A lot of companies like to tout their “experience.” They add up the years each team member has been in the industry and crow that they come up with some impressive number like, “150 years of combined experience on their side.” I’ve always been impressed by them, but there is something more needed, isn’t there? Imagine a company with 100 employees but no one has worked in the industry for more than a year. How much is that 100 years of combined experience worth? Now if it was a team of 3 guys and they’ve worked together for that entire time, we’d probably pay more attention. So, what is experience good for, and how do we get to benefit from that value?

Experience is really only valuable if it is put to work, shared, known about, allowed to come onto the playing field. So, the question that matters more than the sheer number of years is what kind of team dynamic does that experience get to play in. How are the past experiences, mistakes, and achievements of each team member brought to bear on the daily work. And this is a question that we've put a lot of time into at Optimum Construction. We are committed to making “experience” into a meaningful word that gives real shape to how we work. So how do we do it?

Well to start off, it has to come from the top. It has to flow from how the leadership thinks about their team, the kind of people they pull in, and the way their particular expertise gets pulled into play. You can have a team with a ton of experience and expertise that never gets put to use. Teams can often be top-heavy, with a domineering boss who “knows everything” and has to keep every decision under thumb. Even if he is really good at what he does, there is certainly a bunch of expertise on his team that is going to waste.

But leaders can only pull from the people they’ve got and not all experience is equal. You can have guys who have put years of hard work in but haven’t made the time count by really seeking to grow personally and professionally, just putting in the hours and taking the paycheck. Gaining experience takes a lot more than just “doin’ lots of stuff,” it takes curiosity, good listening, asking questions, solving problems for yourself. Most importantly, of course, it takes actually learning lessons from the knocks you take from making mistakes. A good team that can tease and be teased about the mistakes made along the way, without getting bent out of shape, is a team that learns together.

At Optimum, while Kendrick and Ryan are definitely the head guys of the firm, if you walked into a Tuesday morning meeting, chances are it would take you a good while to figure out who was in charge. What you’d sense is that everybody seems just invested in problem solving as the next guy, everybody seems to own the problems at hand. This is no accident.

The type of leadership that fosters this kind of relational dynamic is one that doesn’t assume that just because you’re the boss, you know all the answers. Rather, while you’ll probably know a good bit about everything that goes on, on any given topic there are guys in the room that know more about it than you, cause that’s their specialty. And if you, as a leader, just sit back a bit and let the questions hang in the air a moment longer, someone will speak up. And if you have to wait even longer, the quieter more thoughtful types might even speak up. And that’s where the gold is.

The magic of this moment is more than you’d think too. In that moment when the guy who has that random bit of experience that fits the situation speaks up, it will usually come with a story that gives context to the knowledge and we learn that he had a random summer gig welding underwater boat hulls or something weird like that. From that moment on everyone on the team knows that he’s the guy to go to for questions related to that skill. And instead of waiting for the boss to come around or return a call, they go right to him with their questions. But the magic doesn’t stop there. Now you have problems that come up on one job site talked about on another site and the team keeps up with other projects that are going on, notes are compared, solutions are tested, relationships are growing. Now you’ve got a team that knows where its strengths are, that is invested in projects that other guys are on, and that is really working together, not just working in the same location by chance. Now you’ve got a self-generating environment that finds its own solutions.

Usually when construction guys get hired the thinking goes, “Can he do the job, does he have the experience to do the job?” "Yes? Ok great you’re hired." But we are taking it to a deeper level by pulling that experience into the team level where everybody is actively learning from the new guy’s experience. The whole team is richer for it. But it takes time to bring it out. That’s why we’re committed to our weekly whole team meetings. While we could be on the job site banging out work, instead we are talking around a table, sharing the problems we’re coming across, listening, gleaning from the toolbox of each team member’s experience.

It has been fun to watch the Optimum team take this and run with it. They’re learning faster, better, more independently. To do this, they have to have the freedom and trust of the leadership which, of course, has to be earned. And to earn it you have to be someone that really does want to learn and grow from others, willing to ask questions, willing to take the initiative to go find the answers to your questions. At Optimum, when we say that the personal and professional growth of our team is a priority, this is what we mean. We look for people who want to grow, we invest our time and energy into helping them do so, and as a result we have a team that does it on its own. To us, that’s a big part of what makes it a wonderful place to work.

Your company has how many years of experience…?