Leading vs. Reacting — A Hard Lesson from This Week

If you’ve ever felt like your day is hijacked by whatever pops up in front of you: email, phone calls, job site fires — you’re not alone. I found myself in that exact place recently.

And if I’m being real, it made me question: am I teaching leadership or just improving their reflexes?

In this episode of Profit Builder Unscripted, I share a breakthrough moment with my team that reminded me how powerful it can be to pause and look further out. You’ll hear how a simple tool — one I’ve been teaching contractors for years — made its way back into my own practice and immediately helped us refocus on what actually matters.

The biggest takeaway? A small shift in how you plan can completely change how your team performs.

Tune in to hear what we did, how it worked, and how you can use the same tool with your team — plus, I’m giving the tool to you for free, be sure to grab it in the resources section of this episode.

Two week look ahead:https://suiterbusinessbuilders.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01-Two-week-look-ahead-template.pdf

Resources:

• Want to increase your profitability? Grab my book “The Profit Bleed.“
• Looking to grow your construction business? Check out our exclusive group "The Contractors Collective.”
• Want employees to take more ownership? Check out our course - “Build Your Dream Team.”
• Are you struggling to hire the right people? Check out our “Contractors Hiring Blueprint” course.

Connect with Vicki on social media:

• YouTube: Vicki Suiter
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickisuiter
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuiterBusinessBuilders

If you love listening to this podcast, please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro & Transforming Team Ownership and Focus
• 3:57 Free two-week look ahead form

Transcript

If you find that your team and you maybe are focusing more on the urgent than the important, you really want to listen to this episode and make sure to follow through all the way to the end because I give you a resource that is for free that you can download that will really help you and your team stay in front of what's most important to be focusing on. Hi, I'm Vicki Suiter. Welcome back to the Profit Builder Unscripted.

This week, I had this amazing experience with my team that I just had to share with you. You know, one of the things that we've been talking about is how do you develop your team? How do you get people to take more ownership? And one of the ways that I talk to contractors all the time about how to help people stay in front of what's coming in front of them, how to help your team really be better organized about not just being in the moment about whatever the urgent thing is, but rather have them look up and look out and go, all right, what's in front of me? 

What is it that I have to do that is on the list of important things as opposed to urgent things? And, you know, I don't know about you, but I find myself sometimes that I really like, I get in front of my email and I'm just paying attention to whatever's there in the moment until I like look up and go, my gosh, like that wasn't really where I needed to be spending my time. And if we do it, you know, maybe you can relate to that, then how often does your team do it? They're on their phone or like they just show up at the job site and whatever that thing is right in front of them is what they're paying attention to. And one of the things that I have learned over the years in working with contractors is that when we can start to focus further out in front of us, when we can treat every day like you treat a project, whereas you don't start doing demolition or start trying to build something until you have a result that you're after. And if we can treat every day like that, that can be transformational in terms of our ability to be able to be effective and be productive and it can really help our teams be more successful. And this week, Dortha on my team, we've been kind of going back and forth about, we being really efficient with our time and are we being effective?

And she actually proposed to me the thing that I have a form and a process for with the contractors we work with, which is a two-week look ahead. And that a two-week look ahead has you look out and look at the critical items that are in front of you that need to be addressed. And so as a contractor, that might be what labor needs do you have? What materials need to be ordered? What subcontractors need to be scheduled? What inspections need to happen?

Like looking up and looking out and having your form under your project manager, look out and go, okay, what has to happen in the next two weeks? And doing that every single solitary week. Now, your ability to do that effectively usually requires that you also have a schedule. But if you have those things in place and you have a schedule in place and you know what needs to happen, then...

What you've done when you sit down once a week and look and do a two week look ahead out, you have the ability to be much more effective about making sure to focus on the important things as opposed to the urgent things. So I'm sharing down here below a link to the two week look ahead form that a lot of my clients use. There's instructions with it about how to use it. It includes an agenda. It includes a two week look ahead form and if you start using this, I guarantee you that you and your team will find that you are much more effective in getting things done in a timely manner according to the schedule, which is right key when you're in construction. All right, I hope you found this to be helpful. Thanks for being part of this community and for listening today, and I look forward to seeing you next time on the Profit Builder