How Great Leaders Mentor and Motivate Their Staff in the Construction, Engineering Industries

It’s not enoLeadershipugh to have a vision for your company. You, as a leader, must mentor and motivate your employees to see that vision. They have to believe in you and your mission if you want to rise to the top of the industry.

How do you do it? It’s no accident. There are a few things all great leaders do, some of which are especially important to the construction, engineering, and environmental industries.

They Act the Way They Want Their Employees to Act

Forbes refers to it as demonstrating integrity, not just preaching about it. At Arkansas State University, “taking initiative” is one of the focal points of the Engineering Management program. If you want your employees to be kind, respect each other, make decisions, and follow through, you need to demonstrate that in your role as manager.

They Communicate

Research by the Chartered Institute of Building found that construction professionals consider communication to be the most important skill for a leader in the industry. First, it’s important to be able to clearly communicate what needs to be done. Then, you want to make sure you’re maintaining an open, friendly line of communication, so your employees always feel they can speak with you about issues or concerns. They need to find you available and willing to listen with no fear of judgment or ridicule.

They Encourage Growth and Development Among Employees

In a lecture at Monash University entitled The Role of Leadership for Environment and Sustainability, both formal and emergent leaders are mentioned. Formal leaders are those assigned to roles, like project managers; emergent leaders are people who take on extra responsibility and demonstrate leadership qualities. Both are essential to sustainability.

Therefore, as a formal leader, you have a responsibility and an opportunity to nurture leadership in your employees. They will be the ones to help you take the company to the next level. By taking an interest in your employees’ personal and professional growth and development, you show you care about them as individuals, not just as employees.

Forty-three percent of construction industry professionals indicated they were significantly influenced in their careers by a superior manager. What kind of influence do you intend to have?

They Take Responsibility and Give Credit Where It’s Due

Despite your best efforts, sometimes things go wrong. When you stand up and take responsibility for your role in a mistake, it builds trust among your employees. They know you won’t unfairly blame them to save your own reputation.

At the same time, a good leader doesn’t take credit for something his or her employees accomplished. Honoring the work they’ve done inspires them to continue.

They’re Flexible

No matter what industry you’re in, throughout your career you’ll be working on a variety of projects with a variety of personalities. For example:

“As construction managers are constantly requested to perform a variety of different roles, in different situations, at different times, the ability to assimilate common experiences and apply them to alternative environments is vital to effective project leadership (Gharehbaghi and McManus, 2003).”

Furthermore, that flexibility will allow you to change direction in a given project to achieve the best results, perhaps based on ideas or feedback from one of your employees.

They Show Their Appreciation

A little gratitude goes a long way. Making your employees feel valued is an essential leadership quality. This post talks suggests getting to know your employees and giving rewards for stellar safety records and other achievements, noting that “…showing gratitude for your workers can help your construction company’s bottom line” because, quite simply, happy employees do a better job.

This all comes down to one overarching quality: honesty. When you act with integrity, communicate openly, show your gratitude, and listen to your employees, they learn to trust you. When they trust you, they can follow you, and then you can lead the company where it needs to go.

Michael DeSafey is a leading executive recruiter for professionals in the construction, engineering and environmental industries. He is currently the President of Webuild Staffing www.webuildstaffing.com . To learn more about Michael or to follow his blog please visit www.michaeldesafey.com

Using Body Language as a Business Leader

As a business leader, you have to develop plenty of skills. Leadership means wearing many different hats and accomplishing many different tasks over the course of the day. One of the most important skills you’ll learn, however, is how to use your body language in order to impact the attitude and motivation of your employees.

Contagious Attitude: The Power of a Smile

When you’re stuck in the middle of a stressful day, the last thing you want to do is paste a smile on your face and pretend that everything is going well. This simple action, however, can make a big difference, not just for you, but for your employees, as well. When you smile, your employees will be more likely to smile back at you.

The simple action lowers stress hormones and releases hormones into the reward centers of the brain, thereby making your entire team feel better about the stressful day you’re having. Not only that, when you smile, you’ll increase your own satisfaction, which makes it more likely that you’ll remember to do things like complementing the employees who have gone above and beyond for you during this difficult time.

Keep Your Head Straight

Confidence is one thing; being cocky is something else entirely. When you’re in a meeting or listening to someone else speak, make an effort to keep your head straight. Tilting it to the side gives an impression of cockiness, which is not the impression you want to convey.

Use the Right Tone

Your tone of voice has a huge impact on how people perceive you. You can say all the right words, but if your voice doesn’t hit the right level, your employees aren’t going to respond to it the way you want. A confident leader typically displays several key characteristics in their speech:

A lower pitched voice
Sentences that are carried confidently through to completion rather than dropping off at the end
Dynamic inflection
Clear articulation

Control Movement to Attract Attention

When you want the eyes of the employees you’re managing to be on you, move to attract their attention before you speak. You’ll find that people are naturally drawn to movement, which means that shifting your position by just a step or two is enough to make sure that there are more eyes on you. Ceasing movement helps to underscore the point that you’re making once they’re looking at you–not to mention making you appear more decisive.

