You're the Bottleneck: Building the Banks of the River So Your Team Can Flow, with Scott Borroughs

So then how did you hit the reset button? What was the difference from one week to the next in terms of how you were managing the project, how you were managing yourself?

Yeah, so with those area superintendents, again, they were in their role for a reason.

They earned their responsibilities.

And again, after that two or three week stretch, I got recalibrated, met with the superintendents and basically went through more of a larger high vision elevation approach.

perspective, basically saying, okay, here are the milestones.

Here's where we're at.

Here's where we need to be.

So I kind of redefined what my role was and what I was going to do from a milestone and a perspective standpoint and gave them goals along the way.

And then basically said, okay, you tell me how you're going to get it done, knowing that these are the banks of the river.

These are the milestones that you need to hit.

along the way to make sure we get this job done safely and productively and on schedule.

So I had those separate conversations with them and they all came back and said, here's what we're doing.

This is our plan.

This is our goal.

So in hindsight, that's where we should have started.

And I think they were just waiting for that moment in time to say, all right, the light bulb went on.

Here we go.

From that point on, we changed our meetings were more high level at that point.

So we had our, our all superintendent meeting with that high level, with the milestones, making sure we're hitting them.

And really the question, all the question I asked was, what do you need help with? So instead of me getting into the weeds, trying to help solve the problems for them, it turned around to them.

You bring your problems to me on how I can help.

fix what you need to help or get solved and push what you need to get solved as far as answers and as long as those conversations didn't impede and there was good communication because again with that with the bowl and the back house area there were two distinct areas that you couldn't access without going through the other areas of the building so they all impacted each other so really the kind of the ground rules were We have to hit our milestones to come up with that plan.

And if you're going to impact somebody else's work, we have to talk through that.

So those are kind of the two ground rules that we set going forward.

And project teams and the superintendents came up with very good plans to execute from that point on.