Chapter 41 Exercises — Leading People

These are practice conversations, practice diagnoses, and practice arithmetic. Most of them have no single right answer, which is the honest state of the subject — but they all have wrong answers, and the point of writing yours down is that you can look at it later and find out which kind you produced.

Difficulty legend: ⭐ basic · ⭐⭐ applied · ⭐⭐⭐ judgment · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ research and extension

Selected answers appear in Appendix J. Where a calculation has a numeric answer, it is in a <details> block here.

Part A — Conceptual Understanding ⭐

A1. List the six structural constraints on leading a construction project. For each one, name a leadership practice from this chapter that exists specifically because of it.

A2. State the credibility stack in order from weakest to strongest instrument, and explain in two sentences why positional authority is both the weakest and the most frequently used.

A3. Why is reliability credibility described as "the most underrated asset on a construction site"? Your answer must include what a subcontractor's foreman actually does with a date you give him.

A4. Name the four behaviors that resolve the young-manager problem. Which one is absolute — meaning there is no situation in which you break it — and why?

A5. Define the difference between a position and an interest in a two-trade conflict, and give an example of each from the corridor 2-B scheduling conflict in §41.4.3.

A6. State the four escalation tests. One of them is a single test rather than a scoring test — which one, and why is it treated differently?

A7. What are the five elements of hard feedback delivered to someone who does not work for you? For each, state what specifically fails if you omit it.

A8. Explain the difference between correcting a person and correcting a system, and state the one-sentence test that tells you which you are looking at.

A9. Why is "any questions?" not a comprehension check? What replaces it, and why does the replacement work in every language?

A10. State the sentence that summarizes the manager's obligation on multilingual safety instruction, and explain why a signed toolbox-talk sheet does not satisfy it.

A11. Explain why the decision to run six tens is described as "a decision about people that has a cost" rather than "a cost decision with a people side effect." What specifically does the spreadsheet version leave out?

A12. What does it mean to "absorb blame outward and assign cause inward"? State what goes wrong if you do only the first half, and what goes wrong if you do only the second.

Part B — Applied Analysis ⭐⭐

B1. A project engineer on your team walks up to a masonry foreman and says, "That coursing doesn't match the elevation — you need to redo the last three courses." The foreman is standing with his four masons. Identify three separate errors in that intervention, rank them by how much damage each one does, and rewrite the opening as a question.

B2. Your fire-protection subcontractor has been short-handed for three weeks. Before you send anything in writing, list the three questions you must be able to answer about your own performance, and describe how you would verify each one (not "ask" — verify).

B3. Reread the manpower dialogue in §41.4.4 — Margo's call to Yolanda Prieto. Break it into its six functional moves and label each one with what it accomplishes. Then identify the single sentence that makes the rest of the call possible, and explain what would happen if that sentence were untrue.

B4. Your weekly coordination meeting has run 100 minutes for a month, four of eleven foremen send substitutes, and three items have never closed. Diagnose the root cause in one sentence, name the single change you would make, and explain the causal path from that one change to each of the three symptoms.

B5. A superintendent tells you that a crew member "has an attitude problem." Convert that statement into three observable, factual statements a manager could actually act on, and then say what you would do first with each.

B6. Look at the twelve-row practice table in Case Study 2. Pick the three rows you believe would produce the largest retention effect on a crew you have actually seen, and defend the ranking. Then pick the row you think is least important and argue against yourself.

B7. In Case Study 1, Incident 4, Ray's first reaction was "don't ever do that again." Suppose he had never called Dani back. Write the two-paragraph account of what happens six weeks later, the next time a Kestrel-side item is late in front of Pri Sethi.

B8. A general contractor's project manager begins directing individual electricians on a subcontractor's crew — telling them where to work, in what order, and when to break. Name two distinct categories of risk this creates and one practical field consequence that has nothing to do with law.

B9. A subcontractor's bilingual lead foreman spends an estimated ninety minutes a day translating for three other trades on your site, none of which employ him. Describe four specific things you can change about how information moves on your job that would reduce that load — and be honest about which of them cost you something.

