Strength and Numbers

Jody Kenote took up framing at the age of 14, sharpened his carpentry skills in vo-tech school, and worked for a handful of companies before joining DG Liu Contractor, Dickerson, Md., in 1997. He was 31 and “a framing Yoda,” says his boss Jerry Liu (at left in photo), who quickly promoted him to lead carpenter.

Photo Credit: Photo: Max Hirshfeld

A little over a year later, Kenote (at right in photo) quit and uprooted his family to Florida. “I didn't like the way it was” at DG Liu, he says. The problem wasn't so much the variety of carpentry jobs, including drywall, trim, and cabinets, as it was all the managing that the position entailed: crews, subcontractors, deliveries, paperwork, homeowners. “You spend all your time on the phone; it's next to impossible to be efficient,” Kenote says. Besides, he adds, “my favorite thing to do is frame.”

Liu wasn't surprised. He recalls Kenote as “an excellent carpenter, but really miserable managing,” as were his other lead carpenters. “We were having chronic gross profit slippage, and we would hear again and again that the lead carpenters were getting frustrated that they were spending so much of their time not practicing their trade but having to deal with management issues.”

A year or so later, Kenote returned to Maryland and did some subcontracting for DG Liu. “We framed a house in record time,” Kenote recalls, and the two agreed to meet for dinner. Getting right to the point, Liu asked what Kenote really wanted to do — what it would take for him to rejoin the company. “I said, basically, framing,” Kenote recalls. His former boss not only gave it a go, but he proposed abandoning the lead carpenter system in favor of specialty crews. Kenote would head the framing crew.

Today, Kenote frames all day; most of his former management responsibilities are absorbed by production managers. Two other men run the trim and siding crews. “It's a different world for the crew leaders,” Liu says. “They're getting more work done and more satisfaction,” and the company is more profitable. Revenue hit $4 million in 2005, Liu says, and should break $5 million this year. In January, he handed out more than $35,000 in bonuses in his first-ever profit-sharing program for production and office staff.

Liu's experience sheds light on some fundamental questions that are often overlooked in the nail-banging, numbers-meeting business of remodeling: How well do you really know your employees? How deeply do you scratch beneath the surface of their prior experience to understand their real strengths and aptitudes, and how —not just where — they'll fit into your company?

The answers are the building blocks of a business philosophy we'll call strength management. It espouses hiring and promoting people based on their inherent talents and inclinations, and giving them every opportunity to understand their role within the greater organization. According to this approach, you can't change who people are, but you can capitalize on their strong suits.

Photo Credit: Photo: Kevin O. Mooney

In Liu's experience, the shift to specialty crews evolved out of Kenote's talents and “our growing realization that the lead carpenter system had inherent productivity limitations on larger jobs.” Subcontracting was not the answer, Liu says, “so basically, we decided to let carpenters do what they do best and not conform them to job management behaviors that were not natural for them.”

When the fit isn't obvious, Liu uses the DISC “personal assessment” system. (DISC stands for dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness, and indicates how individuals connect with others, make decisions, deal with change, and more.)

Liu describes DISC as both “unerringly accurate” and full of surprises. For instance, the assessments revealed that three other former lead carpenters were natural salespeople, positions that Liu had struggled to fill in the past. “We had gone through a couple of outside hires for sales — so-called salespeople,” he says. “But the only thing they sold was me.” By contrast, the former leads have thrived. One, Dale Kramer, sold $1.8 million worth of work in 2005.

This wouldn't surprise Joe Zanola, a consultant with many remodeling clients. The principles of strength management, he says, “interrupt a convention” within the remodeling industry of “basing our hiring on people's past experience without ever considering if they were fit for the position.” Then three to six months later, he says, “we're wondering why they aren't working out.”

Zanola says that programs such as DISC are invaluable for revealing not only whether candidates are the right fit for an organization, but also how they can best contribute and what they need from their employer to meet their potential.

One Zanola client is Mosby Building Arts, a $6.6 million design/build company in St. Louis. “We know what we're looking for, and when we find talented people, we find a place for them,” says president Scott Mosby (at right in photo). “We build systems around their personality sets so they spend more time doing what they enjoy in positions where they have the best chance of success.”

For instance, Mosby observed production manager Rich Layton (at left in photo) “doing a lot of selling” in his interactions with clients, and, in fact, Layton's DISC assessment revealed him to be a natural salesman and entrepreneur. On the job, moreover, Layton had proven himself to be “incredibly well-versed in building technology,” Mosby says.

