Your Team Is Trained to Bring You Problems (And It's Your Fault)

THE CHALLENGE:

Tuesday morning. 7 am. Coffee's hot. You've got your list.

Three estimates to review before the end of the day. That call with the potential new client you met about the spring project they discussed. Maybe finally look at expanding into that market you've been thinking about for two years.

Then it starts.

7:15 am. Your PM calls. The concrete supplier pushed delivery from Tuesday to Thursday. The whole schedule shifts. What do you want me to do?

8:03 am. Your super calls. An electrician and a plumber both show up tomorrow for the same space. Someone's gotta wait. Who.

8:47 am. Estimator texts. This new bid just hit our desk. Big one. Should we go after it or pass?

9:20 am. Your ops manager walks in. The Mason Street project is running into major problems, and we need to figure out what to do about it.

By 11:30 am, you've handled nine problems. Made zero strategic decisions. That list you had at 7 am is still sitting there untouched. The craziest part is this isn't a bad day. This is literally every single day.

Maybe you're the owner and this is your reality. Or maybe you're the COO or VP of Operations, a SR PM, and you're drowning in the same fire drill. Either way, your entire morning evaporated into other people's problems. Problems they brought you the second they surfaced. No thinking. No options. No recommendations. Just raw issues dumped on your desk with the expectation that you'll drop everything and solve them right now.

You're not running the business. You're running around inside the business putting out fires while it runs you.

THE IMPACT:

Let's talk about what this actually costs you.

Your PM, who called you at 7:15 am about the concrete delivery, is not on the job site right now. He's not walking the work. He's not catching the issue before it becomes a change order. He's on his phone with you, asking what to do about something he's dealt with twenty times before.

Your superintendent, who needs you to referee the electrician and plumber, is not leading his crew. He's not planning the next two weeks of work. He's not training the new foreman. He's waiting for you to make a call he could make himself.

Every time they stop to call you, they're not doing their actual job. And their teams are waiting on them while they wait on you.

Do the math. Five managers are losing an hour and a half each day to this. That's seven and a half hours of management time wasted every single day. Multiply that across a year, and you're burning nearly two thousand hours of productivity. Not field labor hours. Management hours. The people who are supposed to be preventing problems and driving work forward are stuck in this endless loop of escalation.

But here's what really kills you. It's not even the time you lose. It's what never happens because you're stuck in reactive mode.

You don't develop that new market. You don't build the relationships that lead to the next big project. You don't fix the estimating process that's leaving money on the table. You don't build the systems that would prevent half these fires from starting in the first place.

Whether you're the owner trying to scale or the executive trying to actually execute strategy, you're trapped in the day-to-day while your smarter competitors are playing a different game entirely.

THE SHIFT:

Here's what nobody tells you about this problem.

Your team isn't dumb. They're not lazy. They're actually doing exactly what you trained them to do.

Every time someone brings you a problem and you solve it on the spot, you're reinforcing a pattern. You're teaching them that their job is to find problems and your job is to fix them. After years of this, they've learned their role perfectly. Identify the issue, call the boss, wait for the answer.

This isn't a people problem. This is a training problem.

Your managers are great at executing work. Put them on a job and they'll get it done. But executing and leading are completely different. Nobody ever taught them how to work through a problem systematically. How to step back, look at options, weigh tradeoffs, and make a call. How to know when something is theirs to handle versus when it actually needs to come to you.

So they default to the safest move. Escalate everything.

The handful of companies that broke out of this pattern recognized something important. Building leadership capability isn't the same as building projects. It requires a different kind of expertise. It takes dedicated time and focus to install the systems that develop decision-making in managers. And most construction companies are too busy running the business to build this while simultaneously executing fifty million in work.

So they treated it like what it is. A specialized project that needs proper attention and expertise to get built right. They committed real time and resources to installing the frameworks, training their people, and coaching new behaviors until those behaviors became how the company operates.

Most contractors never do this. They assume their managers should naturally figure out leadership on their own. Or they think they can squeeze in building these systems between everything else they're managing. So they stay stuck in firefighting mode for years, wondering why their capable people never step up.

Here's what actually has to get built if you want to change this pattern.

Your managers need clarity on what decisions are theirs versus what requires your approval. Not vague guidance. Specific clarity based on dollar amounts, risk levels, and scope. When your PM gets that call about the concrete delay, he should instantly know if that's his call or yours. When your supervisor has a coordination conflict, he should know his authority without asking. When your ops manager sees a budget problem, he should know when to handle it and when to escalate.

Right now that clarity doesn't exist anywhere in your company. So everything feels safer to escalate.

Your managers also need training on how to think through problems before bringing them to you. This is a learnable skill. Stop and assess what's happening. Identify two or three ways to handle it. Think through what each option costs in time, money, and risk. Make a recommendation. Then check your authority and either make the call or bring your full analysis for approval.

Most of your managers have never been taught to think this way. They were taught to manage schedules and coordinate trades. Nobody showed them how to structure their thinking around decisions.

And you need accountability built into how your leadership team operates. A regular rhythm where they review what decisions they made, what they're committing to, and whether they're following through. Not another status update meeting. A real session where people present decisions, learn from each other, and hold each other accountable for taking ownership instead of escalating.

When these three pieces work together, something fundamental shifts. Your managers develop real judgment. They stop reflexively calling you. They start thinking through situations and making calls within their authority. When they do escalate something, they bring analysis and recommendations instead of raw problems.

You transition from solving everything to coaching decision-making. Your managers transition from waiting for direction to leading independently. The people below them see a different model they can learn from.

This is how companies scale beyond the owner. Not by working harder. By systematically building decision-making capability in the people they already have.

The companies that figured this out treated leadership development like the critical infrastructure project it is. They gave it the time, focus, and commitment required to build it properly. Because they understood this is the foundation that enables everything else they want to accomplish.

THE CLOSING:

If you're spending your days firefighting instead of actually leading your company, if you're a COO or VP stuck in the weeds when you should be thinking strategically, the answer isn't working longer hours. It's not hiring more people. It's not hoping your team magically figures out how to think differently.

It's building the system that changes how your entire organization makes decisions.

Gerard Aliberti
Pro-Accel, Owner

If this is your reality, I can help. I've developed a twelve-week system that installs the decision frameworks and accountability structures that shift your team from bringing problems to bringing solutions. Email jerry@pro-accel.com and tell me what your last firefighting day looked like.

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