Whether you’re developing a new subdivision or engineering a bridge for the city, breaking ground is not the first step for your projects. Your engineering team first surveys the location and assesses the ground to determine whether the site can even support construction.
Why? Because no matter how well-designed your structure or how capable your crew, building on a soft and unstable foundation will lead to cracks.
The same principle applies to executives in construction, but too many firms skip over this foundation in their hiring process. They focus on whether the candidates have industry experience or an understanding of project delivery, but they fail to vet the values, communication habits, and leadership instincts the new hire will bring to the organization.
You may think that those aspects of leadership don’t matter. But as any good commercial construction executive search firm will tell you, if your next hire’s soft skills don’t align with how your organization operates, your company is building on a weak foundation.
Understand Your Leadership Culture
You have a distinct working environment, whether or not you’ve talked about it. How your past leaders showed up under pressure, how you’ve handled conflict, which decisions you’ve rewarded, and which habits have stuck have shaped your organization’s culture. All kinds of cultures can work for your commercial construction firm, but you’ll have problems if you ignore your organization’s distinct shape during recruitment.
Each executive brings a unique leadership style to the company. One leader might have a strong coaching orientation, excel at building client relationships, and solve problems collaboratively. Another executive might drive results with decisive, top-down direction and efficient processes. Neither profile is wrong, but they can be wrong for your firm.
Hiring the right executive means matching their leadership style to your company’s culture. If a leader’s natural approach doesn’t align with what your organization needs from the executive in that role, friction starts on day one.
Recognize the Costs of Misalignment
In some industries, a new executive’s values or personality get filtered through layers of management, and the cracks develop over the years. But senior construction leaders communicate directly with field crews, trade partners, clients, and subcontractors about projects in real-time. New executives at construction firms don’t have anything to buffer their leadership style.
This pressure means the cracks appear quickly. Say your newly hired VP of Construction manages projects through strict reporting hierarchies rather than empowering project managers (PMs) to solve problems and manage deadlines as they have in the past. Your incoming executive could struggle to surface issues and lose credibility with their teams within a few weeks. And in a few more, that loss of trust can spread to subcontractors and trade partners, too.
A mismatched hire also immediately threatens your firm’s safety culture. Firms where anyone on a job site is empowered to flag an unsafe condition will see that culture erode when a new leader’s instincts run toward accountability through pressure. You may start seeing your people minimize problems to avoid getting in trouble (or getting someone else in trouble). When someone finally does report an issue, the problem may have grown from manageable to massive.
In as little as 90 days, you may be dealing with teams that are wary of your senior leadership, external contacts that don’t trust your new exec, and significant safety concerns that slow down projects and increase expenses. And it’s all because your new executive’s natural approach clashes with your company’s culture.
Evaluate the Candidate’s Fit
Values and personality fit might be soft skills, but they are essential to a successful leadership search in construction. That’s why leading executive search firms deliberately assess candidates’ fit within your organization through personal interviews, leadership evaluations, and reference checks.
Measure Leadership Tendencies
You want to surface leadership patterns before you hire your next executive. Predictive assessments, like TTI Success Insights, Predictive Index, and Kolbe Index, reveal candidates’ behavioral tendencies and motivators.
These evaluations are like the initial measurements of a site; they don’t tell you everything, but they provide a starting point for your deeper analysis of what’s underneath. You can see whether an executive is naturally wired to work within your company, explore how an unlikely candidate could adapt their leadership skills to succeed, and eliminate leaders that obviously won’t fit your organization.
Check the Candidate from Multiple Angles
It’s good to know what a previous supervisor says about a candidate. Checking with peers and subordinates can provide a more complete picture. If you’re working with a recruiter for construction firms, their connections to executives, board members, industry leaders, investors, and former clients can expand that process to an entire network.
Dig Beneath the Surface
Talking to an executive candidate is the clearest way to understand their fit, like digging deep into a site to study the soil and drainage patterns. Recruitment experts start this deep dive with informal interviews to get to know candidates, including their career goals, passions, values, leadership styles, and personalities. The leaders who seem right for your company and the role move forward to formal interviews.
The most revealing interview questions focus on process rather than results and reflect your company’s situation. Say you’re looking for a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to scale your construction company by 25%. You want them to do it without sacrificing your company culture and while building trust, mentorship, and collaboration. A CEO headhunter might provide interview questions like:
- How do you identify people with the potential to become project or operational leaders?
- How do you balance giving emerging leaders autonomy without setting them up to fail?
- What do you personally do to build the next generation of leaders?
- How do you prevent a company from becoming more top-down as it gets larger?
- What would you refuse to sacrifice to grow faster?
- What do you do when an emerging leader makes a mistake?
These personalized questions help you focus on alignment with your company’s needs. Listen to how the candidate talks about the people they led and their own process. Those answers say more about their leadership style and fit with your culture than charisma or accomplishments.
Start with Soft Skills for a Strong Foundation
You expect to see cracks in the drywall of a recently finished building as part of natural settling, just like you expect to see some friction when you hire a new leader. You often don’t know whether it’s a surface-level fix or a foundational problem for months or years, all while the consequences continue to compound. For both construction projects and leadership, an issue at that stage is very expensive to address.
For a stronger foundation, build soft skills into the evaluation criteria alongside technical qualifications. Survey candidates to see if they are the kind of leader who can support your current and future goals. Any new executive will need time to settle into your construction firm, but a leader who fits with your culture, mission, and values is a foundation you can count on.
