After nearly thirty years working on construction sites, I dropped my tools and settled into the office of an apprenticeship training facility. It did not take me long to discover an unexpected difference between the work environments. Put plainly, people working outside the construction world don’t operate with any sense of urgency.
I soon discovered
I needed to prod people in other “office” environments to get things done. I found myself sending out a lot of “reminder”
emails and placing a lot of follow-up phone calls.
I was truly shocked
by this.
As we brought
in new people from the field and plunked them in our office, I gave them this
advice: “Don’t expect to get things done as you do on the construction site. People on this side of the door are not in a
hurry. You might need to push a little
more.”
I suppose the
difference in responsiveness makes sense. In the construction world, we usually operated
on a strict timeline for project completion.
And everyone associated with a project shared the same goal and the same
timeline.
To successfully
bring a building up from the ground, you need answers as soon as questions
arise.
Bottom line: You
can’t stand around waiting for answers and get something done at the same time.
—Mitchell Hegman
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