The School of Hard Knocks is my alma mater. I’ve done time in the actual classroom, but nothing beats real-world experience to lock in lessons for life.
CoBUILD, the company that my husband and I co-founded, turns 10 this year. CoBUILD has changed and grown over the last decade, and we’ve grown with it, paying tuition along the way. We are not the same people we were when we started this endeavor! So, in honor of CoBUILD’s 10-year anniversary, I’ll be highlighting the top three leadership lessons that The School of Hard Knocks has taught me.
1. Leadership must be learned.
It’s a familiar story: high performers get promoted to managers, but their expertise doesn’t translate into the skills to lead or manage. Most people know this personally, because they’ve experienced working for someone who knows their subject inside and out but leaves relational carnage in their wake.
Bosses are given positional authority to accomplish goals, but boss ≠ leader. In fact, giving someone with charisma and talent the title of “boss” before they have the discernment, empathy, and relational backbone to do the job well is dangerous business.
Good leaders inspire and align. Good managers streamline and equip. Both roles require a fierce commitment to clarity, empathy, and courage. Those things aren’t personality traits; they’re skills that can be cultivated. And it takes years.
That’s why one of the best ways to identify a potential great leader or manager is by finding those that think they have a lot to learn. They spend their own time and money to get better. They take a posture that smacks of both humility and confidence. The data is clear that leaders are learners. They’re readers and students and they take personal development seriously.
At CoBUILD, our leaders and managers spend time each week developing themselves. Our All-Hands meetings cover topics like conflict resolution, cultivating trust, providing clarity, burnout prevention, habit building and the neuroscience of change. Our managers work with an executive coach and are constantly improving our skills. We’re about to launch a community of practice for managers to work on their skills together.
We’ve invested heavily in developing our people, far more than average GCs. Why? Years ago, I realized the “what got us here won’t get us there” truism was well…true. We had above-average people skills, or emotional quotient (EQ). But I wanted us to be the best — industry disrupters and paradigm busters. We’re general contractors, of course, but we also wanted to become trusted consultants and advisors to clients interested in cultivating long-term partnerships.
So, I went back to grad school to be on the cutting edge of research. What science is uncovering about the neuroscience of leadership and performance is astounding. More than that, it is directly applicable to doing great business. We are applying these findings at CoBUILD, something that I’d bet most of our competitors are not doing. But I believe it’s worth the investment. Our clients experience the value our EQ forward team brings to the table. We’ve learned a lot about becoming great leaders and we plan to keep on learning. Leadership, after all, is learned.
P.S…if you’re intrigued about the consulting and development our people receive, check out our other articles or send me a message. We’re making some of these tools available more broadly!
2. It’s pragmatic to assume people are doing the best they can.
Really. In a world where you can get the middle finger from the driver next to you and a snarky reply to your latest Instagram post at the same time, it’s easy to be annoyed. Our news feeds confirm that people can behave atrociously — it’s called doomscrolling for a reason.
Despite the temptation, there are problems with believing humanity is a failed experiment. Firstly, in my opinion, it’s just not true. People are wired for connection; I believe we are capable of altruism. It’s an evolutionary advantage to collaborate and defend each other. And if we dig a little deeper into harrowing news stories, we will find smaller, less click-worthy tales of kindness, resilience, and ordinary heroes.
But beyond the philosophical, there is a pragmatic reason for believing that people are doing the best they can. It has everything to do with practicality and efficiency. To make my case I present a personal anecdote:
I am a parent of a child with special needs. Years ago, as a young elementary student, my child participated in an after-school kids’ choir group. Many of the after-school activities for neurotypical children had already become inaccessible to them. But the children’s choir, while challenging, still worked.
One day my child had a particularly rough day at school and didn’t want to go to choir. I pushed them, because “we follow through with our commitments.” Whether that was a wise parenting move or not is debatable. When we arrived, my child threw a temper tantrum, yelled at me, and plopped themselves on a curb, refusing to move into the choir room.
To any bystander my child looked out of control, defiant and disrespectful. But I knew that they had spent years in occupational therapy learning to cope with loud noises, and that they experienced ongoing challenges with sensory integration. I knew that after a long day my child’s resources were limited. Forcing my child to attend choir was a rookie move. But I wasn’t a rookie, and eventually I came to my senses.
Instead of dragging my child to the afterschool program, we agreed to walk to the nearby coffee shop. I bought myself tea and them hot chocolate. After a while of sitting together, mostly in silence, my child agreed to stand at the open door at the back of the choir room and watch — at a distance. The following week, when better resourced, they attended choir without issue.
I tell this story because it illustrates a fundamental paradigm shift that happened for me as the parent of a special needs child. And it’s a paradigm shift I believe would serve organizational leaders in any industry. At the end of the day, people are doing the best they can. Dr. Ross Greene is a specialist in child behavior management, and he is renowned for saying, “Kids do well if they can.” But I believe his views can be applied more broadly to include all people.
Greene says,
“There is absolutely zero evidence telling us a [person] responds poorly to problems and frustrations because they are poorly motivated. That evidence doesn’t exist. There’s a mountain of research telling us that they’re lacking in skills. Here are the umbrella skills [people] need: flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, problem-solving, emotional regulation.”
