Vic Ortiz on Revolutionizing Construction with Facilitation and Resilience

When Victor Ortiz, a pioneering figure in lean construction, joins me for a profound conversation, we unravel the tapestry of life's greatest puzzles: time, money, emotions, relationships, and the search for purpose. Our exchange goes beyond the surface, with Vic illuminating how the principles of lean construction and high-performance leadership can profoundly shape not only industries but also our personal lives. A community member's touching story becomes a beacon, reminding us that in our content lies a shared strength that helps to shoulder the weight of personal trials.

This episode is a journey through the heart of collaboration and the transformative skill of facilitation, as I reflect on my path from aspirations to join Interaction Associates to revolutionizing processes at Ford and beyond. We trace the birth of the Lean Construction Institute and celebrate how it sprouted from the roots of advanced facilitation training to become a flagbearer of cooperation in the construction realm. Whether it's in boardrooms or on building sites, Vic and I dissect the critical influence of leadership that listens, facilitates, and connects.

Our dialogue takes a sober turn as we confront the stark realities of mental health and addiction in the construction industry, drawing parallels to the ingrained practices that often leave individuals on autopilot. Yet, it's in the midst of these challenges that leadership can shine, harnessing the power of conscious choice to cultivate a culture of high performance and empathy. As I share my own narrative as a cancer patient, we discover how personal adversities can open doors to growth and the chance to support others, leaving a legacy that transcends professional accomplishments. This episode isn't just a conversation; it's an invitation to witness how leadership and vulnerability intertwine to pave the way for transformative change.

Connect with Vic at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-ortiz-671301/
https://leanconstructionblog.com/High-Performance-Leadership-The-Missing-Puzzle-Piece.html

Let Primo know youre listening:
https://depthbuilder.bio.link/

Get on the path to Becoming the Promise You are Intended to Be
https://www.depthbuilder.com/books

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Everybody has the same five basic problems, and a problem is a situation in life that you have to figure out how you're going to deal with it. How do you manage your time? How do you manage money? How do you manage feelings? How do we build healthy, fulfilling relationships? And the fifth one was what do you do that's meaningful in your life? How do you find meaning?

Speaker 2: 0:22

What is going on? L&m family, I've got a special guest for you who's not only, I think, a hero of mine, but maybe a hero of many folks out there in the construction industry. This is the lean construction space, and you may not even know that he's your hero because he's been out there. He's been in the space, mr Victor Ortiz, doing organizational transformation, and not just organizational transformation but industry transformation. And now he's in this new era or maybe not new era, but a really hefty message around high performance leadership.

Speaker 2: 0:59

And before you get to meet Mr Vic, you know I've got to give a shout out to the L&M family member that dropped this really thoughtful note. He said I found your content very inspirational. I found myself on a very slippery slope the last few months, leaning on something in a glass more than I should to drown out the noise. I just order your book. Thanks for the inspiration. So, mr L&M family member out there, you know who you are. Thank you very much for sharing that, because that's the whole purpose of the book. Right, we're not alone and we can help one another. And that's enough flapping from me. Here we go with Mr Vic. Mr Vic, good morning. And how are you, my friend?

Speaker 1: 1:43

Well, it's great to be here. I'm really excited. This is the kind of conversation that doesn't happen enough Genuine, genuine, let's get down to what's real, to the best of our ability, kind of conversation. So it's been a delight to sit and think about what I might try to share and what I hope we can do together.

Speaker 2: 2:07

Oh yes, Thank you, and you know the prep, the slight touches that you and I had before, like actually locking in the date and scheduling a time to record. Really I got super excited, not just because of the influence that you've had in the industry at large, but also because of the history, Like what I gathered, when this whole lean construction movement hit the industry was on the West coast around the nineties, and word is that you're kind of complicit in that. Am I off?

Speaker 1: 2:42

No, no, but that's. That's maybe a place to come back and touch on. Okay, the founders of Lean Construction, greg Hull and Glenn Ballard, came to training that was put on by an organization called Interaction Associates, and they were founded by two architects of all things. And the architects wrote a book called how to Make Meetings Work, which was transformative for me. They were the first ones to really write about the distinction between the process, the way that you ran a meeting, or, if you're talking, take it up from meeting to meetings in a project, in a collaboration in a community organization, in a dispute resolution, where there's a series of meetings that the process you use to manage. That is really important. And they wrote the book on what it meant to be a neutral third-party facilitator and how a leader could liberate themselves from trying to manage both process and content and being overwhelmed by it and just going for whatever they wanted to have happen at the exclusion of everyone else. How they could liberate themselves by having somebody facilitate and somebody in the old days before computers were using flip charts and so having somebody recording while somebody was watching the group and managing the process and the leader could actually be free to listen to what their people had to say and to help shape and help plan so that they could focus on what they cared about, which was the content, instead of ignoring the process and having it go awry. The neutral facilitator could really help guide the process and together you created much more productivity.

