Executive summary. The best employees can be the ones that want to shoot to the top and take an executive role as early as possible – not everyone wants to do that. But unfortunately, true leadership can only be realized through business and life experience. Let’s talk about events that can only come over time.
Addressing age discrimination. Yup, I said it. It’s a taboo within all American human resources handbooks: employers cannot discriminate against race, creed, ethnicity, et cetera, and, yes, age. Well, I’m in my mid-fifties and have heard friends/peers complain that they cannot find a job because they’re too old. So, for the younger folks, be it known that discrimination works both ways against the old and the young.
Been there, done that. Most construction and engineering companies want to hire executive leaders that have not only technical aptitude, but also have high scores in business and life experience. The reason is that construction is a serious business which can be life and death, plus it involves a great deal of money. Being wise and calculated from past experience can prove priceless.
What sort of events? When you’re a sole owner of a business and/or you have tens to hundreds of people under you on an organization chart in a larger business, you see a lot. Those looking to hire executives want to be sure that their new hire has seen a lot of the world’s challenges. If you want to be an executive, you need to have lived and been an important voice in all but one or two of these sorts of events (in increasing severity):
- Quit a job face to face – it’s hard to quit a job face to face. Anyone can do it via email or text.
- Give a speech – be a keynote speaker or an emcee or just a featured speaker where you have hundreds of eyes on you. Public speaking as an executive is a must have.
- Fire someone – call someone into your office and terminate them (this is not to be confused with laying off someone which provides a much softer landing pad).
- Hold or console a crying employee – loss of a loved one, having killed a child in combat, experiencing extreme anxiety, or suffering an injury are all experiences in which I’ve had crying employees. Half of those people were men, so don’t think this just applies to women.
- Be wrongfully accused or libeled – politicians go through it all the time, but as a businessman or woman having someone lie about you is tough to hear.
- Trust an ex-convict – if you’re in construction, you’re probably already doing this. But, many in the industry swinging a hammer or pulling joysticks in an equipment cab have done time. Those crimes were committed long ago when he or she was at a different stage in life. Forgive and give opportunity.
- Save the company – I once worked for a company that was acquired and the executive team from the buying company said at a company dinner after their acquisition that “we’ll use these craft guys and get rid of them after the project’s done.” The next day I was speaking in front of 50 workers who were on the verge of quitting due to that executive’s poor choice of words. No craft worker wants to hear that.
- Have a very bad accident – from the crane hook, we dropped a wall curtain of rebar over a carpenter crew and, as the project manager, I stood in the hospital next to the wife of a worker who had a rebar 8” out of his arm in each direction (it was about a 20’ piece of rebar that punctured the laborer’s forearm that the crew cut on either side to allow ambulance transport) while going into surgery. On another project I went to the hospital as doctor’s debated whether or not to amputate the leg of a laborer as a result of a crushing incident with an excavator.
- Death of a worker – I had at least one attempted suicide, one death, and one murder in my career. There were two construction deaths, but they were not on my jobs so I can’t really speak to them. But statistically, with all the employees you will have as a business owner it is bound to happen.
- Be threatened with your life – I once had a subcontractor tell me he’d bury me in a sugar cane field if I didn’t pay him. He was in a gang – a real one.
My story. These events above are all taken from my career. Others who have had similar experiences can add their own. I should have added having been embezzled from and having had a plane crash on their project, but we could be here forever with these war stories. The point is that, ideally, you’d like to have an executive that has “seen it all” and these shared anecdotes represent that caliber of manager. A hiring company can feel as if whatever the executive may be put up against, he or she will come through responsibly and calmly.
Work safe!