Reduce the Appearance of Tension

When you are calm, relaxed, and confident, you’re more likely to inspire the same emotions in everyone around you. By reducing the appearance of tension, you can substantially change the attitude of the room. After all, you believe in your employees and their ability to accomplish the goal in front of them–that means they can believe in themselves, too. A few simple exercises can help you learn to relax the natural tension in your face, neck, and shoulders, changing the image you present to everyone around you.

Pay Attention to Employees

If you want to increase the odds that people will participate in a discussion, share their problems with you, or give their best to projects that you’ve assigned, the best tactic is to ensure that they know you care about their participation–that is, to look like you’re listening. Don’t multitask during meetings or when an employee is talking to you. Instead of talking over them, take the time to listen to everything they have to say before formulating your response. These simple steps can make a big difference in how you are perceived by your employees.

Learning to use body language to your advantage is a great way to make more out of every interaction you have with the employees who work with you. By practicing a few simple controls, you can change the way they perceive you, shape your workplace culture, and better motivate every employee throughout the business.

How To Be An Authentic And Effective Leader In The Construction, Engineering And Environmental Industries.

Business leadership is a complex subject, even though most of those who offer advice about it try to simplify things. It is one of those subjects that can be described with straightforward universal truth, but also relies on a myriad of details, many of which drive people who prefer the concrete and the predictable.

The construction and engineering industries are professions that are full of exactness. Materials do this, wires do that, this many bolts of such and such a size will hold up this much weight, and so forth. While that kind of data isn’t quite as plentiful in leadership, there are principles there to guide construction managers, engineers, environmental specialists and other professionals working within the construction, engineering and environmental industries.

Honesty

More than anything else, people who follow a leader want honesty. The reasons are fairly clear, given the relative absence of this virtue in modern business. A straight answer goes a long way towards building confidence. One thing you will always hear from people who admire a certain leader is that “you always know where you stand with him/her.”

Be that leader and you will inspire the kind of confidence that will make your job a lot easier. This is especially true in a role where many of the people you lead are experts in their fields. It is far easier to engineer a building than it is to engineer a consensus. However, if your leadership is built on honesty, that difficulty doesn’t have to be insurmountable.

Action

General Patton was famous for his quote (paraphrasing) “an imperfect plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow.” Action in the face of indecision is the mark of all great leaders, whatever the consequences of their decisions. Making mistakes is something common to all people. Presuming you are immune to error just because you’re in charge now is not realistic and will lead to one of two undesirable outcomes.

First, you’ll be more likely to make a wrong decision because you think you can do no wrong. Two, you’ll be less likely to make a decision at all, which leads to a bottleneck problem. Taking action while accepting the possibility of failure is absolutely crucial. Without this, nothing gets accomplished.

Construction and engineering are two disciplines that professionals can find themselves stuck between planning and building. Making sure the organization has forward momentum is just as important as the plans and the work.

Delegate

By their nature, leaders have an unlimited capacity to encourage, promote and help build a powerful team. Kings have always understood, for example, the utility of promoting someone with a new rank and new responsibilities. Giving someone the authority to lead, it can be argued, is the ultimate test of a true leader.

Delegating responsibility also happens to be one of the things that will make it possible for you to lead. Many executives make the mistake of trying to do everything themselves. This leads to the dreaded “three star general gassing up jeeps” situation that prevents the leader from doing what only they can do. Any corporal can gas up a jeep. Only a three-star general can draft a large-scale battle plan. Delegation is what keeps the generals and the corporals doing the right jobs.

Engineers and environmental professionals will find delegation a vital tool, especially if they are in a position to lead even a small-scale project. The ability to call on the help of many qualified people is crucial in a technical environment.

Leadership doesn’t have to be difficult. As long as it is approached with the right level of sober reflection and understanding, it can be one of the most rewarding roles in business and lead to long term organizational success.

6 Questions to Ask Yourself To Increase Your Career Success..

When people reflect on their careers, activities at work and what they can do to increase the likelihood of success, they might find that thinking rarely leads to doing. Perhaps if they asked themselves questions that lead to active change rather than passive questions, their focus would change and they could affect the change they are dreaming about for their careers.

Although companies regularly spend money to train their employees, the result is often that they stifle innovation instead of encouraging employee engagement. Companies need to approach the engagement of their employees in a new way. Survey results from organizations around the world indicate that companies use only passive questions to assess conditions. Passive questions illustrate static conditions, and might sound like, “Are your goals clear?” People who are asked questions framed in this way often think about what’s happening to them instead of what they’re doing. They focus on their circumstances and not on their own success. For example, an environmental specialist might focus on following a standard process instead of proposing a customized process that works better.

Answers to passive questions are almost always environmental. An employee who answers that his or her goals are unclear will often blame the lack of clarity on outside circumstances. Excuses might range from “The project direction is unclear” to “My manager hasn’t specified goals for me.” When posed with a question similar to this, many employees look outward for blame instead of taking personal responsibility for setting their own goals.