B10. Case Study 2 shows Randy Voss covering short crews with 6% premium time against Jamal Foster's 2%. Describe the feedback loop this creates in five steps, starting from "short-handed," and identify the single link where a superintendent can most cheaply break it.

Part C — Calculations and Deliverables ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

C1 — The cost of being right. In corridor 2-B, the conduit conflict resolved on the spot cost 4 workers × 2 hours × $66/MH. Discovered three weeks later after wire was pulled and the corridor ceiling was closed, it costs:

Compute both totals and the ratio. Then compute the ratio again assuming the late discovery also delays substantial completion by one calendar day on Northgate.

C2 — Six tens, worked. A crew of 10 at a burdened rate of $66/MH, base wage $34/hour, premium adding $19/burdened hour. Compare 5 × 8 to 6 × 10. Compute (a) weekly cost of each, (b) percentage increase in cost versus percentage increase in hours, and (c) cost per equivalent man-hour at a sustained-overtime efficiency of 80%. Then redo (c) at 75% and at 85% and state the range.

C3 — Turnover, priced. A subcontractor's crew averages 30 craft workers and runs 60,000 man-hours a year at a burdened rate of $62/MH. Annual turnover is 28%. Use $4,600 per hard replacement and a 120-equivalent-man-hour production ramp per replacement. Compute the annual cost of turnover in those two categories only, and express it as dollars per craft man-hour and as a percentage of the burdened rate. Then compute what dropping to 12% would save.

C4 — The escalation decision. For each situation, apply the four tests, state how many are true, and state your decision with the reason:

(a) A subcontractor's foreman parks his truck in the fire lane every morning after being asked twice. (b) You discover that a load-bearing CMU wall was grouted without the specified reinforcing in two cells, and the wall has been closed. (c) Two subcontractors are arguing about who pays for a $2,400 cleanup. (d) Your project engineer tells you the owner's representative called them directly and asked them to add scope. (e) A crew is working from a scissor lift with the guardrail chain removed, and the foreman says the chain is in the way.

C5 — Write the kickoff document. Produce the actual two-page subcontractor kickoff document for a $6.8M municipal community center with twelve subcontractors, using the §41.5.1 table as your checklist. Every row must have a concrete answer, not a policy sentence — "manpower reported by foreman via text to the superintendent by 7:30 a.m. daily, by trade, headcount only" rather than "manpower will be reported regularly."

C6 — Write the conflict-escalation protocol. One page. Levels, timeboxes, the four tests, the tell-them-first rule, and the three things you bring every time. Then name three conflicts you can predict on your own current or most recent project and route each one through your protocol on paper.

C7 — The three conversations. Do the §41.13 Try It drill in full, in writing, before reading the worked approaches. Then compare and write one paragraph on where your version differed and what it was optimizing for.

C8 — Price the credibility. Norm Kubiak brought four insulators to a corridor that was not released. Direct cost: 4 workers × 1 h 40 min × $66/MH. Compute it. Then compute the indirect cost over the following seven weeks under this assumption: Thermaline commits to 4 items per week instead of 9, and each un-committed item represents roughly 6 man-hours of work that gets pushed into a later, more congested week where it is performed at 85% efficiency. Show the arithmetic and state what you would tell a project executive who says "it was four hundred dollars."

Part D — Judgment and Ethics ⭐⭐⭐

D1. A subcontractor is six weeks behind. You know that a written cure notice will convert a working relationship into an adversarial one, and you also know the four trades behind them will absorb the compression. Argue both sides honestly, then state your decision rule — the specific condition under which you send the notice — and defend the timing.

D2. Your accountant proposes holding a $180,000 subcontractor pay application for three weeks to improve project cash position. Compute the financial gain at an 8.5% cost of capital, then make the leadership argument against it. Under what circumstances, if any, is delaying payment legitimate — and how do you distinguish that case from this one, from the subcontractor's side of the table?

D3. A safety incentive program pays each crew a bonus for a month with zero recordable injuries. Explain the mechanism by which this can reduce reported injuries without reducing actual injuries, and design a replacement program that a superintendent could implement next Monday.

