We have to have like such calm certainty about our own value as human beings that we don't feel threatened by bringing in another person who made like make our skills look pale by comparison. And now a message from our sponsor our cat. You know, we've all had that one story that one project that had such a unique situation and required a solution that no one had considered before. And we love to share these stories in our professional circles. But there has never been a great collection of these conflicts and triumphs in one place until now. Detailed is a podcast series that features architects, engineers, builders and manufacturers who share their insights and expertise, as they highlight some of the most complex, interesting and oddest building conditions that they've encountered, and the injured nudity it took to solve them. Join host Sharif lakeside, otherwise known as the CSI cracking, a senior specification writer at Rdh building science, as she uncovers lessons learned to help you navigate similar challenges that may arise in your next project. This is a great opportunity for you to hone and further refine your technical abilities. Listen now at our cat.com forward slash podcast. That's ARCA. t.com forward slash, podcast. Hello,
and welcome to the Business of Architecture. Hope everybody is well. So I'm sat here with my good friend, Mr. Enoch Sears. How are you Nick?
Ryan? I'm doing excellent this morning. Thanks had I had a breaking workout at the gym this morning. My my, my personal trainer completely destroyed me. So other than that, well,
excellent. So we're going to have another one of our in depth conversations where we're going to be looking at some of the issues and problems that we're hearing from many architecture practice owners that we speak with and consult with on a daily basis. And we're gonna have a bit of a deep dive into a particular topic today, which affects a lot of practices, which is to do with underperforming team members. Now, this is something that we've been over the years, it happens, and we hear a lot of problems related to team performance. What does team performance actually look like? inexperienced team members, team members dropping the ball, people being very concerned about how much time they're now spending training and educating their they particularly younger members of the staff, and what it's doing to their to their bottom line. And this can be quite a, it can be very stressful. It's one of the it's probably one of the things that you never realized this is what you're going to be doing is actually leading and talking and mentoring and coaching. Other people babysitting. Yeah. And it can be really, really frustrating. It What have you heard so far? What kinds of things have you seen from practices when they're dealing with this?
Well, the the generation gap certainly comes up a lot, which is the older established architects that have been doing this for a while, it's very easy to blame the millennial generation to blame the the new kids coming out of school, they don't have work ethic, they don't know how to work hard, you know, when I was and we saw this even a couple years ago with the thing that happened at CyArk. Were a couple of the students at the school, raise their hands, and they asked this distinguished panel of established architects, they said, Hey, what's the deal with like living wages? What's the deal with some of you on this panel? Having the young architects work for free? You know, what's up with this culture? Like we can barely afford to live here in Los Angeles? And then the older generations response was? Well, I mean, come on. I was I was a waitress in New York City. While I didn't earn any money in architecture, I kind of worked my way through school. And then I worked my way through the first initial stages of my practice work for years and years and years without earning really barely enough to survive on. So a couple things happening there. Right. There's the the old this new generation is lazy kind of theme, which seems to recur for every single generation. Let's face it, I
mean, that's about our generation did that? I don't
think so. No, I think I was the one that they didn't actually say they say, Damn these, I'm, I'm borderline millennial. I think what I'm called is I think I'm Gen X. What are you Ryan, you're millennial
I'm on I'm what's known as a grandfather millennial. So the grandfather millennial, I don't identify as a millennial, I'd certainly identify more with the Gen X. You know, that was my that was my older, my older siblings, that people who you looked up to, and certainly much more of that kind of mindset. I think there's even they've made a special grouping for those born in 1980 to 1982 called xennials. An interesting letter in between the millennials and the Yeah, annexures thing. That's interesting.
