Holding trades accountable without micromanaging
Friday afternoon, and you are walking the floors for the third time today. The insulation foreman has stopped answering your texts, and the drywall foreman asked whether you plan to hang the board yourself. Two trades still missed what they said they would finish.
Micromanaging is what happens when the only way to know whether work is on track is to watch it. It eats your day and tells foremen their word does not count. The alternative is to make each commitment explicit, check it once a week, and treat every miss first as information about the plan.
- Take commitments from the person who runs the crew, in their own words: what, where, and done by which day.
- Keep one list for the week that every trade can see.
- Check once, at the end of the week: done or not done, with no partial credit.
- Count the ones kept. The Lean Construction Institute calls this percent plan complete: promises completed on the day stated, divided by promises made for the week.
- Record a reason for every miss: waiting on another trade, material, information, labour, weather or over-promising. Sorting these reasons for variance shows the failures that keep coming back.
- Follow up on patterns, privately and with facts. Three labour misses in a row is a talk about crew size, not a lecture at the meeting.
- Fix the misses your own side caused first, and say so.
Following up on a miss
Common mistakes
- Counting "nearly done" as done.
- Asking "how's it going?" five times a day instead of checking once a week.
- Using the numbers to shame a trade in front of the others.
- Ignoring misses caused by your own late information or inspections.
Action list
Start this week
- Commitments from foremen, in their words
- One list every trade can see
- Done or not done, checked once a week
- A reason for every miss
- Patterns reviewed over several weeks
- Your own side's causes fixed first
- Escalation with facts, as the subcontract sets out
Check your understanding
A trade's kept commitments fall from nine in ten to six in ten in a week. What do you check before calling their office?
Show the answer
The reasons recorded for the misses. If the crew was waiting on another trade, on information or on your own inspections, the problem is upstream and the call would blame the wrong party; if the reasons point to their labour or planning, you have facts to raise with the foreman first.