Speaker 1: 4:32

Well, I started reading that stuff and I went oh man, why don't we do this? Why doesn't everybody do this? I got to learn how to do this, so I finally. It took years for me to convince Interaction Associates to hire me. I was their eighth employee Okay, these two guys, doyle and Strauss and when I started working with them, I went off and worked at rethinking Ford Motor Company's whole product development process. We put together this huge collaborative process with a bunch of process redesign teams that we facilitated, and I facilitated the program management redesign team, rethinking how leaders work with teams. You know what a great setup for what was to come. While we were working at Ford, we got a call from Pac Bell and we were asked to help them with this big, what's now called Bishop Ranch facility, and they're building this huge facility with four wings on either side and a huge central facility, and they were two-thirds of the way, way over budget, way behind schedule, everything.

Speaker 1: 5:39

A mess Pac Bell was freaking out. They brought in Michael Doyle with me as his assistant facilitator and we put up on the wall we facilitated this meeting with the top 20 of 120 subcontractors, top 20 superintendents of the biggest firms, most influential firms. We plastered the wall with paper, we got out post-it notes and we had them describe what the process was and where it was breaking down and how would they redesign it. And sitting in the back of the room was another guy that Pac Bell had hired, by the name of Greg Howell, who was at Stanford at the time. Greg Howell, who was at Stanford at the time and Greg had never seen anybody get 20 superintendents work together in a matter of about five minutes and spend a day redesigning stuff. He'd never seen anybody do process mapping using post-it notes and he'd never seen neutral facilitation.

Speaker 1: 6:39

And Greg being a smart guy that he was said holy crap, I got to learn this. A smart guy that he was said, holy crap, I got to learn this. That sort of gets to a theme for today, I think, which is when you see something that you didn't know and it sounds great, you better go learn it. And it turns out we had a two-day manager meetings course and a four-day advanced facilitator intensive course really heavy-duty course and Greg says I got to go. We said of course you do. And he said I got to bring the smartest guy I've ever met with me because he's going to dig this, and that was Glenn Ballard. So in 1983, early 84, glenn and Greg went through all six days of the training and I was lucky enough to be one of the co trainers and we became friends and they realized that everything in construction needs to be about collaboration instead of command and control. And I got to facilitate many of the formative meetings of LCI. So that's the skinny on how all that happened.

Speaker 2: 7:48

So summary it's your fault. Maybe, that's an oversimplification.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Much brighter people than I am developed that I just. You know the power of neutral facilitation. I'll say this for your listeners If you learn facilitation skills, it will take you to places that are way beyond your pay grade and will help you improve your pay grade by getting in there and showing that you can actually help improve things.

Speaker 2: 8:19

Oh, my goodness, Okay. So there's a few points that you've made. I love the combination of words neutral, facilitation, right. So there's a few points that you've made. I love the combination of words neutral, facilitation, right. So there's an assumption, at least in my head, when I hear that of objectivity and my role in the space is to facilitate a conversation, not drive, direct or guide. You use the word collaboration.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Precisely, that's exactly right. It's somebody who's watching how things are getting done and not trying to sell their point of view.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Yes, yes, yes. You said collaboration, which, again, if the objectivity is a big deal. Now you also said that you all selected 20 of the most influential superintendents. So I got a little curious there. The word influential was that 20 of the subcontractors that had the greatest amount of the contract or scope for this building.

Speaker 1: 9:19

We were not necessarily picking the people who could change things, so we were looking at the people who had the biggest scope of work and, you know, would therefore be likely the most responsible for being over budget and behind schedule the largest contributors Yep. Yeah, with the exception of management, of course, which the owner and the general contractor scheduler, who was Charlie Kuffner, at the time working for Swinerton, who had the job, and so that's where I met Charlie too.

