What I Learned Managing $300M+ Worth of Construction
👋 Hey, Kyle here! Welcome to The Influential Project Manager, a weekly newsletter covering the essentials of successful project leadership.
Today’s Overview:
Starting in the construction industry, I set out on a mission to deliver $1 billion worth of construction. Fast forward to today, and I've successfully steered over $300 million worth of projects. This week’s edition is a reflection on the entire journey.
Part One: Your career will span approximately 80,000 hours: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. This means your choice of career is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. I’ve identified six key elements to look for in a fulfilling career.
Part Two: Construction sites, while unconventional, serve as highly effective learning environments. I’ve grouped insights into five key areas: Project Management, Productivity, Leadership & Team Building, Communication, & Lean Construction.
Each lesson was sparked from a moment of achievement when I discovered a tactic that helped me. Consider these lessons as mental shortcuts designed to reduce complexity, improve decision making, and propel you in the right direction.
What I Learned Managing $300M+ Worth of Construction
Filed under: Construction, Leadership & Managing People,
Starting in the construction industry, I set out on a mission to deliver $1 billion worth of construction.
Fast forward to today, and I've successfully steered over $300 million worth of projects, marking significant progress towards my goal.
This journey, spanning a decade, has been a rich source of life and business lessons. It's become clear that building goes beyond erecting structures; it's also about constructing a rewarding career.
In this piece, I reflect on what managing these complex projects has taught me, my insights on carving out a fulfilling career, and the key lessons I've learned along the way.
Part One: A Framework for a Fulfilling Career:
In my early days, I misunderstood the concept of a great career.
I had urges to abandon my path and “follow my passion,” even though I didn’t really know what that meant. I felt pressures to be this “young, successful millionaire” who had everything figured out.
Thankfully, I resisted these impulses, allowing me to connect the dots and find my true path.
Consider this: a typical career spans approximately 80,000 hours, factoring in a 40- hour workweek, for 50 weeks a year, over 40 years.
This means your choice of career is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.
Make the right choices, and you can help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life. But for such an important decision, there’s surprisingly little good advice out there.
If you ask a young person what there dream job would be, the likely response will revolve around a role that’s “well-paid and easy.”
A fulfilling career goes beyond the job category, stress levels, or salary. It’s more nuanced and personal.
Instead of striving to avoid stress, seek engagement, purpose, and challenges. Based on my experiences, I’ve identified six key elements to consider when seeking a fulfilling career:
1. Work that’s engaging
What really matters is not your salary, status, type of company and so on, but rather, what you do day-by-day, hour-by-hour. Engaging work is work that draws you in, holds your attention, and gives you a sense of flow.
Tasks that are clear, challenging, absorbing, and have variety.
Freedom to decide how to perform work.
Feedback, so you know how well you’re doing.
Allows you to enter a state of flow.
2. Work that helps others
Rather than “follow your passion,” get good as something that helps others. Or simply: do what contributes.
Help other people. Help a team.
Solve problems for people and organizations.
People who help people are happier and healthier.
If you put making a valuable contribution to the world first, you’ll develop passion for what you do - you’ll become more content, ambitious, and motivated.
3. Work you’re GOOD at
Being good at work gives you a key ingredient - a sense of achievement. The most meaningful projects, the most engaging tasks, and highest pay all require being GOOD.
Gain valuable skills.
Being good will increase your contribution.
Build career capital (character, skills, connections, credentials, reputation).
Skills ultimately trumps interest.
Gives you the power to negotiate for other components of a fulfilling job.
4. Work with supportive people
When we think of dream jobs, we usually focus on the role. But who you work with is almost as important. If you hate your colleagues and work for a boss from hell, you’re not going to be satisfied.
Work with good people who are similar and like-minded.
Work with people who care about your interests.
Look for culture where it’s easy to get help, feedback, and work together.
5. Lack of major negatives
Everything above is important. But you also need the absence of things that make work unpleasant. These negatives can easily outweigh many other positive factors.
