Real Estate and Construction
Leadership blueprint
How Mark House uses trust and communication to build The Beck Group’s Florida Division
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Tampa Bay | January 2008
When Mark House is sitting down with new hires, he gives them
a one-page leadership philosophy that clearly states his core
beliefs and his expectations. The managing director of the The
Beck Group’s Florida Division views the paper as a contract that
establishes certain expectations upfront for both himself and the
person being hired.
“It puts a lot out there on the line saying, ‘Here is what you can
expect from me. It’s in writing, and I want you to hold me to it
because I’m going to hold you to it. This is what I am about and this
is what I expect from you,’” he says.
House has used his open and honest leadership style to move his
way up the ranks of The Beck Group, where he started in 1989 as
a senior project manager responsible for integrated services —
which encompasses architecture, real estate and construction.
Now, as head of the Florida Division, he is responsible for more
than 100 employees and about $170 million in 2006 revenue.
While a leader faces many challenges, House says his three
biggest obstacles are finding and retaining the right people, communicating his message, and then making sure everyone in the
organization understands it.
Here’s how House faces those challenges and is taking his division into the future.
Finding the right people
In today’s environment, House says he wants somebody who is
very flexible, open-minded and creative, and someone who doesn’t rely on what he or she did in the past to succeed.
“What we don’t need is to have somebody say, ‘Well, we’ve
always done it this way,’ or, ‘I’ve done it back at such-and-such a
place,’ because ... the technology is changing so fast, the construction techniques are changing fast, and the population of our experienced workers is reducing very quickly,” he says. “This baby-boom generation is retiring and the X and Y generations behind it
are much smaller populations. So, therefore, we have much less
people to do more work with. So, you have to be open-minded, and
you can’t do things like you did in the past.”
In order to find the right person for a management position, asking the right questions can give insight in regards to how somebody will fit in to an organization and how he or she may handle
situations.
“If we are looking for a management-type person, we are going
to start asking questions like, ‘What is your biggest challenge you
found in a management role?’ or, ‘Explain to me how you are going
to deal with a confrontational employee,’” he says.
House and his direct reports will also put together a scenario and
ask how that person would handle the situation.
They may ask, “You’ve got to build a large retail center and your
supply of granite tile is coming in and it’s held up in customs. What
are you going to do? What steps are you going to take? You have
an opening date, it’s a drop-dead date, and it doesn’t look like you
are going to be able to finish with the materials specified. How are
you going to handle that?”
“Put them in a position where they have to think on their feet,”
House says. “There may not be any right or wrong answer. We are
just looking at how they are going to react and coming up with
some solutions.”
House says he and his team may talk to a potential employee
multiple times but in a number of different ways.
“We bounce people around pretty well, and we tell them right
away that we have an unconventional hiring technique,” he says.
House tells them, “You are going to talk to three or four people. It
may go dark for a week. We may not talk to you for a week, but it’s not
because we don’t want to talk to you. It’s because something else has
come up that we need to jump on it right away because we don’t have
a formal hiring person.”
House says having a hiring process that is a little different helps
him find the right person for the job.
“The classic HR way is, you go through somebody’s resume, and
you look at somebody’s resume and check off a bunch of boxes,”
he says. “This way, you are being more creative. You’ve got some
things on a resume, but what you are doing is — I am looking for
more people skills, soft skills, you can’t necessarily see on a
resume. In this particular environment, we’ve got to have some
leaders out there that have some soft skills, rather than people that
are engineers that just have analytical skills because we have to do
some things a little differently.”
Once House has his direct reports in place, he needs to trust
them, especially with the people they are going to hire.
House says he will generally meet a person being hired by a
direct report, but won’t spend too much time with him or her.
“My direct reports, I have to entrust in them, and if I don’t trust
them, then you are not sending a clear message to them that,
‘Look, I trust you; I believe you are going to hire the best possible
person,’” he says. “If I intervene in there, then I don’t need that person. The person that works for me needs to know they have my
undying trust and support. The person they’re hiring is going to
work for them so they need to have the most influence.”