Speaker 2: 9:54

Understood. I think those parameters are important because, especially nowadays, you hear the word influencer or influential and it means something entirely different, right, like I think people will automatically envision a handsome devil like myself when they hear influencer, but we're talking about, like brass tacks, largest amount of scope that, on path or off path, will have the biggest influence on the flow of work and the performance and et cetera.

Speaker 1: 10:23

Right, People are highly at risk for their margins on their bids for this work. Who will be likely to blame each other and end up in court, or be sued by Pac Bell in this case for failure to perform? So they had a lot of skin in the game.

Speaker 2: 10:43

Yes, I'm curious, though, like you're facilitating, this conversation is collaborative. They're visualizing the flow or the relationships, interaction of the work and the sequence of work. Like did you just you read the book and you knew how to do that? Like, was that a natural? No, no, I.

Speaker 1: 11:00

I read, I read the book. Well, let's, let's go back and I'll tell a little bit of the story, because this is all about lessons and missteps, and how I got into all of this is very different for most people who grew up in construction. Right, I grew up I'm a kid of the 60s, I'm 72 right now, and in the 60s I did what a lot of us did in the 60s I experimented with a lot of drugs and I did that. I think and this is apropos of your contributor that you were shouting out to who was finding solace in the glass. In my case, it wasn't so much finding solace, it was that I recognized at an early age that there was something missing in my life, and I think what was missing because of the family.

Speaker 1: 11:50

I grew up in were very smart people, but Norwegians of a Victorian background who knew nothing about feelings, knew nothing about honest confrontation. You know, if we had alcoholism in the family, as we did, nobody talked about it. If something was difficult and embarrassing, everybody pretended it wasn't happening. By the time I was a teenager and there were a lot of expectations because my family was full of people who had huge academic success that I must be extremely smart and I'm going to go to Harvard and I'm going to, which I did not, and I'm sure you've heard the term imposter syndrome here. I am one of the only kids ever in Eau Claire, wisconsin, in the 50s, with a Hispanic last name in this Norwegian, very smart family thinking, and I'm under tremendous pressure to succeed, and to succeed means being glib and having the answer and being on top of stuff, and I was, when I got into junior high, not on top of anything, but I was curious. I had an uncle who was a psychiatrist. I was curious about how the mind works. The mind works, and so I started. You know, I heard about turn on, tune in, drop out, expand your mind and so on, and I thought, well, I got to see what this is about. And so I did.

Speaker 1: 13:29

And I got in trouble for drugs when I was 19. And I had gone from learning that my mind was quite malleable, that you put a different chemical in and you began to change your perceptions and that perceptions could, in fact, be managed. You could change your perceptions. What I'd also done was I'd begun to build a social network that was all around this ritual of getting stoned together and managing drugs and giving each other, you know, sharing our lid of weed or whatever it was. And I got stuck in it and I knew that I needed to do something different, like I'd learned what I could learn from this very quickly. And now what was next? And nobody that I knew had a solution to what was next for me. So I ended up getting busted and I ended up being invited to this confab. I was trying to work at a free clinic to look like I was trying to do something positive about drugs instead of what I'd been busted for and hoping that I could avoid prison.

Speaker 1: 14:28

And there were a couple of people from this place called Awareness House. So I'm starting here with a huge misstep Right, getting busted, and the first lesson here is that some of the biggest missteps become some of the greatest opportunities to learn and grow Right? Oh yeah, so I was in serious danger and I went to this. I was lucky enough to show up because I was curious and I wanted to do something good. I knew that that was what was happening inside me.

Speaker 1: 15:00

I went to this thing where I found out about a training center the first National Institute of Drug Abuse Training Center out in California, where a lot of people who were ex-addicts were actually teaching people in communities how to organize and create places for kids to go. They used drop-in centers as a kind of location, and the people that they trained to be counselors were usually ex-users who were trained by people who had been through something like Synanon or some of these therapeutic community programs. It was the first time I met people who could answer the question okay, what's next when you stop using? What do you do? Where do you grow? Where do you learn? I tried to impress these guys instantly, too, with all of my I'd read some books.

Speaker 2: 15:46

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:47

And they saw me as just full of BS, you know, trying to impress and so on, where inside they could see through to this scared, ignorant guy who was afraid of admitting that he didn't know what to do. And the fact that they could see through me so easily meant that they understood things, knew things, had been through things themselves that I hadn't.

Speaker 2: 16:10

And I thought whatever I do.

