Leaders Carry the Weather
Every jobsite has it’s own weather system, yet many of us don’t even realize it. The superintendent shows up hot. The PM who walks in steady. Either can bring the storm, or bring the calm.
So while construction spends a fortune forecasting rain delays, we totally misses forecasting the storm we bring in ourselves.
That’s where Eli Embleton comes in, a man with the unique ability to stay calm under the most extreme pressures. He uses that power to help others move beyond survival mode and into connection.
But in order to do so, he first had to learn to do it for himself.
Toughness is a Material. Resilience is a Structure.
If you’ve been around construction long enough, you’ve learned a tough lesson you’ll ultimately carry for life: even the strongest steel in the world still fails. Not because it's weak, but because of fatigue.
Stephanie Lemek has learned the exact same lesson. Only to her, we’re talking about something much more important than steel.
We’re talking about our teams in the field.
Invisible PPE: The Human Under the Hat
We've spent fifty years getting really good at protecting construction workers.
Better gloves, glasses, hard hats and boots. Better harnesses, vests and signage. Even better toolbox talks, incident reporting and stand-downs. We have stacked layer upon layer of PPE and processes in an effort to eliminate the ways someone can get hurt on a job site.
And yet construction loses five times more people to one particular cause than any other physical fatalities.
Suicide.
So either we're protecting the wrong thing, or we're simply pretending that physical PPE is enough.
The Hardest Problems in Construction Have Nothing to Do with Tech
Many times, when something is wrong, we notice right away. Other times, it may take a friend pointing it out. But every so often, the most important lesson comes from a wakeup call. Literally.
That’s how it all started for Ian Gray, a long-time construction advisor and co-host of the Salty & Wired podcast. And while his first instinct was that he “must be the weird one,” he soon realized that the construction industry's hardest problems weren't living inside a process flow diagram or an RFI.
They were living inside the people building the projects.
Construction’s Mental Health Crisis Isn’t What You Think
We've all seen it.
The veteran foreman who just doesn't show up on Tuesday. No call. No text. Gone. The superintendent whose work suddenly goes to hell after 15 years of rock-solid performance. The crew lead who starts showing up late, snapping at questions, making rookie mistakes.
Everyone whispers, "What's wrong with them?"
Wrong question.
