Overcoming Setbacks
There may have been “the perfect construction job” somewhere at some point in time, but many – shall we say most? – construction projects provide a surprise or two along the way. Setbacks are a fact of life in the industry. That being the case, what do you do when faced with a setback on a job site, in your business itself, or at home?
Please tune in this week as Dennis provides guidance on the two aspects of good problem handling: Situational and Personal Makeup. He offers four tips on the former and three more on the latter. What has worked successfully for you? How do you coach your people to deal with the occasional setback? Please share with us in the comments.
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Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht, Family Business Institute Digging Deeper.
Today, I want to talk about overcoming setbacks. And of course, in the construction industry, whether it's a job that's not
going perfectly or a job that we didn't win or a personnel matter or something like that, we have setbacks pretty regularly.
Things that either distract us or keep us from achieving our goals or keeping us online to achieve our goals. So, overcoming
setbacks and thinking about that, there are really two aspects of it. One is the situation itself. What are you going to do
about the situation to get yourself back on the rails and going in the right direction? And the other aspect of that goes to
your personal makeup. How capable are you of handling setbacks and making sure that you keep yourself, keep your head
to be able to overcome setbacks as you go through life and as you go through work?
So, on the situational side, pretty simple. If something is going wrong and you have a setback, it's very important to
recognize it. Recognize it early, because the longer it goes on, probably the deeper the setback might become. Have some
analyses, figure out, well, okay, what went wrong and why? And in many cases, we may treat symptoms instead of the
root cause. So, you really, in your analysis, want to get to the root cause if you want to overcome a situation. And then
next, you need a strategy. Once you know what's happened, what's the strategy to either fix that situation or get yourself
back online towards your goals?
And then finally, it may not be a one-time situation. It may be that you have a problem with the whole system, and you
may need to fix the system. So, as you think about that, a situation arises, it's a setback. Make sure that, again, you're
doing the root analysis so that if it's a situation where your system isn't strong enough,so you keep having these problems,
maybe you need to fix the system itself to make sure or fix adherence to the system itself to make sure that people are
following the correct processes. Because with bad process, of course, you'll have more setbacks and more situations to
resolve.
Now, on the personal makeup side, I think the primary thing you can do in overcoming setbacks is keep a good long-term
view. Keep in mind your overall vision, your overall purpose, and your overall goals that you're headed toward. Because
if you keep those in mind, it's a lot easier not to get caught up in a negative cycle where a setback leads to another setback
or leads to a reactionary solution that doesn't work. Those sorts of things. If you keep the long-term in view, the setbacks
will be just that. There'll be just little bumps in the road along the way, and there are always going to be bumps in the
road. So, you can't let them divert you from your vision and your purpose.
And then part of the personal makeup, again, is who you surround yourself with, your team, and how do you use your
team? How do you get information in to help you? Because you shouldn't be doing this alone. You shouldn't be overcoming
setbacks. You should be trying to get all the information you can from all the people who can contribute to that. And
coming up with a decision that reflects a better set of information coming back and hopefully some teamwork that comes
back.
And in overcoming setbacks, you also have to remember in most situations, you can't get there alone. You've got to
motivate a team to overcome that setback and get back on the horse and ride in the right direction as well. So, I quoted
Ziad Abdelnour a couple of weeks ago, and he had a couple of great quotes, again, for overcoming setbacks as well and
for motivating your team. One of them was that "Successful entrepreneurs know when to drive an idea forward and when
to wait and listen to constructive criticism." And I think that's important. Sometimes when we have a situation, we just
want to mush forward and march forward, but maybe, again, there are some flaws and a flaw to the system that needs
to be fixed so that you don't just repeat the same mistake or go down the wrong road instead of really heading towards
your vision and your purpose.
The other quote from Ziad was, "You must be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you need help
and brave enough to ask for it." And I thought that was really powerful because sometimes you do have to stand alone
because you have naysayers, and you have folks that may be holding you back. But I know in my own life, very often I
haven't been smart enough to know when I needed help and to ask for it. And then being brave enough too, because
sometimes we let our ego take over and we think that we shouldn't need help, or we shouldn't have to ask somebody.
But it really does take bravery to sometimes say, I don't know, I don't know the solution. And to get help and then get
yourself on the right road.
So, setbacks are going to happen to all of us. Really make sure you get a good strategy to overcome them and make sure
as a leader you are built to overcome setbacks and have the courage to get there.
Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.
