The Risks of Vision and Strong Leadership

The strongest leaders at all levels in construction have a clear vision of where they are headed and are relentlessly focused on achieving their goals. They align their teams tightly around the vision, goals, and strategy. This may introduce risks.

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Leadership Tools: Tunnel Vision and Strong Leadership equals Failure. Example: The 1978 United Flight 173.

This is absolutely the leadership required to bring a project out of the ground, set up a new department such as prefab, enter a new market, launch a new branch office or found a contracting business.  

As a contractor grows the leadership styles must also adapt along with the entire team dynamics. The airline industry has learned this through many failures including United Flight 173.  

It would be too easy to blame the captain, but similar incidents had occurred in the past. Root Cause Analysis pointed to deeper cultural and training issues. There hasn’t be an incident like this since.  

Our mission is to help contractors build stronger businesses for the next generation. We spend a significant amount of our time helping prepare leadership teams for succession and have learned many lessons along the way.  

Every failed succession we have seen has been a failure of talent not being properly aligned and not a failure of available capital or deal structure.  

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Construction Ownership Transition Issue 1 of 9: Strength and Alignment of the Management Team. Beyond liquidation, nearly 100% of the value of a construction business is based on the management team's ability to profitably grow the business.
Levels of Productivity
Making major improvements to labor productivity for contractors starts at the company level and must be rigorously managed all the way down to the individual steps in each task.
Managing Dependencies and Grow Profitably
As projects and contractors grow in complexity it becomes increasingly more difficult to manage all the dependencies between tasks.