So there's, well, there's that there's that divide. What's interesting. So I read a book a while ago, that really changed my perspective on life on leadership, kind of as a culmination of years and years of personal development leadership. up and excited Scott is by an M. Jocko Willink, who used to be a Navy Seal, great book, Extreme Ownership as the name. And he now has gone on to be a business consultant. And the point he makes in the book is that there's power in Extreme Ownership. So he gives an example, when he was, I don't know if his platoon commander, I don't know what the actual name of but he was leading this group out and maybe as a platoon, I'm not sure. But he talked about how his team had basically snuffed out, they'd mess up, right. And so when he came before them, and in the debrief afterwards, he says, Hey, first of all, guys, I gotta admit that I dropped the ball on this one. And this is what he reported to his superiors, I dropped the ball, you know, I take full ownership and complete responsibility that you guys didn't know where we were at at the right time. As a result, there's some chaos and confusion that happened, that kind of thing can get someone killed. So he stood there powerfully and took ownership. And then what he did, then he then took to the team, he said, Now, Ryan, you're the communications guy, you're the guy who's in charge of getting the map ahead of time and coordinating with the people back in the field office, so they know where we're going to be at what checkpoint? So that is all on track. That didn't happen. Ryan, why not? Why the hell not. And so then Ryan gets the opportunity to be established his integrity. So there was like this idea that like, I own it. Now, in the arc, what I've seen in the architecture industry is just with inexperienced leaders, since we're not taught leadership and don't want to go through well, not most of us haven't gone to the military. A lot of times there is, there is blame, and lack of individual ownership for the firm leaders themselves. So when firm owners are telling me about the challenges that they're facing around staff, they never show up. And they say, Well, you know, my leadership is crummy. And I never learned how to motivate inspire people. It's always like, Ah, I'm frustrated, because seems like I'm doing the same tasks over and over again, or I gave my team a task, they're indecisive, they can't make any decisions. It seems like they're always waiting for input for me. Well, when you look at that, like, Okay, who is the one that built a team that's always waiting on input from you? Did you use an HR consultant? Was there someone else that came in and built your team for you? Who was the one that developed the roles? Who was the one that decided, this is the caliber of people this is the experience level people, we need to be able to help me perform the best of my job. So I would say the first thing, right is just very much a lack of accountability for small firm leaders, just just not even looking in the mirror, just blaming their teams just saying, Oh, it's just my team's fault. You know, it's, it's the millennials, it's this isn't a millennials, it's the it's the Generation X, instead of taking the look in the mirror and saying, hey, it's my leadership, where am I dropping the ball here.
It's interesting, the blame playing the blame game. And the kind of psychology about blame is that we get to be right about something, it's kind of self affirming of, you know, when we place the blame over there was something that we can't control someone else's behavior, we get to be right about whatever belief it is that we've got going on in our own minds, it might be something like, I'm the best person in the office to be able to do this kind of work, or I knew I was really super skilled at doing this, nobody else can do it, as well as me, this might not even kind of occur in someone's mind as as something egotistical. It's just kind of occurring as fact. But there's a bit of an addictive behavior that can emerge of being right about the poor performance of other people. And it's got nothing to do with you. It's all over there with them. Now, that might sound a bit bizarre. And I've, I've said this to practice owners before in the past of just being self aware of how we ended up unintentionally using our business to get emotional needs met. And there is definitely an emotional need that human beings have to be needed. And when things go wrong, and you blame somebody else, we can kind of get that need met, I've needed, they're useless. And I'm the one that can can save, I can help I can be the one that does it. And we've got to be just we've just got to be cognizant of that and just aware of the of that mechanism and how the mechanism can become psychologically unhealthy or unhinged, even and bit warped and deformed. And we can get into this game of you know, continuously blaming the the, I get it as well. The complaining and blaming the general, younger generations is fun, as well. There's it
slightly, it feels really good. I like I like being the sage on the mountaintop that can blame all these young tykes that don't know how to work.
They never had it as hard as in my day. In my day, we used to work we used to work 48 hours in a row. And we were grateful for being able to draw if I had ink in my pen. That was that was that was what I was great. That was the only that was the only motivation I needed was to get was to get fresh ink and we love the
bonuses were that I get to keep my job
But the bonus was good not getting fired. Yeah, yeah. So there's definitely that kind of story which we can get into which there's a certain level of fun and amusement with it as well. But on a more sinister, sinister side, it actually stops us from taking any responsibility with the performance of our own team, and puts it solely out there with the other people. We've got to think about how this ends up occurring to the other side, the younger team members and how frustrated that they get. And there is definitely a cultural difference, a generational difference between the expectations that that say the boomers and the Gen Xers perhaps have that millennials, and certainly Gen Z is don't have, and there's a there's a, there's a different purpose in life, like work is not seen in the same, it's not seen in the same light doesn't mean that's bad. It's just different. It's like, you know, if you think about businesses when they go abroad, so for example, my, my dad spent a lot of time in his professional career working in the Far East, in Asia and in the Middle East. And their businesses used to invest a lot of money. Learning about the other cultures, sometimes it might mean language that my dad never learned other languages, but they certainly learned the business cultures of other people. So how they do business in Arab culture, or in the Middle East, and how they like to do deals. And, you know, how do people work in Japan? And that's actually quite a common thing where people who want to do business with these other cultures take some time to learn to learn, learn what's what are the motivations of these other of these other cultures? What's important to them? What are the sorts of faux pas that we can accidentally put our foot into where, you know, if I express my culture, I've unintentionally now offended somebody because it's hyper offensive to do that in their culture. But you know, you we can kind of make those faux pas, unintentionally, but we don't do that without we don't do that with generations. I see very on both sides, I see very little effort, going to try and understand where the other person is coming from. And what the paradigm is that there is that they're operating. So if the point.
