I am bona fide control freak. Maybe you can relate. There are a lot of us in this industry, and it’s understandable. It’s easy to want to control every aspect of our business when there is so much at stake, or if our resources are stretched, or if we think that it’s faster to do it ourselves than to invest the time in training someone else (and risk mistakes).
This is hardly ever a path with a happy and successful ending. More often it leads to burnout and keeping our company, and ourselves, small and stagnate.
So what’s the alternative? I could give you a spiel about how you should embrace collaboration, open up and freely give every member of your team an open seat at the table to make high level decisions, to always let go and trust the people around you to do the right thing and to be ok if they don’t.
I admit that I am not always that evolved, are you?
Building Trust Begins Internally
Today I had to let go of a big project and turn it over to members of my team because it was the right thing for me, the right thing for my client, the right thing for my company, and the right thing for the project.
I was too heavily invested on a personal (ie ego) level, and there were people who could do it better. And I had to realize it wasn’t just a project that I needed to let go of, it was an entire function of my business that I needed to step away from. I needed to create the vision, and then I had to learn to trust that someone else could take the project across the finish line.
So What’s the Correlation for Home Builders?
For many of us in the industry, whether we’re homebuilders or those that serve them, the next few years will be a time of growth. Companies that downsized within the last few years will begin hiring again. Only now, the job descriptions have changed. The roles have changed. The skill sets have changed. Most importantly, the type of people that we need to be successful in the next ten years look a lot different than the people that we needed to be successful during the last ten.
For many of us, the people that we hire in the next year – the people we will trust to take our vision over the finish line – will be the most important decisions that we make in determining the future of our company. These are the people who will be the future leaders of our company, the future competitors of our company, and for some of us even the heirs of our vision.
The Walk Away Test
At the heart of building a home builder legacy brand are the people who we surround our self with everyday and their ability to share, engage with, and execute on our vision independent of us. Do the people that you surround yourself with today operate at the level of integrity that you want to be known for as a company? Is your bench deep with skills for the next decade, or are you weighted down by outdated status quo thinking? Is your team waiting for the market to improve to be happy and passionate in their work again, or are they excited by the opportunity that’s in front of them?
Look around. If you had to give everything you do away in order to let go and achieve the next level for you and your company, do you trust the people in front of you to take your vision across the finish line? Who doesn’t fit?
What will you do about it?