(I’ve changed the quote above to say ‘people’ instead of ‘children’ to drive the point home that this could apply to anyone of any age.)
Greene says adults are misguided when they presume people do well only if they want to. That defies the preponderance of evidence.
Dr. Greene claims that the belief that kids are unmotivated, lazy, or selfish leaves educators and specialists totally powerless to effect change. I think that believing employees are unmotivated, lazy, or selfish leaves leaders and managers powerless to effect change too!
Had I believed my child was a disrespectful brat rather than a stressed-out kid I would have only had a limited number of responses available to me: reprimand and/or punish. But because Dr. Greene convinced me “kids do well if they can,” I could investigate what would cause my child to behave poorly. In their case, it was exhaustion and sensory overload. By discerning the real cause behind the behavior, I had options. Non-judgement and curiosity opened the possibility for creative solutions — solutions that left our relationship stronger and laid the groundwork for future successes.
When the people we lead act in ways that disappoint us, the belief that they’re doing the best they can gives agency to managers. In fact, when managers and leaders engage direct reports with non-judgement and positive regard, very often these people feel seen and respected. That alone can increase their capacity for excellence. Conversely, believing people are lazy or evil leaves leaders and managers virtually powerless. If people are lazy and malicious, they are beyond the reach of a leader to intervene. Whereas the choice to believe a person is doing the best they can even when they are underperforming creates a wide playing field for finding solutions. Managers and leaders can provide support, increase training, alter job descriptions, or move someone off a team that doesn’t suit them. In fact, it becomes incumbent upon them to do so. Holding people in positive regard and choosing to believe people are doing their best actually increases accountability.
At CoBUILD we ask our managers to consider the following: Do all the people on your team “Get it, want it, and have capacity for it?” Because people can be doing their best and still not really understand their job. People can be doing their best and not really have the drive or motivation to do their jobs. People can be doing their best and not have the physical, psychological or intellectual capacity to do their jobs. When any of those scenarios are true action must be taken, both for the health of the individual and the organization. Leaders and managers must be accountable to act.
My belief that people are doing the best they can has led people to call me “Pollyanna” and naïve. I contend that it makes me a pragmatic realist with a box full of tools and a high commitment to accountability.
How about you? Do you agree? If not, why?
3. Business moves at the speed of trust.
In the words of Yoda, “Bosses do not leaders make.” Actually, Yoda never said that, but he should have. Because it is true. Positional authority isn’t synonymous with relational authority. And relational authority is what counts in the end. As we explore this, let’s define some terms:
Managers are excellent at aligning people and processes to efficiently complete tasks in the face of volatility. They are protectors of the status quo and essential to organizations.
Leaders acknowledge the importance of management but look around the corner and into the future. They have a vision of a future that could be before it ever exists, and they can paint the picture of that desired future to entire organizations.
But what do bosses do? What’s a boss? Old school organizational models would say organizations have a hierarchy of organizational authority and power structures. In short, workplace life requires bosses. Somebody has got to be in charge around here after all. And that’s the job of a boss: tell people what to do and hold them accountable for doing it.
This model of having the boss in charge is based on an Industrial Age “Power Over” paradigm. In manufacturing, it’s thought to be most efficient for one person to be the knower and teller while the others are the doers. The doers aren’t paid to think; they are paid to produce. Workers don’t have to like their boss; they must only follow instructions.
Old school bosses rely on fear to get things done, through threats, yelling, or flexing their power. Fear is a fuel that burns hot and fast, often leaving relational carnage in its wake. This launches workers into their reptilian brain where that notorious fight or flight response gets activated. The fight/flight/freeze/fawn response shuts down workers’ prefrontal cortexes, preventing them from making complex decisions or generating original ideas. And the boss never realizes they’ve become the reason they can’t trust their own people.
Newer models for organizational life are necessary, after all, most employees are not Industrial Age factory workers. Most employees must be creative and innovative problem solvers with relational acumen. This type of work requires a team of people with fully engaged prefrontal cortexes. When teams of people have access to all brain regions then mirror neurons activate to create a state of communal flow.
The role of “the fearmongering boss” must be recast as “the leader”. Leadership relies on a different fuel source than fear; that fuel source is trust. Trust burns long and slow; it’s remarkably efficient. The classic book by Stephen Covey, “The Speed of Trust”, makes a strong case that business is far more efficient when leaders cultivate trust. But one must only have sat through a grueling round of preconstruction OAC meetings to have a visceral sense of the inefficiency of mistrust. Rounds of re-engineering, value engineering, and pricing exercises could be avoided if all the parties had an evidence-based sense of having one another’s back. Mistrust is so expensive! It costs relationships, time and money.
At CoBUILD, we have a technical definition of trust to which we hold our leaders accountable. It’s a part of every quarterly review. (We do reviews quarterly because we believe in short feedback loops. They build trust!) We need our team to have full access to their prefrontal cortexes because we are committed to creative problem solving and cultivating relational synergy.
So, at CoBUILD we’ve become students of trust, committed to learning and practicing. We want to be leaders who are worthy of trust and partners who cultivate it. We’re continually working to earn relational authority. Our teams of trade partners and repeat clients can attest to that commitment. At CoBUILD we’ve given up on the old school model. We don’t want bosses who must always be right and who motivate others with fear. We motivate through trust and connection.