Like is, that is a good point, Ryan.
It is interesting, isn't it? It
is it is? It's it's a new possibility. Right. And so here's some of the problems that, that we commonly see regarding team members. Number one, team members lack initiative, it seems like they're too scared to make a decision. They're always waiting for your input. And this gets frustrating because you're like, golly, just just move ahead and do something. You waited two weeks for that? Why? Oh, geez, now the project is going to be two weeks late, because you didn't, why didn't you bring this to my attention sooner, etc. Number two, you've become the bottleneck. So as the firm owner, again, you're out and about, you're meeting with clients are coming back. And while you're out there, growing the business meeting with clients handling fires, sometimes everything comes to a screeching halt, because they're waiting on something. And so now team members are putting that project on the side burner waiting for your input, slowing down the operations. I know that in firms that I've worked in, sometimes this was the case where we ran out of things to work on, and the owner wasn't there to instruct us on what to do next, or to give us some guidance. And so what they do, you know, well, let me update the detail library. Let me go organize some of the product photos or let me play solitaire. This
is a such a common issue. And again, I'll say it with practice owners, because they start a business. And then they usually only ever hire people that are less experienced than them or younger than them or who are cheap. And all of those.
There's a good one I Ryan, did you there was a call I was on with one of our clients last last week where he literally had the epiphany and this guy is a smart architect. But he like it finally dawned on him. He's like, I have hired a team of inexperienced people around me because I was going for cheap. And now he feels trapped.
How can you how can you sell an expensive service? When you're not willing to invest in people? You're not willing to you're not you're not willing to invest in in in talent? Why do you think so many businesses, you know, over the last few years have so much problems with hiring. It's not because of it's not because there's been this great exodus of architects leaving the profession as a very small percentage. It's because we're not paying them enough. And your business is not working well. It's not working well enough for you to be able to sustain a livable decent salary A wage. And so unlike drop now, the way that we ended up seeing this manifest is in this bottleneck scenario, where you've got the most senior, experienced, knowledgeable person who is now trying to run a business. And inevitably, they are going to get pulled into every single decision that needs to get made on a project. Because guess what, they've surrounded them by themselves with people who don't know anything, or don't know, what is needed to do the project. And then they get surprised by it. Think about a business like, I mean, any great CEO, or entrepreneur, surrounds themselves with brilliant people, they surround themselves with people who are in many cases more have more expertise in a certain domain that they do. And it doesn't surprise me that when I talk to business owners who don't have an architectural background, and they've seen the architectural space as a way of making money, and they think, oh, you know what, there's a problem here to be solved by designing houses. And they set up a design business, and they don't know anything about architecture necessarily. What do they do, they go and hire people. And first thing they do is start hiring people around them who understand and who know, that part of the business. And they can't get involved in it too much. And they become the managing partner, they become the entrepreneur, and they build a team around of expertise around themselves. And guess what that business tends to do very well. If we, if we look at architects who have done this, well, BRK angles springs to mind as being someone who was actually quite young and inexperienced as an architect, and made some very important hires early on in the business in terms of having a CFO and having you know, business minded people in place, there's an interview, I heard with him where he was talking about, you know, he had to go and find really senior project architects because he'd never done it himself. He'd never lead these sorts of projects. But he's dealing with some of the, you know, these massive New York high rise buildings and, and things like that, and winning the work. And he was very much focused on the communication of the practice being the marketer, being the salesperson going out and winning the work, creating a vision, and, and communicating it and then building a team of brilliant people to go and deliver it. So there it becomes, if you're going to build a team, then this idea of the bottleneck, and you being at the center of it becomes much, much less likely to happen. Yeah,