D4. You learn that a foreman on your site has been mimicking a crew member's accent, and that others have laughed. Nobody has complained. Write what you say, to whom, in what order, and where. Then say what you do if it happens again — and be specific about what "again" means, because a policy that is not defined in advance is a policy you will apply inconsistently.

D5. Your superintendent tells you he is not going to promote a highly capable crew member to foreman because "the crew won't take direction from her." Work through your response. What do you challenge, what do you concede, what do you ask, and what do you actually do about the crew's reaction if he turns out to be partly right?

Part M — Mixed / Interleaved Practice ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

M1 (with Chapter 27). Northgate's baseline PPC was 54% — 101 commitments completed of 187 made — and 55% of the misses traced to Kestrel. Explain why PPC is properly read as a measurement of leadership rather than of subcontractor performance, then design the change to the weekly work plan meeting that would make a general contractor's own commitments visible on the same board. What resistance would you expect from your own staff, and what would you say to it?

M2 (with Chapter 24 and Chapter 29). You are about to authorize six tens for nine weeks to recover 17 days. Using the weeks 34–36 leading-indicator table, build the hazard analysis for the acceleration decision itself: list five production-system changes the directive will cause, the hazard each one generates, and the specific control you will put in place before the directive goes out. Then name the one indicator whose decline is your stop signal, and say why it is counterintuitive.

M3 (with Chapter 19 and Chapter 32). Chapter 19 ranks "pay them correctly and on time" as the second-strongest source of leverage. Trace the full causal chain from a pay application processed three weeks late to a specific number on a schedule update sixty days later. Name every link. Then state which link is the one most contractors believe is not connected.

M4 (with Chapter 20). Chapter 20 argues that productivity is a management variable more than a worker variable — sequence, access, staging, crew size, overtime, stacking, supervision ratio, rework. Take the nine constraint categories from the look-ahead and mark which are owned by the general contractor. Then explain why "what's in your way?" is a better first question than "why are you behind?" using that ownership split as the argument rather than as a communication preference.

M5 (with Chapter 25 and Chapter 26). The anchor-bolt submittal sat eleven days. CO #14 could substantiate $121,000 of $186,400. Both are usually taught as documentation failures. Reframe each as a leadership failure: name the belief the responsible person held, name what created that belief, and name the specific management practice that would have changed it. Then state which of the two would have been harder to prevent, and why.

M6 (with Chapter 40). Chapter 40 says the best people are reassigned before closeout starts and subcontractors send their B-crews. Design a staffing and incentive plan that keeps enough of the right people through the last 5% of a $47.5M project. Price it against $11,480 per calendar day of closeout overrun, and be honest about what your plan costs the next project that is waiting for those people.

Part E — Research and Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐

E1 — Find out what your assistance program actually covers. Not a search of the internet: call your own company's human resources department, or your local's member assistance program if you work union, and find out. How many sessions? Confidential — in what specific sense? Does it cover family members? What is the number, and is it printed anywhere a worker can look at it without asking anybody? Then produce the wallet card and the trailer posting, in the languages spoken on your site, and put them up. Write one paragraph on what you learned that surprised you — most people who do this exercise report at least one thing.

E2 — Go read the current sources on construction mental health. Look at what the CDC has published on industry-level suicide analyses, what NIOSH's construction program currently says, what CPWR — The Center for Construction Research and Training — publishes in its construction data resources, and what the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention makes available for employers. If you work outside the United States, find your national equivalents. Write down the current figures with their dates, their definitions, and their limitations — specifically, how the industry was defined and which occupations were included. Then explain in one paragraph why this chapter deliberately declined to give you a number.

E3 — Interview two supervisors. Find one supervisor whose people stay and one whose people do not — you almost certainly already know which is which. Ask each of them the same five questions: How do people find out what they're doing next week? What happens when somebody brings you a problem? How does somebody on your crew become a foreman? What do you do in the first forty-five minutes of the day? When did somebody last stop work, and what happened? Do not tell them what you are studying. Write up the differences. This exercise has produced more changed behavior among the young managers I have given it to than any reading assignment I have ever set.