A long commute.
Extremely long hours for long periods of time.
Unfair pay.
Job insecurity.
6. Work that fits with the rest of your life
Ensure your professional goals align with your personal ones.
Fits into your larger life picture.
Key Lesson: Don't expect to discover your passion suddenly. Instead, job satisfaction grows over time as you learn more about what kind of work suits you, develop valuable skills, and use them to find engaging work that benefits others.
This journey occurs over three career stages:
Explore: Investigate your uncertainties to identify the best paths. Prioritize finding the best fit for you until you're ready to commit to a path for several years.
Build Career Capital: Seek jobs that help you develop valuable skills, connections, character, financial security, and that most accelerate you towards your longer-term vision. At the same time, invest in your personal development. Do this until you’ve taken the best opportunities to invest in yourself.
Deploy: Use your career capital to address pressing global or industry issues and secure a job that meets your personal criteria.
Part Two: Lessons Learned from $300M+ of Construction
Construction sites, while unconventional, serve as highly effective learning environments.
A place where thousands of conversations, tasks, moving parts, and people merge to bring a project to life from a raw piece of land and a set of written plans and specifications.
As a project manager, you're coordinating all the resources, manpower, and equipment to ensure project completion according to a set price, schedule, and quality, while handling any unforeseen conditions.
Below I will share the key lessons I've distilled from delivering $300M+ of successful projects, working alongside exceptional teams at Layton Construction.
Note: Click here to view my project portfolio. This link shares a collection of projects I’ve successfully completed or am currently engaged in for various clients.
The insights I’ve gathered are grouped into five key areas: Project Management, Productivity, Leadership & Team Building, Communication, and Lean Construction.
Each lesson was sparked from a moment of achievement when I discovered a tactic that helped me. Consider these lessons as mental shortcuts designed to reduce complexity, improve decision making, and propel you in the right direction.
More importantly, use them as a source of inspiration for investigating, trying new things, and developing your own heuristics - which is what really matters. Watch your ability to turn bold visions into reality radically improve.
Project Management:
You'll uncover more surprises by continuously planning than by documenting the plan.
Agreements are flexible, deadlines are not.
Keep your team close, and your stakeholders closer.
Breakdown to breakthrough: Anything is possible if you break it down into small enough steps.
Stay 5 moves ahead: Address obstacles before they impact progress.
Encourage collaboration: Create one team room where everyone works, shares data, and laughs together.
Be aware of the avalanche: One small scope change won't derail a project, but a 100 will.
One name: The only acceptable answers to "who owns this" is one single name.
Pair optimism with realism: Prepare for the worst, strive for the best.
The biggest risk is you: The greatest threat you face managing a project isn't external; it lies within your own biases and thought patterns.
Your RAID log is your project anchor: It serves as a single source of truth, documenting Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Decisions.
Think slow, Act fast: Carefully considered planning allows for rapid execution. If you “think fast” during the planning stage of your big project, you’ll be forced to “act slow” in the future while you deal with the challenges of a plan that doesn’t work.
Watch your downside: Focus on not losing, every day, while keeping an eye on the prize, the goal that you are trying to achieve.
Be like water: A well-run project adapts to change like water; it finds the best path forward, no matter what.
Productivity:
Brain dump: Write everything down that captures your attention. Project Managers use their mind for creating ideas, not storing them.
Take care of yourself: A well-rested, healthy project manager is an effective one. Balance is key.
Multiply your time: Spend time on tasks today that'll save you time tomorrow.
Sleep, diet, exercise: These habits have a direct impact on your energy levels and productivity. Prioritize them.
Sunday planning: Spend 15 minutes on Sunday night to plan your week and you’ll never stress on Monday morning again.
The 2-minute rule: If you can finish a task in less than 2 minutes, do it right away. If it will take longer, add it to your to-do list and schedule it for later.