agreed. And it's this crazy paradox, where that I've seen where the more someone understands the craft. In other words, what the business actually does, the slower the business grows. And why is that? Well, because they do it better than everyone, which they probably do. And so they have a very difficult time letting go of the reins, this is key, as like letting go of the reins. And a lot of times why they don't let go of the reins is they don't want to be burned, they're afraid of being sued. They're afraid of liability on the projects. And they're afraid of that, because again, they've built a team that lacks some experience around them, because they're the ones who were planning on doing most of the heavy lifting with the technicalities of it, the design, etc. And so it's it's it is really wild, I'm glad you brought that up. It's It's kind of crazy. What's interesting when we look at it, and we say, you know, the people that have less expertise in the actual area, oftentimes, that's a, that's a catalyst or that is a, that's a booster, whereas deep knowledge and expertise can actually hinder the growth of a business. So this is again, where it's really important to take a look in the mirror and say, am I being so precious about this, that I'm limiting the growth of my company and what it could be? I'm thinking of when I was like, when I was young, we used to play soccer all the time. That would be football, right, just in case you're wondering. And I was on the team growing up, we had this term called the ball hog. And I it's the same term that they call it in basketball. But the ball hog is the person who they never want to pass the ball, they want to keep the ball the whole time. And I've been in that position before where I've been the best person on the team. And I understand the pressure because I don't want to, I don't want to give it to Joe over here because Joe's gonna miss the shots. So I'm just going to keep it because I want to win the game. And so what we think is the ball hog is we think, Oh, I'm the best one on the team to do this job. I'm just going to keep the ball all the time and try to score the goals. But then when we look, those kinds of teams will always lose to the teams where there's proactive cooperation, where there's passing where everyone is doing the right role where the goalie is the goalie, the forwards the forward the midfielders, the midfielders the defenders are the defenders they're really good at it, as opposed to a team With the ball hog running around that ball hogs going to get very, very tired very, very fast. And so we can see the analogy here to running a business, we can be the ball hog in our own business. And
think about as well the kind of person who only plays a sport with people who are worse than them. Well,
that says something else about our psyche as well, indeed, and this is, again, it's it goes back to psychology, doesn't it? Right. And I mean, guilty as charged, it's just natural of human beings to want to be the smartest person in the room. But when you look, when you look at the best business leaders, they want to be the dumbest person in the room. So we have to have, we have to have like such calm certainty about our own value as human beings, that we don't feel threatened by bringing in another person who made like, make our skills look pale by comparison.
Yeah, I think that that's, that's really important in in business that we don't, we don't talk about it enough. But I think in any endeavor, where you're pursuing excellence, to surround yourself with people who are at a level where you want to be, or who are better than you. And this means, you know, for your team, as well, fantastic, because it means that you're going to be growing. And certainly, as a business leader, you want to you want to be able to go to your team. And they're the ones directing you for what you should be doing and how we should be doing it. So you get the best quality Intel, so that you can make a strategic decision about what the business is going to do. So you can focus on your role as being the managing partner, the CEO, of you know, here's the vision and the mission long term where the business is going, I'm getting people with the best expertise, to give me the right knowledge. So I can make those sorts of decisions. Most architects aren't thinking from a strategic position who we're running a business, they're thinking about, we've got put, we've got to get projects delivered. And I haven't, you know, they might not say this, but the reality of it is, we haven't charged enough fees for it. So we're on the backfoot already, and we need to get some cheap staff in. So let's go for the most inexperienced team members. And then, you know, perhaps they've got really good computing skills, because that's what all the kids learn these days. And then they shut them into a project. And then they get all upset that they don't know how to detail gutters, and, you know, they don't know the building code and all this kind of stuff. And then there's then there's the drama that they get to engage in. If you think about, I think there's a, there's a famous Henry Ford quote, he's being interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, or one of these, one of these newspapers, and the journalists are trying to provoke him. And they're trying to kind of go to him into saying that, well, you're not that much of an intelligent person. You know, I, you know, what kind of how are you going to answer all these kinds of questions, you don't have all these expertise yourself, or blah, blah, blah. And he says, Listen, I don't need to have all the degrees and education of so many other other people, I have a team around me where if I push this button or ring this bell here, you can ask me any question that you want. And within 10 minutes, or five minutes, somebody from on my team will come up, and they'll be able to tell the answer to that. Had his own little Google before Google. And he had that's how he was thinking he was thinking about having expertise surrounded by him, which would help him kind of carry out his vision of where he wanted to go. Which was great. Really, really interesting.
Hey, Enoch, Sears here. And this conversation was so great, we decided to split this up into two podcast episodes. So what we just covered is the first part of this episode about what to do when your team members eff up again, join us on our next episode, where we're going to continue this conversation about how to build a team that actually frees you up as an architect, instead of making you work longer and harder, and ultimately giving you a lot of heartburn and frustration. And
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