Speaker 1: 16:13

I got to go to this training center. I got to go learn this. I got it, that's the next step in my journey. So I went and I worked five years in a therapeutic community drug program and I went in thinking like I was I'm going to be a counselor. I had been clean about 30 seconds. I had no idea what I was doing. I remember sitting down in a confrontation therapy group with a kid who was a couple years younger than me and he said well, what brings you here? And I said, well, I've been hired, I hope I can help. And he looked at me and he said I didn't come here to be helped by you, I came here to help myself.

Speaker 2: 16:53

Woo, woo-hoo Powerful.

Speaker 1: 16:59

Yup, Yup, I again. I knew I was in the right place because I saw through my BS instantly.

Speaker 2: 17:06

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:07

And I think you know for me, putting myself in a place where people who know a lot more than I do see through my attempts to look good, and I have to confront what I don't know and get curious and learn and find some humility, which was terrifying to me that's been a great thing in my life. So a couple things from that that I think are fundamental to share today.

Speaker 2: 17:39

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:39

One is that the idea there were a couple of really key things that I learned in the therapeutic community environment that I've used through my entire life and all my career was the idea that we didn't have a drug problem. What we had was a drug solution. Hmm, okay, that what we didn't? We didn't have a drug problem. What we had was a drug solution. Okay, so neil lombardi, my mentor there, who was a guy with a sixth grade education whose father was a mafia godfather in new york, his his name on the streets was johnny black and he pearl handled 38s under his black suit as a gangster, right yeah, he went to Synanon for four years.

Speaker 1: 18:16

He was a heroin addict from age 12. Neil said everybody has the same five basic problems and a problem is a situation in life that you have to figure out how you're going to deal with it, some basic thing that's going on. His five basic life challenges were how do you manage your time? Yeah, which includes free time, self-care, work, family, etc. How do you manage time? Everybody every day gets up and they have to make choices about what am I going to do with myself today.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Second one was how do you manage money? How do you earn it, spend it, think about it, etc. The third one was how do you manage feelings? How do you deal with feelings Something that my Norwegian Wisconsin conservative upbringing had not taught me at all. Complete blank on that Feeling. What is this feeling stuff? What is that? The fourth one was how do we build healthy, fulfilling relationships? How do you manage relationships? And the fifth one was what do you do that's meaningful in your life? How do you find meaning? And Neil said people who are addicted? Uh, how they manage free time? They're running after drugs, they're partying with people, they're trying not to get sick, and and so on. How do you manage money? You deal, you rip and run. You might. If you're not that addicted, you may able to work, but much of your time is spent. So how do you manage feelings? You hide them, drown them.

Speaker 1: 19:59

Or you use the drugs as a chance and the alcohol as a chance to explode and blow off steam. How do you build healthy, fulfilling relationships? Well, they mostly revolve around rituals of using drugs together or going to the bar and drinking or whatever. So your rituals are built around this chemical support system. And then how do you find meaning? Well, that usually is in having some kind of a fake facade of being a tough guy or a cool guy or a rock and roller or whatever. It might be right, yep, a stand-up dude, right, oh, yeah, yep, yep, a stand up dude, right, yeah.

Speaker 1: 20:49

So he said if you look at it, what people have is a lifestyle. Lifestyle is a set of solutions that you use, how you respond to these questions, and good solutions. You get good results. If they're crappy solutions, you get crappy results. If you get crappy results in your life, you look at yourself and you feel like crap. And you should, because you're not doing good things. So the secret is not that you have to just abstain or something. The secret is to learn a whole new set of life solutions.

Speaker 2: 21:12

Yes.

Speaker 1: 21:14

And boy, I had a lot to learn.

Speaker 2: 21:16

Yes, you know, vic. Now it becomes extremely clear why I felt compelled by you and to talk with you, because your background very similar. I've wrestled with addiction for a long time and there's a couple of things that you have said so clearly around building the social networks. That was the frame of words that you used and, absolutely like looking in hindsight, that's what I did, right, and my social network revolved around, um maintaining my chemical solution to the way I was living life, a hundred percent. Now my social network is designed differently. Um, the distorted definition of success that I was brought up on has been contorted and switched in, maybe a healthier way, and I feel like that's what's happening in the construction industry right now. I feel like there's this point where we're starting to see that, man, maybe the way we've been defining success has led to the pains that we're experiencing now. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1: 23:27

I think that's fairly profound, and if we think about the construction industry and tying this back to addiction, we've got two things going on for People, which they have.

