When your shop grows to a point that you have left the truck and assume a superintendent’s position, your perspective changes: if you have a good grasp of the trade, as well as your workforce, you can begin to grow into that role in a good way. Learning how to manage your people becomes as important as getting the work done. Doing it right means you have the time necessary to do your job and keep your people doing theirs. With your eye on productivity and the bottom line, managing your workforce can either be a freeing experience or it can be a nightmare. It all depends on how you do it.
The first rule is never forget who you are. You are the boss! You make the decisions that will make or break your company. Listening to your field personnel on matters of productivity, material ordering and so forth is a good thing, but making the final decisions is your thing, and when it comes right down to it, you make the tough calls and stand by the results … good or bad.
Once you have assumed the mantle of field superintendent, you must constantly evaluate your workforce. All journeymen are not created equal — not every journeyman has the same skill set or ability. This is a fact, not a value judgment. Everyone on the payroll has strong and weak points. The field superintendent, if he is effective, must be able to position the best people for each job and constantly revise his crews according to the work required. Part of the decision making here is to know your people and their levels of tradecraft, reliability and knowledge.
Example No. 1: The project is a commercial, single story strip mall with 20 back-to-back two-piece bathrooms (a lavatory and a water closet in each, cold water only, one floor drain with a trap primer), ten roof drain/overflows and condensate drains. The project requires only two men — a journeyman and an apprentice.
Example No. 2: The project is a multi-story (say five stories for the sake of this example) medical office building with core restrooms (four wall-hung, electronic flush valve water closets, four electronically operated lavatories, two electronically operated urinals, floor drains and trap primers in each) and bar sinks in kitchenettes in each suite. There are roof/overflow drains, condensate drains, medical gases (to only some suites) and a small restaurant with a medium sized commercial kitchen on the ground floor. The project requires six men — a foreman, three journeymen and two apprentices.
The field superintendent has to man each of these projects. At first, it might seem that the least experienced men might be assigned to the strip mall and the most experienced to the medical office building, and some supervisors might do that. Think about that for a minute; the two projects are polar opposites in complexity, both from a technical and a logistical perspective, so let us factor in the field superintendent’s time and efforts at this juncture.
Based upon these examples, let us assume that the company has eight employees and the field superintendent is the owner, making it a total of nine people in the field. If the super puts his least experienced guys on the strip mall, he opens himself up to a heavier workload. Why? The chances are very good that the least experienced journeyman may know how to do the actual work, but not how to run the job, or his apprentice, to his best advantage. That means the superintendent (you, the boss) is going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time babysitting the project. Leaving an inexperienced guy to run a project, as described, is a recipe for disaster. Doing the work is easy, but scheduling, ordering materials, planning for subcontractors (backhoe, saw cutting, insulation, etc.) is a bear. That is where you will lose your profit. That is where you will spend a huge amount of your work day trying to make sure you don’t.
It would be better to man the small project with one of your more experienced journeymen and your greenest apprentice. Putting a known quantity (experienced journeyman) in charge of the project and pairing him with your least experienced apprentice accomplishes two things. First, it means that the superintendent (you) can spend less time managing the job because, presumably, the guy you have working it is competent and you know he knows what he is doing on all levels. Second, because the job is basic, it gives the green apprentice the opportunity to gain experience at a level upon which he can build moving forward. Basic is good. Complicated can come later as far as apprentices are concerned.
More important, the superintendent can spend more of his time in a productive mode, keeping his eye more focused on the big project with only minimal input on the small one. The less experienced journeyman, now on the larger job, also has the opportunity to expand his trade skills while in the company of more experienced guys, which is a win for everyone concerned.
The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born author is a retired third generation master plumber. He founded Sunflower Plumbing & Heating in Shirley, N.Y., in 1975 and A Professional Commercial Plumbing Inc. in Phoenix in 1980. He holds residential, commercial, industrial and solar plumbing licenses and is certified in welding, clean rooms, polypropylene gas fusion and medical gas piping. He can be reached at [email protected].