Though employees will make a mistake, it’s important to continue to trust them. House recalls a situation when a senior-level manager was working on a small project that was easy for the manager. Everyone made the assumption the manager could handle it
and didn’t check on the situation. The manager went to House
eventually, but the problem was bigger than they originally
thought. House says it was a valuable lesson for the manager, and
the experience made him a better builder.
House says developing that trust is done through actions and
time, which show that if a mistake is made, it’s not the end of the
world.
“Desperate people do desperate things,” he says. “If you put people in that kind of position to know that there is no room for failure, then they’ll do something that may not be in the best interest
of the company or themselves. We want everyone to feel, ‘Hey,
things go wrong, let’s figure out what went wrong and how we can
prevent it again, and lets react to it so we can make it better as
quick as possible.’”
Communicating your vision
Finding the right people is just the starting point. Once you have
them in place, you have to communicate through as many different means as possible to get a message across so that everyone is
working toward common goals.
“You’ve got to communicate very well to your direct reports, your
managers and say, ‘Here is the big idea, guys,’ and ask them to push
that down through their chain,” House says. “Then, what you are
doing is following behind them and hitting different points in the
chain and saying, ‘Hey, did you get the word? This is what our idea
is.’”
House then follows up with e-mail, which he calls a necessary
evil, to get a point across, though he would much rather use “face
mail” by getting out and talking to people face to face.
When talking directly to someone, House likes to ask people
what they think and hear what the message is in their words, but
he tries to approach the person in a natural fashion. He says to do
that, you need to establish from the beginning that you have an
open-door policy and talk to people on a regular basis.
“If I am giving an official communication or asking somebody to
do something, I’ll go through their manager, but I don’t hesitate to
go to somebody and say, ‘Hey, how are you doing? What is going
on? Tell me about your family,’” he says. “It’s not an unusual thing
that I go talk to people because that is part of my job to continually talk to people.
“It should be part of the normal conversation. I’m talking about,
‘How’s your kid doing in baseball?’ to, ‘What do you think about
what we are doing here?’ or, ‘Did you see this the other day on the
Web site?’ or, ‘What do you think about this new policy we’ve got
about safety?’”
Finally, at every opportunity you have, you need to communicate
the message to make sure everyone is hearing it consistently.
“If it’s a meeting of only 10 people, a staff meeting, or if it’s a meeting where we call our stakeholders meeting, you bring it up again,”
he says. “Then we have a monthly electronic newsletter we send
out, and we may put an article in the newsletter. I don’t think you
can undercommunicate.”
House also finds handwritten letters are a great way to communicate, not only to get a point across but as a way of acknowledging good work.
“If you really want to show somebody you care about them, then
write a handwritten letter or note to them about how you’re proud
of them,” he says. “In a couple of instances, I’ve written people’s
parents and said, ‘John’s been doing an outstanding job, we’ve just
promoted him, and I wanted you to know we’re proud of him and
you should be very proud of him.’”
Not only have handwritten letters served as a great communication tool, but it’s also aided in retention at the company, which has
a turnover rate of less than 5 percent, House says.
“Because if you’ve got a good, young, hot employee and they’re
tempted about going somewhere else, they more likely than not
will talk to their parents and that parent might say, ‘Are you out of
your mind? These guys care a lot about you. I’ve never had anybody write me a letter other than your third-grade teacher about
you and how much they care about you.’”
He also advises not to cause confusion by overloading workers
with too many ideas.
“You got to stick with one or two ideas and go there,” he says. “If
you’ve got the Gettysburg Address of all these different things, you
dilute what the main idea is.”
But, no matter how hard you try, someone isn’t going to understand the message. You then have to talk to the employee, not to
embarrass him or tell him that he’s wrong but to point him in the
right direction.
“You say, ‘Here is where we are really thinking about this,’ and
kind of try to reset it and reset their mind,” he says. “Then, you go
back to the manager and say, actually, you go up as high as you can
and say, ‘I think our message is getting twisted a little bit, and let’s
resend this message back down and communicate it back down
again.’”
HOW TO REACH: The Beck Group, Florida Division, (813) 282-3900 or www.beckgroup.com