An hourly laborer might dream of being a project lead or site foreman. Asking him the right questions—in the right way—might help him realize his ambitions.

Asking passive questions isn’t wrong, though it often causes repercussions that aren’t always positive. Asking solely passive questions can provide an easy excuse for employees to avoid being accountable and taking responsibility as individuals. If employees aren’t prompted to see themselves as taking the lead role in their own development, many will pass that responsibility on to someone—anyone—else.

How can this unproductive fate be avoided?

Simply put, the opposite of passive questions are active questions. Revisiting an earlier example question as it might apply to an engineer, “Are your goals clear?” could be improved and made active. An alternative might be “Did you apply yourself as best you can to setting specific, measurable goals for yourself?” The original version of this question really asks about the employee’s mindset; the alternative enables the employee to assess and argue for a specific plan. The engineer might realize an opportunity to plan a project differently or lead a new project instead of simply acknowledging progress in someone else’s plan.

Asking the following six questions will allow you to become are more successful version of yourself.

Am I taking steps to increase my happiness?
Am I taking steps to find meaning?
Am I taking steps to be engaged?
Am I taking steps to build positive relationships?
Am I taking steps to set specific, measurable goals for myself?
Am I taking steps closer to achieving my goals?

Michael DeSafey is a leading executive recruiter for professionals in the construction, engineering and environmental industries. He is currently the President of Webuild Staffing (www.webuildstaffing.com) . To learn more about Michael or Follow his Blog please visit www.michaeldesafey.com

7 Beliefs That Successful Leaders Have..

7 Beliefs That Successful Leaders Have..

In studying human behavior, especially in the work environment there seems to be a common trend of success among successful business leaders and their belief patterns.

Of the most successful business professionals, especially in the construction, engineering and environmental industries, employees that have risen into the top executive positons within organizations have exhibited these traits that have made their organizations, as well as, their professional careers advance successfully;

Everything happens for a reason
There is no such thing as failure, there are simply results.
No matter what happens, be responsible and don’t blame others.
You don’t need to understand everything to be able to utilize it for your benefit.
People and relationships are the most important assets.
Your work should be enjoyable and aspiring. If you do not enjoy what you are doing then find a career that you are passionate about.
There is no such thing as long lasting success without commitment.

By adapting these belief patterns in your daily living (ie. career, personal affairs, etc.) will allow you to achieve overall success throughout your career while finding the ideal balance with your personal life.

5 Ways to Become A Better Leader In The Construction And Engineering Industry

5 Ways to Become A Better Leader In The Construction And Engineering Industries..

The famous “leader vs. boss” stereotype paints a powerful image of what a true leader really is: someone who can stand in the front of team while also working beside them. This being said, being a good leader is about being a team player as much as being the main decision-maker and source of guidance. If you are interested in becoming a better leader yourself, here are five things to keep in mind when working in the Construction and Engineering Industries.

1. Remember Respect Is Earned

A good leader leads by example. You need to show your team that you are worthy of your position, and you aren’t just willing to lead your team but to also work next to them. Talent, after all, thrives when it is given the right resources and leadership to flourish. Once you earn your team’s respect, they will be loyal to you and be empowered to bring their best work to the table.

2. Be Open To Learning From Your Team

Just because you’re leading your team doesn’t make you an expert at everything. This being said, it’s always a good idea to get input from members of your team and learn from them. Asking them to share their knowledge can lead to more frequent collaboration and exchanges of ideas. Moreover, you’ll learn from their expertise, which can help you be more informed about ongoing projects and tasks.

3. Avoid Micromanaging And Let People Grow

A leader’s role is to empower their team, not to control them. This being said, you want to give your team room to grow, which means micromanaging is out of the picture. Trust that they will do their job well and establish a collaborative feedback system so that they know what to improve on and the goals/responsibilities for project and there job.

4. Encourage Healthy Disagreements

If everyone was always agreeing on everything, it’d be difficult to figure out what your team is doing right or wrong. This is why it’s a good idea to encourage your team to speak up if they disagree with you.

5. Have A Good Sense Of Yourself

Being a good leader starts with knowing who you are and being truly self-aware. You’ll know your strengths and weaknesses, which will make it easier for you to know when to step in and step back.

How Great Leaders Mentor and Motivate Their Staff in the Construction, Engineering Industries

How Great Leaders Mentor and Motivate Their Staff in the Construction, Engineering Industries

Using Body Language as a Business Leader

Using Body Language as a Business Leader

How To Be An Authentic And Effective Leader In The Construction, Engineering And Environmental Industries.

How To Be An Authentic And Effective Leader In The Construction, Engineering And Environmental Industries.

6 Questions to Ask Yourself To Increase Your Career Success..

6 Questions to Ask Yourself To Increase Your Career Success..

7 Beliefs That Successful Leaders Have..

7 Beliefs That Successful Leaders Have..

5 Ways to Become A Better Leader In The Construction And Engineering Industry

5 Ways to Become A Better Leader In The Construction And Engineering Industry

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