Real Estate and Construction
Deal with it
How to empower your employees to handle things on their own
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Orange County | March 2008
Joe Troya
co-owner, Consolidated Contracting Services Inc.
When a situation arises
at a Consolidated
Contracting Services Inc. job site, Joe Troya doesn’t want his employees looking around for someone else
to find a solution.
“If my laborer’s answer is, ‘I
need to talk to my project manager or my superintendent,’ the
reaction my client is going to
have is, ‘This guy hasn’t been
empowered. He doesn’t know
what to do,’” says Troya, who
co-owns the company with
Tony Elias-Calles.
While a company’s leaders
have the highest visibility, it
is more often their employees with whom customers
and clients interact. And if
employees don’t know what
to do when questions come
up, it reflects back on you,
Troya says.
By following this philosophy, Troya led the general
contractor to 2006 revenue of
$45 million with about 60 employees.
Smart Business spoke with
Troya about how to get your
employees to put their best
foot forward.
Q. What’s the first step
toward empowering
employees?
Value their personal life.
Value that they are human
beings and that they have
kids, and they have soccer
games to go to, and they
have personal issues.
Select the team for each
project based on not only
their ability but the challenges that they are having.
You’re not going to take a
guy that lives in San Diego
that has three kids and a wife that works and have him go
to a project in Los Angeles
for the next two years.
You’re destroying the family life. Our personal lives are
more important.
What you get back is the
utmost loyalty. It has to be a
two-way process. They are
valued as human beings and
as people, and that loyalty is
reciprocated back to us.
You’ve gained that loyalty
when people come into this
office and they say, ‘I’ve got
to go to Mexico to
spend two weeks with
my mom because my
dad just passed away.’
You know what, that’s
fine. The rest of us
will pick up the
pieces. You go.
You can say you’re all
about your employees,
and then situations
come up and you’re
kind of evaluating,
‘Well, let’s see, if I give
him a day off and I’m
still paying him, how
much is that going to
cost me?’ Money is secondary.
Q. How do you build
bonds with your
employees?
My manager used to stand
at my door and say, ‘So, how
are you doing?’ I would say,
‘I’m doing good.’ He would
spend five minutes talking
to me, and then he would
walk away.
I like to know what’s going
on through their head. If I’m
going to ask a question, I’m
going to sit down and I’m
going to listen. I’m not going
to, as soon as they start
telling me a problem, say,
‘Let me get back to you on that.’ I like to listen.
We’re all guilty of trying to
do 10,000 things at the same
time. You have to force yourself to make that person priority one when they are in
front of you. I put my screen
down, I try to turn my phone
off or at least put it on
vibrate unless it’s a real, real
important phone call.
Q. How do you encourage
uncertain employees?
I do a lot of the business
development for our company.
Most of the project managers
or engineers are people that
roll up your sleeves and go to
work. They don’t feel real
comfortable with marketing and foo-foo stuff and meeting
with clients and having lunch
with the clients.
Some of them are intimidated by that. But if I’m by their
cubicle talking about that
kind of stuff and how I went
to lunch with Tom and we
had a great time and talked
about the kids and this and
that, they realize you can do
outreach to your clients and
you don’t have to be talking
business all the time.
You can just talk family. You
have kids; they have kids. You
like dirt biking, surfing, skiing, you can talk about a
thousand things. You don’t
even need to talk about business. You want to get to know
the person as a human being.
The mentoring may be a
subconscious mentoring.
You’re talking about how your
lunch was with so and so, and
they are listening to you, and
they say, ‘Wow, I could actually do this. It’s something I
don’t feel real comfortable
with, but if that’s what Joe did
and he’s successful at it,
maybe I could do it.’
Q. How can you earn an
employee’s trust?
If the guy is honest and
tells you, ‘I really don’t know
much about this,’ the first
thing I tend to do is put him
under my wing and say,
‘Come here, let me show you
how it’s done.’ You automatically open your heart, and
you take pride in that.
I tell my employees, ‘If you
don’t know something, don’t
pretend.’ You’ve got to put
your pride aside and open
yourself up to learning
things.
HOW TO REACH: Consolidated Contracting Services Inc., (949) 498-7500
or www.consolidatedcontracting.com
