Introducing Scientific Management Methods Into My Practice

Speaker A Good friend of mine had been a member of Tech for several years and suggested to me that I might want to give that as a consideration as a form by which I could broaden my experience and also get the camaraderie and the consultation from the other Tech members and from the Tech organization on the operations of my business. So I believe I joined Tech in November, December of 1995. That in itself was a very smart, strategic move on my part. It certainly broadened my horizons. Rather than dealing in a single industry, I was able to take a look at how other industries were handling similar parallel problems to what we had. The issue of volume of business and the downturn in construction was not a long lasting one. We've had a good economic environment to work in up until the present day. One of the first resources that Tech brought to me was the eight times a year outside resource that would come in and speak to us on various subjects. One of the first of those was a gentleman by the name of Rod Bartel who had a consulting business in State College, Pennsylvania. His business does both behavioral training and organizational. Behavioral training also was doing at that time assessments of individuals for both capability and for their working behaviors. I found that fascinating. It's the first time I'd ever been exposed to soft tissue training and immediately I set about to place 24 25 of my employees, foreman, superintendents, office, staff, tried to mix it up a little bit and we all went through the assessment process. As always, I was looking for some means that I could improve the operations of our business. And at that time, frankly, as I recall now, what I was looking for was how to hire the correct foreman based upon a pre employment assessment. And I reached an utter disappointment because we had personality styles across the board, we had management styles across the board, we had people foreman working for me that had relatively short time horizons and we had those that were very long term time horizons to deal with. And it turned out, interestingly enough that there weren't only two common threads to the people working for me at that level of management and they had nothing to do with not an awful lot to do with intelligence or behavioral styles. In any event, I was working with Rod Bartel, become somewhat enamored of that and found some very practical experiences in using the pre employment assessments within the business. And we did not just do those for upper management personnel, we were taking them to the foreman level when we had opportunities to employ new people. One of the results of working with Bartel, and this was pre Jack's Still, was that taking advantage of the self assessment, what I had previously thought perhaps were faults in my character or inabilities. I started taking a look at as to how to turn those into strengths. Certainly one of the ways of dealing with that was to take away certain roles from myself and place them with people who were better capable of handling them. I'm not the most reliable person with regards to management of my own time. I was very effective in a certain role within the business. But as it grew I found simply that I had to learn to delegate and that was a simple thing to do in the end, at least up to a point which we'll talk about in a while. 1997 had the opportunity for the first time to hear Jerry Harvey speak at a joint meeting of our tech groups in York, Pennsylvania. Jerry's a fascinating speaker. He made his presentation on I think it was called The Abilene Paradox which itself is a nice little piece of learning that I think we've all experienced how that can happen, particularly within a business structure. Jerry also introduced at that time Elliot Jacks. In brief and in terms of time span of discretion. We were looking taking a look at the charting of that, the growth of individuals and different stratum over their lifespans and that was quite fascinating to me. One of our members of our group, Art Mann had already been a student of Jack's and we began to have discussions both inside and outside of the tech environment. Over the course of the ensuing years many of Jack's books became topics of discussion both as reading assignments and in other resources that we had present to our groups. We had Herb Koplowitz there, who also was there to talk about the assessment process, how to determine whether or not an individual had the time horizon current potential to fulfill a particular role within the business and also began to take a look at the definition of those roles. So I became a student of Jack's theory, not in practice for quite some time for a period of four or five years where I tried to absorb as best I could the theory of his works.