Speaker 1: 23:48

Right now has uncovered data that shows that the suicide rate in the construction industry is the highest of any industry, including the military.

Speaker 1: 23:57

We all think of all the vets who kill themselves. We have terrible safety records and a lot of mental health, and we have a lot of people coming into construction industry who've been struggling with addictions or depression and so on. But they come into then an environment in which people are not necessarily treated with respect. They're treated as a pair of hands. They're treated as a disposable trade. Their chances and security of their future are not what they should be, and so there are lots of reasons for people to feel depressed or anxious and there's not a they should be, and so there are lots of reasons for people to feel depressed or anxious and there's not a lot of support.

Speaker 1: 24:35

So I think this idea that if you're getting bad results, you have to look at what are the solutions you've been using, and in the construction industry, what's similar to addiction is that we have gotten into this pattern of doing things, thinking this is the way it's done, the same way as when you're addicted. What we've done is we've given up on conscious choices. We're doing things because it's become automatic. We're not even aware of making choices anymore.

Speaker 1: 25:06

And there's a wonderful book that was written years ago called the Addicted Organization, which was arguing the same thing. Organizations get into this culture and this pattern and this is our set of solutions. And our set of solutions defines who we are, and we won't change that for anything, because if we do, then who am I and who are we as?

Speaker 2: 25:26

a company yes, Right.

Speaker 1: 25:29

So in the construction industry and in addiction, the thing to change is not to complain about everything that's wrong, though I mean we need to see it. Yes, it's to find better solutions that get better results. That's the whole focus, and in life and in changing an industry or changing an organization, and those better solutions involve the engagement of everybody in thinking about how to make the work better and how to redesign it so it works better. Yes, yes, back to the facilitation skills and the leadership skills and all of that. You, you know which, in my case, because I was lucky enough to have these wonderful mentors and then I've been intentional about trying to find people who know more than I do, which has never been that hard, and attaching myself to them, to just be very selfish about learning and being a better human being and more effective, you know. Then you learn better solutions, and the better the solutions are, the better your life is.

Speaker 2: 26:40

Yes. So, vic, what's the relationship between high performance, leadership and facilitation and collaboration? Or is there a relationship?

Speaker 1: 26:51

Oh, absolutely. So let's start with where does leadership show up? And it does not show up when you're sitting there by yourself. I mean, you may be thinking of things you're going to go do, but leadership is always in relationship to other people, right?

Speaker 2: 27:12

So who are you?

Speaker 1: 27:12

leading If you're not connecting with people. You know you're diddling around with yourself, yes, so when we talk about high performance leadership, the question is what do you do as a leader? What is the toolkit that you have as a leader to help you work with people? What skills do you need, what tools do you need, and so on. So the fact of the matter is, leadership happens in meetings. You and I are having a meeting right now. If we're talking about business or talking about ideas that will help us go along in business, we're having a meeting. Us go along in business. We're having a meeting. And so meetings go from great, big, big room meetings and big confabs and lessons learned sessions and partnering sessions down to just a one-on-one conversation or a phone call even. They're all interactions and they all have something about what we're talking about and they have how are we talking about it? These two things in balance.

Speaker 1: 28:12

So Doyle and Strauss and their brilliance had people brainstorm as an early exercise what goes wrong with meetings and the things that people come up with. I mean, anyone listening to this could do this. In 15 seconds, you could come up with 10 things that go wrong. People get off track, people don't get listened to. We have no agenda, there's no follow through at the end of the meeting. Somebody got upset and dominated, the boss talks too much. I mean go on all of this. So we write that on flip charts and we go back and we say to the people okay, look at all these things that you came up with that you don't like. You can do this with a project, not just a meeting. You can say what goes wrong in projects and what you find out is that nothing that they're complaining about has to do with what the subject of the meeting was. It all has to do with how the meeting was run, in other words, content of the meeting, process of the meeting. All the things that everybody complains about have to do with process right, how it was led and so on. So if you ask people, then how much time do you spend at the beginning of the meeting going over not only what's on the agenda, ie the topics but what are you trying to accomplish and how are we going to go about accomplishing it? How are we going to engage people? What is people's role in this? And the answer is nothing, nothing, zero.

