Fabricating Urgency
It’s not urgent for everyone.
It’s common to hear leaders implore their teams to “create a sense of urgency.” This added pressure will surely help speed the project along to a harmonious and efficient conclusion. It is undoubtedly true that a sense of urgency can accelerate a project, but it may also have the side effect of decreasing efficiency in certain operators. Some people simply do not work well under pressure, and sometimes you’ll get lower quality product as a result. But beyond it’s potential to compromise quality, urgency and the pressure it brings can backfire when applied thoughtlessly.
Urgency comes when things must be done by a certain deadline. The timeline must be a very real threat and not a vague target, like “sometime in the spring.” Despite manager’s best efforts, a sense of urgency to hit the mark does not impact everyone equally. Both parties — the contractor and client — have strong incentives to hit the mark. A client may want to get into the house because they want to celebrate Christmas there, avoid additional rental payments, or to finish before the birth of a baby, etc. A contractor may want to hit a payment milestone, to make a client happy, or — more powerfully — to stave off anger at a missed deadline.
Weak Sauce
Now, why would your employees share this drive? And your subcontractors? To make you happy? Because they love you? Imagine the client’s sense of urgency as a steady drip of hot coffee trickling down. By the time it has been processed through the contractor’s filter, the PM, to the electrician, and to the electrician’s apprentice, the client’s strong, hot brew is a weak, flavorless potion. I’m sorry to say, but the electrician’s apprentice simply does not care about the client the way you do. You can try and make them care, but you will fail. Let’s be clear that apprentice is not a bad person, he’s just not drinking the same coffee.
So how do we give subcontractors and employees a full-strength dose of pressure that will help us get the job done? Well, we have to change the terms. We have to give them a different drink: they don’t respond to the client’s weak coffee or yours. They are not under the same pressure that you and the client are, nor should they be . They are behaving entirely as expected based on their incentives and psychology.
Creating vs. Sharing
Reviewing the aphorism “create a sense of urgency,” we see the key word is create. Often when we think we are creating a sense of urgency, we are just sharing our sense of urgency, and this is a failure in action. It is a passive gesture to declare the importance of a schedule without establishing why it matters to the person you aim to influence. You are saying it is important to me so make it important to you! This might work for your relatives and close friends, but not for our young apprentice.
If their only link is their social tie to you, i.e. wanting to remain in your good graces, then there is something wrong with your management practices. While social ties are definitely a component of good business practices (see The Power of Donuts), they are just a fraction. Ultimately this is a business operation and when your appeals to your social connections fail (“hey buddy can you do me a favor and get this done tomorrow”), you’ve got to find something else to support your mission.
For immediacy, there is no substitute for leaning on a relationship; if you need it done tomorrow and you haven’t planned for it, this is the time to lean. However, this is no way to live — in an unplanned world. Builders are, by necessity, planners and must be proactive. If you are running around at the eleventh hour cracking a whip and demanding people hold to your hastily fabricated schedule, something happened in the lead up that caused this burst of reactivity (or more likely something didn’t happen). It could be a failure in management, could be that a low budget led to less than preferred subcontractors, could be arbitrary and unrealistic schedule expectations (which should have been corrected early on). We have to plan in advance, otherwise we will need to lean on relationships to get the job done, and soon that relationship capital will run dry. Further, it takes time and effort to build the kind of relationship that we can lean on. Lean on a hastily built fence and it will collapse; we want the other kind. You cannot expect a brand-new relationship to pull out all the stops for you.
Or Else
There has to be an “or else.” You will do this or else. If you are an employee, it could mean an impact on bonus, or a shot at a promotion, etc. If you are the boss, it could mean withholding from a client, a bad review, or the end of a fruitful relationship. What are the “or else’s” for a vendor? There are a lot of fish in the sea and many vendors leave a trail of bad vibes behind them as they go, yet still they stay in business. Your future business may not be that important to them (remember we are talking about urgent situations, you are working with what you have). The or-else can’t just be the vague promise of future work. Besides, if a vendor completes all scope per their contract, but doesn’t kick it into high gear at the end like you wanted, that may not be grounds to delete them from your black book. Regardless, there must be a current reason that incentivizes urgency beyond “the PM will scream at you.”
One way to handle this might be by tying schedule and incentives together in the contract, or setting up a payment schedule that encourages completion of certain milestones by specific dates. Trade selection is key here. A fence installer who comes in last to do a small piece of the project doesn’t impact the schedule if they fail to show up and finish in a timely fashion, but a plumber can be far more damaging. Pick the trades carefully, you can’t always get all-stars, and if you require even 50% of your bench to be all-stars, you have not read Moneyball and are living in a dreamworld. If this is your strategy, you are not really managing either: you are hiring and releasing into the wild.
The trouble is, all of this requires proactivity. If you are late in the game trying to rescue a schedule and relying on the goodness of others to do it, you are doing open heart surgery in the jungle. It’s really not the time or the place.
If in this situation — what can you do now? Unfortunately, you may have to open up your wallet. When we mess up a client’s tile work, we pay for it. Why should the schedule be different? Time to incentivize: our flooring supplier has drivers who only deliver to the first floor, but when you produce a few crisp bills, they are more than happy to hit the second, third, heck even fourth floor! You want people to work on Saturdays and Sundays? Well, what time is lunch and we’re having tacos. And speaking of proactivity (or in this case, a lack thereof), considering adding these bribes into your annual budget: “Urgency grease.”
The time to start managing the schedule is before it has started. Your urgency is a sign of your reactivity; your reactivity puts your lack of planning on full display. A marathon is not won on the last mile but in the first 25.