Leadership absence

In the realm of construction, poor leadership can spell disaster for any project. Leadership is a tangible yet misunderstood element in a project team and it transcends the project team. It is comprised of personal leadership from workers to turn up each day, from suppliers to supply the right materials at the right time and from project management to support the team dynamics and rules of engagement and leadership from the final project owner to establish the key project success factors and to expedite decisions. Leadership is a sense of acting and communicating with a sense of purpose and a clear understanding of the end goal.

The following real-life experience highlights the importance of leadership.

As the months rolled on, the initial promise of timely completion faded into a distant memory. Decisions made without subcontractor and worker input delivered a cascading waterfall of inefficiencies, causing costs to soar beyond budgetary constraints.

With each poor choice, the quality of work diminished, the pressure mounted on the project team that evoked emotional heated disputes between contractors, designers and project managers prompting communication to break down, stifling collaboration and exacerbating the mounting issues causing a series of costly defects that further plagued the project.

Feeling the weight of mismanagement and lacking clear direction, workers lost motivation.

Ultimately, what began as a promising and exciting construction endeavour transformed into a cautionary tale, illustrating how detrimental poor leadership can be, resulting in a significant financial loss, fractured relationships and a compromised reputation.

The lessons learned would be invaluable if a similar project was to be done with a similar team, but alas the team would be split up and each go onto a new project to repeat the failures.

The only constant in this industry is to repeat the failures of history with new teams...such is the failure of leadership in the construction industry.

I can only imagine a future where there is sufficient industry change to support learning from where things do not end up where we hoped.