Speaker 1: 29:41

So Doyle and Strauss said we are process blind. The problem is that we don't even see process, because we came there to talk about the content of the meeting, the subject matter, but we don't see process and nobody is explicitly managing the process. Nobody is skilled to manage the process. Now, what's the parallel with construction? Right now, we are process blind. In this case. We don't understand operation science. We don't understand how to make things flow.

Speaker 1: 30:08

The whole goal of lean is to help us begin to open our eyes to what's happening operationally and the way things work. So we need technical process awareness and we need interpersonal or social process awareness and high performance skills. Leadership skills start with learning some basic facilitation skills, because in order to plan a meeting and add the aspect of what process are we going to brainstorm? If we brainstorm, what will that create? How will we capture that? Okay, now what do we do with that? Are we going to categorize it, prioritize it? Yeah, put it in one, two, three, four order. How do we make this useful?

Speaker 1: 30:52

If you're not thinking about that, you're not ready to have a meeting because you don't know how to engage people in a meaningful way to come up with a product. Same thing true in construction. You have all these different people each working on their own skill, but who's overall looking at how do we make all of this flow? That will come up with the milestone that we've got in our last planner system so that we can get things done. So process awareness is a profoundly powerful thing. You know, we all make process mistakes. We all do things and have to go back to. Well, that didn't really work the way I wanted it to.

Speaker 1: 31:30

Yep, yeah, learning communities like we create in the High Performance Leadership Workshop are the way that we give each other feedback. We talk about what worked and didn't. Plan, do, check, act, continuous learning cycle right. So that's what it's about. We have realized Design Build Institute and LCI and a number of other professional organizations have realized Design Build Institute and LCI and a number of other professional organizations have realized that we've built all of these tools lean tools for managing the technical side of how work goes, and we have butchers in terms of leadership tools.

Speaker 2: 32:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I a hundred percent. The way the, the, the, the way it lands. For me in Jesse land is like it's, it's a social, technical thing that we do in construction and, oh my goodness, are we good with the technical crap and completely blind to the social right? Like, just we, completely. And when I say we, that's me, because when I first got introduced to, we'll say, some of the tools in lean construction, I did them to people Like. I did them against people to optimize production, to optimize activities. I didn't do anything to make the work better.

Speaker 2: 32:53

Now, what I experienced, what it felt like in relation to the conversation that we're having, when I finally realized, like, oh my goodness, there's something missing. It was like an identity crisis. Everything I knew to be true, that I had to let go of command and control, be the authority, take up, let everybody know how damn smart and interesting I am. I had to release that and step back and do more listening, have some more structure, know that there was an intended outcome, that we were focused on, and maybe guide, escort or at least join in the voyage to clarify whatever that was. I feel. Or maybe I wonder, when you're introducing leaders like, and when I say leaders, we'll use we'll just kind of define that as individuals with tremendous responsibility within an organization or a team. We're going to be generous and call them a leader. Um, how many times do you see them struggling with this identity crisis? Of what do you mean? I can't just tell everybody what to do and send dirty emails anymore.

Speaker 1: 34:10

Yeah. So there's another wonderful model that Doyle and Strauss taught me called a doing, planning to do and planning to plan model. Okay, start by saying you know early in your career what was your job and how much of it was doing and how much of it was planning. You know, I was a fry cook and once I learned how to cook the stuff there wasn't much planning. When an order came in I had to figure out how long the cook times to were for the four different things at the table of four. We're doing, but it was 99% doing.

Speaker 1: 34:45

Most people's jobs are 99% doing. Now, the person who got elevated to be the shift supervisor in our little kitchen was the person who'd been there the longest and was the best cook. The assumption was that the way you get up and advance is by knowing what to do. So we advance people and you learn pretty quickly that I better at least act like I know what I'm doing here in order to get advanced and show off right.

Speaker 1: 35:11

Yes, so eventually, if that keeps going, if you're in a big organization like a construction company and you become a foreman and a superintendent At some point, you are now managing a group of people who have skills that you never did have and you, if you try to be the one with all the answers, become a bottleneck.

Speaker 1: 35:33

So, instead of doing all the planning for people, you now have to get other people to plan. In other words, your job becomes orchestrating engagement of people in a planning process. And where did you learn those skills? And the answer is nowhere. Admit that. They need to learn new leadership skills that involve how do we engage people and how do we manage the process of engagement in a productive way that doesn't waste people's time and get stuff done? Or you have to try to fake it, and the way most people fake it is they go back and try to control things and micromanage the stuff that they did used to do to show that they know what they're doing, and they just screw it all up. They get in the way, they shut people down, they cover their butts so that they don't show that they don't know what they're doing. It was called the Peter principle you get advanced to the point of your incompetence, so we have to support leaders.