Prioritize: Do the most important thing first. Usually, the thing giving you the most resistance. The longer you put off a task - the harder it becomes.
Eliminate noise: Turn off ALL non-emergency notifications on your phone, tablet, and laptop.
Significance: Spend most of your time performing activities that are important but not urgent. These tasks are your compounders—they build long-term value on your project and in your life.
Discipline equals freedom: Maintaining discipline in your work, time, and habits gives you the freedom to pursue your goals without resistance. Strict routines now yield greater flexibility later.
Leadership & Team Building:
Be the captain your team needs: Successful projects hinge on a selfless, dedicated leader who willingly performs thankless tasks for the team's benefit.
Right people, Right roles: When your people’s skills match roles, your project runs like a well-oiled machine.
Plan the people: No amount of planning can fix a people issue.
Lead by example: To encourage discipline in others, you must first be disciplined yourself. To lead others, you must first lead yourself.
Trust but Verify: Have faith in your team’s abilities but ensure to check the work for correctness. Trust builds confidence while verification ensures quality.
Shared success: Progress is a team sport - when everyone pulls together, success is shared.
Trust, protect, maintain: Trust is the cornerstone of all relationships in a project.
Shield your team: A bad executive is a distraction, a good executive shields a team from distraction.
Uphold psychological safety: Promote an environment where team members feel safe to speak up, share ideas, and make mistakes.
Encourage continuous learning: A team that learns together, grows together.
Feedback is a gift: embrace it, learn from it, and use it to grow.
When people do a good job, acknowledge it. Make your appreciation specific, personal, and consistent.
Ask “Why?”: Know why you’re doing your project, why it matters, your ultimate purpose, and your result. As the project sails into a storm of events and details, good leaders never lose sight of the ultimate result.
Communication:
Clear communication: When the idea in my head and the idea in your head is the same, after I communicate it to you.
Start your day right: The morning daily huddle is the most crucial communication of the day.
Make the implicit, explicit: Clear, straightforward communication manages expectations. And above all: check if you were understood.
Lead with the answer: People have busy minds. Give them what they came for first, and then back it up with the details.
Document everything: Clear records of decisions, conversations, and changes prevent confusion and disputes.
A picture is worth a thousand words: Use diagrams, charts, and models to explain complex ideas.
Be consistent: Regular, predictable communication builds trust and prevents miscommunication.
Lean Construction:
Be Lean, be mean: Identify and eliminate non-value-adding processes for a lean and efficient project.
Respect everyone: Treat every encounter as if it’s the most important thing happening at that moment, no matter what is on your own agenda.
Empower the Last Planners: See the project through the eyes of the crew. Inviting crew members' suggestions help reduce tasks that added little value and produce more efficient, reliable schedules.
5S Culture: Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain should be the cornerstones of your project culture.
Strive for flow: Ensure work progresses smoothly without interruptions, adapting to changes and constraints.
Pull, don't push: Start tasks when the next process is ready for them.
Visibility is key: Make your workplace into a showcase that can be understood by everyone at a glance. Make progress, delays, and defects immediately apparent.
Use visual aids: Diagrams, charts, calendars, and models can help your team see the plan.
Continuously Improve: Don't just work in your project, work on it; always look for ways to improve and add value.
Celebrate small wins: Recognizing progress, no matter how small, builds momentum and morale.
I invite you to take these lessons and apply them to your projects. They are not a magic solution but a compass to guide you in the right direction.
Share them if you find them useful, and here's to building beautiful structures and careers!
Until next week,
Kyle Nitchen
Construction Management, Lean, & IPD Resources
Explore books, podcasts, and websites focusing on leadership, team building, and culture in Construction Management and Lean Construction.
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Thank you so.much for sharing this with us, Specially the part of feeling the pressure to have it all figured out now as younger generation of upcoming professionals,,I now know to spend more time on finding my suitable path,path that I will enjoy doing the rest of my careeer🙏🙏