With those strengths in mind, the men identified a need that Mosby Building Arts hadn't been able to meet: jobs smaller than the company's typical design/build projects but large enough to keep field staff busy between larger projects. “We would refer these jobs out because they didn't balance with design/build,” Layton recalls. When it became clear that these referrals were worth more than $500,000 a year, the company established a new division called Total Home and appointed Layton its general manager and sales manager.

Total Home capitalizes on all of Layton's strengths, from his understanding of construction methods and costs and the design/build process to his natural instinct for connecting with people. The ramp-up wasn't instant; Layton says he had quite a bit of sales training before getting the division off the ground. But the fit was there, and Total Home now brings in about $1 million in new revenue to Mosby Building Arts, through jobs costing between roughly $7,000 and $75,000.

Strength is a team thing; the most successful companies consist not of isolated talents but of talented individuals who understand how to work with and learn from one another. Zanola encourages clients to make every employee's personal assessment available for all to see, and for individuals to physically “highlight those things that are important to them.”

At Carnemark Systems + Design, a high-end design/build firm in Bethesda, Md., “we DISC everyone and have team discussions about the assessments,” president Jonas Carnemark says. This understanding creates a real sense of camaraderie and helps mitigate misunderstandings that might arise if one person is less expressive or goal-oriented than another, for instance. “We follow the platinum rule,” Carnemark says. “Treat others as they want to be treated, not as you want to be treated.”

Another tool that Carnemark uses to practice strength management happens to be one of Zanola's favorite business books. First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, is based on surveys by The Gallup Organization of more than 80,000 managers in a wide variety of organizations. Rules underscores the responsibility of managers to hire for talent and fit, and to do everything they can to make their employees successful.

Rules (which was followed by Now, Discover Your Strengths) argues that the strength of a workplace can be measured by employees' responses to 12 fundamental questions. Carnemark finds three especially useful:

• Do I know what is expected of me at work?
• Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work correctly?
• Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

Asking these questions on a regular basis really opens up communications with employees and helps solve virtually any problem involving employee performance or behavior, according to Carnemark. “Most excuses with poor performance are, ‘I didn't know I could do that,' or ‘I didn't know you cared.'”

Clay Nelson is amazed that more companies don't consider such basic needs. A management consultant with many remodeling clients, he identifies “full and complete communication” as the key to organizational strength and immediate supervisors as the linchpins to employees' success. “If you delegate something to someone, you're still responsible for it,” Nelson says. “Check in with them, make sure they're doing OK, ask, ‘Have I overwhelmed you?' ‘Do you need anything?' ‘Should we sit down and talk?'”

Jim Sasko intuitively understands the principles of strength management. Sasko is president of Teakwood Builders, a design/build company specializing in historic homes in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He created the position of production coordinator expressly for Chris Levitas, whom he had hired as an “overqualified” lead carpenter with a background in architecture and with strong managerial, analytical, and communications skills.

“If Jim is the general manager of the team, I'm the coach,” Levitas explains. “I help leads accomplish their goals, and I sometimes act as devil's advocate — give them direction when they need it, train them to overcome deficiencies, point out their positives and negatives, basically help them improve.”

In that regard, Levitas realized that although Teakwood's six lead carpenters received all kinds of documentation — budgets, plans, specifications — they didn't necessarily know what to do with it. They had Microsoft Project on their computers, but nobody was using it. (Levitas remedied this situation through basic training.) The leads were e-mailed job-cost reports, but they didn't really look at them. “I showed them how to read the reports and how to forecast costs,” he says, and how to understand actual labor burdens in order to manage, for instance, a $1,000 budget for interior trim.

Like other strength managers, Levitas plays up his lead carpenters' strengths. One who is extremely efficient but not as detail-oriented as some others, for example, isn't likely to get that pristine Queen Anne needing intricate millwork repairs. And he relieves his leads of tasks that used to bog them down, such as scheduling.

“People would say ‘There's a Teakwood way,' but nobody knew what it was,” says Levitas of the company he joined three years ago. By comparison, he says, “today everyone understands that we do nice work and we're here to make money, and there's something in it for them if we do.”

“Maybe I'm overlooking some of the strengths people have,” says Sasko, who is considering adopting strength management more formally. Perhaps it's something more remodelers should consider.