Speaker 1: 36:41

Now I'll say one other thing. I don't think of leaders as just these top people with a lot of responsibility. We did the high performance leadership class two days last week and when I was thinking about this, I was thinking well, what makes someone a leader and why do people come to this workshop? Someone a leader. And why do people come to this workshop? They come because something inside them is saying I want to make a difference. I see something here that is not as it should be, doesn't feel right. I see things that are wrong. I've learned about lean. I see waste. I see blah, blah blah. Leadership is when somebody steps forward and chooses to be seen in the service of helping others and making a difference, so that anybody can be a leader, even for three minutes. If a meeting is going off track and they say hang on.

Speaker 1: 37:40

I'm unclear where we are here. Can we recalibrate? That is a moment of leadership that they're doing, and the more skills you develop, the more you're able to intervene in these ways and the more you're able to make a positive difference in the world, even if it's a little tiny world of just what's going on in a meeting at the moment.

Speaker 1: 38:01

And those same skills are just as important in the huddle. At the end of a day, they're just as important at the executive level. The same humility, the same noticing what's going on and becoming skillful at intervening in ways that don't shame people, blame people, make people wrong. But look at how do we improve this system. Those skills are life skills that we can use at any level, in any business.

Speaker 2: 38:35

Real powerful Anywhere, everywhere, okay. So you've kind of thrown this out there and I'm like I bet the L&M family members out there are like what you keep talking about this class, like, is it never? How do people get like this high performance leadership class that we've been jumping on for the past few minutes? How do people get a hold of that content, that teaching your wisdom? What do we got to do to get that?

Speaker 1: 39:03

That, teaching your wisdom. What do we got to do to get that? Well, I've trained about somewhere over well, over 3,000 people in this over my career. Lci has gotten a hold of the materials and there is a plan to get them into that, but what we're doing right now, the Northern California Community of Practice has been sponsoring.

Speaker 1: 39:23

We've done three of these trainings so far and we continue to, of course, always tweak the training and improve it as we go. So one way is you can go to the LCI website and the Northern California website and find out about the course. It can be done for a project team. If somebody had a project team and said, man, we need to do this with our team because we do not get along or think of it like a partnering session, but with a whole lot more horsepower to do it.

Speaker 1: 39:55

So people can contact me. You can also find me on the Lean Construction blog, where I've got a bunch of articles that I've written, and I'm currently writing a series on high-performance leadership, which is taking the materials in the class and going through and saying so what have we learned about leadership and what are the basic skill sets? I'm working on the fifth installment in that.

Speaker 1: 40:22

Very good, yep. So those are a few ideas. So I'm currently working with a couple of one owner big hospital organization here in Northern California. We're going to bring the training to that organization. A big project they have in Sacramento working with a major construction company in the Bay Area to bring it there. We're going to bring it to Nashville where there's a new community of practice for LCI Working with Design Build Institute to bring this to augment some leadership training that they've already got, which is sort of a high-level conceptual what does it mean to be a leader training?

Speaker 1: 41:03

And I'm saying, okay, and now here are all the tools and techniques and methods that you need to have in order to actually pull that off. Just so people know, like I said, I'm 72. I'm six and a half years into dealing with metastatic cancer and one of the things I facilitate is support groups now. So I've kind of come full circle from my therapy to working with my fellow cancer patients to support our own growth through the cancer journey and dealing with the existential issues of life and death that come up with cancer existential issues of life and death that come up with cancer. And I'm concerned about what's my legacy.

Speaker 1: 41:52

How do I I've spent all this time trying to figure out how to do things at least moderately well, and how do I share that with people? So part of my mission for myself and my legacy is to throw these ideas out there and say go practice these, steal these ideas, put them in your company, take my slides, put your logo on them, I don't care. If you want to take this and feel like it's yours, go do it, because it will help you learn, it will help your company, it will help the people you work with. If you learn these skills and you will advance in your career. It'll take you places you never thought you could get to and you didn't have the positional leadership authority to be there. But because you have skills and you show that you add value when you're there. No-transcript.