogy. I don't know if it's a perfect analogy or if there's a better one, but, you know, if you have a leaky boat, let's say, what's the most important thing, bailing the water out or stopping the leak, right? And I think that we could all agree to a certain extent, right? Under certain circumstances, it's better to plug the leak and then to bail it out, right? But when we try to retrain or recover or mentor superintendents out of bad behaviors when they're 15 years into it, that's like bailing out the water. We should plug the hole and make sure they're coming out of the gate properly.

For me, I was a field engineer. I was a Rodman. That's what they called that position.

And then a field engineer at Hensel Phelps. And I was a field engineer for four years. That means I got to do layout, primary, secondary, working control, lift drawings, coordination, 3D modelings, frontline safety and quality management.

I mean, for four years, that was great. And I was able to make it to where I was a senior superintendent at 33. And then a general superintendent at 35.

And then a field operations director at 37. And a project director at 37, yeah, 37 years old. And so that's not bad.

Probably the rest of you are like, wow, that took you so long. But I'm talking there are people that never make it there. Or it takes them to where they're 45 or 50 or 55 or 60.

And that's not a competition. I'm just saying that what helped me was being a field engineer for a longer period of time. So let's talk about that principle tonight.

So if we, I really started focusing in on this because I was doing a webinar for the Lean Construction blog. And we were talking about becoming a superintendent or supporting superintendents or elevating superintendents. And we showed a graph where there was this normal career path.

And I have surveyed people, multiple companies, and they tell me their career path. And any time I find that they didn't get time in the survey seat or the field engineer seat or the project engineer in the field seat, their duration of time that it takes them to get to the positions they want extends. And then if you look at the career path of people that were in survey, that were able to be a foreman, that were able to be a field engineer for a number of years, that duration is shortened quite a bit.

And I was intrigued by that, right? I was intrigued by that. And I asked myself why, you know? And so you've heard me say this before, but superintendents fail if they don't do one of these six things very well. Delegation, getting the plan visually out of their head and not on paper, visual, having visual plans and schedules, if they don't speak up and hold people accountable, if they don't set high standards, if they don't have a good personal organization system, if they don't know how to use technology, right? Those are things that you learn how to do as a field engineer, right? So if you didn't get a chance to crack open AutoCAD or Civil 3D or Revit and do lift drawings and have to visualize things in a coordinate geometry system, if you never had to lay out in a coordinate geometry system and learn survey and control layout fundamentals, if you never had to actually go out and pull tape on embeds and actually detail out a wall with a lift drawing, like a complex wall, like I remember in Austin, Texas, having to detail out the plinths on an exterior system with changing exterior skin types with an elevation change of over 30 feet and figuring out how all these plinths and dowels and everything work together on top of the structure, like if you've never had to actually do a drawing of that, lay that out and then QC it and install it with the workers in the field, then you're missing out on the opportunity to learn those builder visual techniques that you will use in the future, right? If you've never had to do that QC, if you've never had to do that frontline safety, if you've never had to use that technology, if you've never had to organize your days in that chaos and have that builder experience, then we're just short cutting each other.

We're just short cutting ourselves for the future, right? And I've said this before, and I'll say it again, being a superintendent is not a builder practicing position. You should be a builder to be a super, but you're not practicing how to be a builder. You practice how to be a builder when you're doing the drawings, when you're doing the layout, when you're piecing everything together, when you're QCing, when you're troubleshooting with the workers, when you're out there doing the work, like that's where you practice building.

You don't practice being a builder by just being a super and pointing and going around. I think that me personally, the biggest mistake a superintendent can make is to come out of college without any field engineer experience and go right into being an assistant superintendent. They always get held up.

I don't think I've ever seen a high profile and call me. Call me out. Call me.

Text me. Jason S at elevateconstructionist.com or six zero two five seven one eight nine eight seven. And if this is you and you somehow made it past this, let me know.

If you're a general superintendent or a field director for a large construction company and you did that by coming out of college and going straight in as a super, call me and let me know because I've never heard of that ever. I've never heard of somebody or seen or experienced or tracked or spoken to somebody who went from college and went right in as an assistant super and then made their way through the ranks successfully. Ever.

And every time I look at somebody who has done well in those ranks, they have had some sort of field engineering, whether that's form and survey, field engineer, project engineer with a field focus, whatever the case may be. So what can we do? What I would suggest with any company and it's expensive. And even if I own a construction company, I would do this.

The first thing I would do for my field builders would be start a field engineering program. I would get field engineer boot camps going. I would integrate the field engineering methods manual by Wes Crawford.

I would get monthly field engineer trainings. I would get a field engineering mentoring group and lead field engineer set up. I would get the career structure 100% aligned.

