Showing Up Matters: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Increase Performance on the Job

By DAVID SIMS

It was the middle of summer on the Gulf Coast. The plant and its workers were at a standstill, thanks to malfunctioning equipment.

Stifling doesn’t begin to describe the heat inside the airless plant, where the scorching sun outside was matched by the steaming equipment inside. The men on shift waited, restless and sweating, while the maintenance workers labored to get things moving again.

As the delay dragged on, their site leader appeared on the floor with a cooler of bottled water. They watched as he made his way through the area, handing out bottles one at a time and stopping to talk with the men working. They weren’t surprised. He was as much a fixture on the site as they were and made a point to know them by name.

That’s the story we were told by the wife of one of the workers when we asked what it was about that location that kept him there. She told us about that day and simply said, “They’d do anything for that man.”

That plant was one of two facilities under the same corporate umbrella, practically identical in operations and size. But one plant consistently ranked high in employee satisfaction, especially on questions about trust in leadership and feeling supported on the job. The other struggled. The difference?

Leadership.

Stories like that say a lot about what good leadership looks like in the real world. Leadership doesn’t happen in air-conditioned conference rooms. It happens on hot jobsites, under changing conditions, from before dawn til long after most of the world has gone home. Leaders are expected to keep the work moving, solve problems on the fly and make sure everyone goes home safely.

Most leaders in construction are put into those roles because they’re skilled, experienced and dependable. What often gets less attention is that technical skill and leadership skill aren’t the same thing. Most supervisors are never given the tools to make that transition successfully.

We wouldn’t hand a worker a pile of nails but no hammer and expect great results. Without the right tools, even the most capable person will struggle. It’s not that leaders don’t care; it’s that no one has given them a working understanding of how their day-to-day interactions shape their crew’s performance.

Research has consistently shown that supervisors have an enormous influence over team performance. Studies from Gallup found that the direct supervisor is one of the strongest factors in whether employees feel committed to their work, perform at a high level and stay with an organization. In industries like construction – where so much depends on decisions made in the field – that influence becomes even more important. No procedure can cover every situation, and no leader can watch every task. Workers decide every day whether to take a shortcut or not, to speak up about a problem or stay silent, to go the extra mile or throw in the towel.

What leaders notice, respond to and reinforce becomes the culture of the jobsite. In most cases, the only thing that gets attention is outputs – finishing a job early, hitting quotas and staying on schedule. But if leaders only focus on output, they miss that the inputs – the detours, shortcuts and risky choices – are leading the team to disaster. Every response (or lack thereof) from leadership becomes your company’s culture.

We’ve seen how it plays out in organizations where leaders recognize the daily effort behind results. One former client received a national safety award and was invited to Washington, D.C. to accept it at a formal ceremony attended by elected officials and industry leaders. Instead of bringing another executive, the CEO brought along one of his plant’s janitors. He even bought him a suit and made sure he stood beside him to accept the award.

This was the same CEO who regularly walked the plant floor late at night to thank employees for their work. When a night-shift employee was selected for the safety committee, the CEO arranged for the worker’s wife and children to be there to see him accept the nomination. It was late, and the kids were already in pajamas, but you can bet that’s a moment the family never forgot.

In each of these moments, the focus was on recognizing the behaviors that lead to success. That simple practice sends a powerful message: your work matters, and your supervisor sees you. That’s what makes employees more willing to speak up, follow standards and look out for one another.

If we can give leaders tools to notice what goes right, give positive feedback and recognize effort as well as results, we can create more workers who would proudly say, “We’d follow that man anywhere.”

David Sims is vice president at The Bill Sims Company, Inc.