I would get projects to pay for them. I would get a culture going with field engineering immediately under a field engineering group. I would align all those career paths.

I would align incentives. I would create that training. I would make sure that we had higher expectations and basically provide these builders a good foundation because the superintendent, you know, is equal to the project manager, right? And they need to learn how to obtain operational control.

They need personal organization. They need to understand how to build high performance teams. They need to learn scheduling.

They need to learn all of these great things. And then it's built upon the other fundamental practices, right? If I had a magic wand, I would say everybody go to field engineer boot camp before they ever come to super boot camp. But I, people order the super boot camp.

So I have, I'm going, we're going to, we're going to do everything we can and they're going to leave completely changed. But if you wanted a kick butt group of supers, we'll, we will make these super, these field engineer boot camps and we'll have them attend. I mean, it's absolutely fantastic.

And, you know, in, in those field engineer boot camps, we give them two points, a set of drawings. And by the end of the third day, they have to have footings placed in the ground. And then we laser scan them to see how close they got.

In order to actually interpret a bad set of plans, create the drawings, determine the layout, do the mathematical calculations, actually go lay that out, build it, build it and design the form work systems and get concrete in and schedule all the time. That's an intense program. Like it is intense.

You have to be a builder to get through that. You, I bet you, and this isn't an insult. I'm just saying it because I love you.

I bet you 80% of the people in the construction industry couldn't go through and do that without the training we provide. You couldn't give them two points and have them engineer that from the start to the finish. And I say, if you, if you're going to be a superintendent, you have to know how to do that.

You can't just go out there and say, Hey, servers, go out, lay out my building and not know correct survey principles. You can't go out there and say, Hey, exterior guys, go put this up and not know how to piece things together and how to lay out embeds and how to, you know, calculate angles and how to do these things. You know, I mean, there's some pretty complex things that engineers can do with the proper training that builders should be able to do.

And I'm not trying to make people feel guilty. I'm saying that you're not getting the respect you deserve if you haven't been given the time to be a field engineer. So my best advice for designing, creating, building, coaching, birthing, you know, superintendents of the future is to have them go through the field engineering program and to have a strong field engineering program in-house in the company, 100%.

And that, that's my message. If you want to be successful and you're listening to this podcast right now and you're a field engineer, stay there for a while. If you're not a field engineer and you have the chance, take it.

And if you're choosing between a company that has field engineers and doesn't choose the company with field engineers, that's if you want to do well in life, right? If you want the immediate self gratification of being like, okay, I'm out of school. Now I'm an assistant superintendent, you know, go do that. But that's going to hurt you in the long run.

Excuse me. I'm sorry about that. I probably won't edit that out.

It's too late. But there's the end. And that just goes back to, I'll close it out with this.

That goes back to that study of the marshmallows. They took kids and they said, you can eat a marshmallow now. But if you wait 15 minutes, you'll get two.

And they did that study and the kids, they tracked those kids over 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years. And they found that the kids that were able to wait to eat the second marshmallow did better in life, had better relationships, made more money, were more socially stable, and had less incidents of crime. And so the act of patience is not only an indication of your character, but it's also a measurement or a possible measurement of how successful you'll be in the future.

So if I could give you any advice, I would say, take the time to learn the fundamentals early on. And if you're a company, and if you want to develop superintendents well, then let's plug the hole and bail the water out later, or do both at the same time. But let's not just continually bail out the water without plugging the hole.

Because one of the things that I want for everybody, I want it for supers, I want it for business owners, I want it for executives, I want it for everyone. I want these grumpy, pain in the butt, don't know how to schedule superintendents to stop holding you hostage. Meaning you're like, there's not very many supers out there, I don't have enough people, these three supers that I have, I have to tolerate their bad behavior or else they'll quit.

They're holding you hostage. I want that gone. I want a newer generation of people, or the existing generation that are trained, so well that they know how to schedule, they know tax planning, they know technology, they know how to use their computers, they know how to use Bluebeam, they know how to do IPD, they know how to manage coordination, they know how to go out in the field and run an operationally stable job, they know how to talk to people, they know how to mentor.

The superintendent of the future, Superintendent 2.0, has the technological capabilities of a project manager, the genius and the strategic mind and the logistics sense of a military general, and the ability to talk to anybody and influence people, when friends influence people. That's Superintendent 2.0. So I want this problem gone, and the way we do it is we plug the hole by training fundamental builders at the fundamental level within that range of field engineering, whatever you want to call it, fundamental builder, and so that is what I officially recommend and I hope we can get to that point, and we're here to help anybody at any time. 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.