When you’re hiring a construction executive, clarity benefits both sides of the process. Candidates need a clear picture of what they could be stepping into, and your company needs to understand what its next leader should look like.
But in our years as an executive headhunter for commercial construction, we’ve noticed a troubling trend. The problem isn’t necessarily the talent pool. It’s that too many companies start hiring before they’ve clarified the role. This hurts the company and the applicants. Role clarity can make or break your executive search.
Where Construction Hiring Goes Wrong
No one starts their executive search intending to fail, but too many organizations just don’t think clearly about what they need in a new leader. So they dust off the job description from a prior hire and update a few bullet points before sending it to search partners.
These job descriptions typically list generic responsibilities, such as “oversees construction operations.” That kind of information gives candidates only the vaguest idea of what you expect of them. Without any distinguishing details about the role, you’re relying on the job title and compensation to attract candidates.
A cookie-cutter job posting also signals to candidates that something is off. If you don’t care enough to create a meaningful description, maybe you don’t care about the role or the executive who fills it. A fuzzy job description could even indicate that you don’t fully understand the position yourself, opening the door for confusion and conflicting expectations.
At the end of the day, an ambiguous job description usually attracts the wrong kinds of candidates. Talented leaders aren’t interested in working for an organization that seems disrespectful or disorganized. And the kind of candidates who are only focused on a job title probably aren’t the candidates you want. You could lose the opportunity to hire the right person simply by moving the executive search forward without any direction.
How to Clarify a Role
To hire the right kind of leader, you need to define the role at the beginning of your C-level executive search. Here’s what that involves.
Define Success Outcomes
Success outcomes are the most concrete signal of whether a hire is working. For a construction leader, those outcomes might be tied to on-time project delivery rates, cost performance, subcontractor management, or how effectively they build the team beneath them.
Define those outcomes by considering the problem your new executive needs to solve. If your projects consistently exceed cost projections, for example, you may want your construction leader to deliver Phase 1 on schedule and within 5% of the budget. This connection moves both your C-level team and your new hire beyond broad expectations to results you can measure.
A well-defined success outcome should also give your executives a goal and room to determine how to achieve it. Tell your new hire to decrease the number of change orders each quarter by improving cross-functional communication, but don’t spell out every step they should take. Talented executives want to bring their own expertise to a role to improve the organization, and clearly defined outcomes with room to lead are empowering, not suffocating.
Set Boundaries for the Role
Decision-making authority is complicated in C-level teams, but especially if your construction leader works with in-house engineering and architecture. Each of these teams depends on the others to bring a project together. Unclear boundaries for your leaders can create conflict when someone oversteps. If too much is piled on one executive, they could burn out. Or if no one knows who should do what, tasks can slip through the cracks.
From day one, your construction leader needs clear boundaries for their role. Define their decision-making authority by answering questions like:
- Who has final say on design changes that affect constructability?
- Who owns the conversation when schedule and scope conflict?
- Which design changes require other leaders to sign off before proceeding?
- Who owns the decision to adjust the scope versus request additional resources?
- Can the construction leader reallocate labor across projects without approval?
Your leaders need to know when to collaborate and when to act independently. And when a promising candidate asks questions about the role during an interview, your well-defined answers show them how they can expect to lead.
Create Leadership Profiles
The most talented executives bring their own personalities, experience, communication styles, and leadership skills to the table. Hiring the construction leader who can truly achieve success often comes down to discerning these small differences and determining which best align with your company’s needs. Leadership profiles help with this task.
To create a winning profile, start with experiences closely related to the problems at hand. If your company is scaling operations, look for executives who have built teams, standardized processes, or managed growth at a similar stage.
Next, define which leadership skills your construction executive needs in order to address those problems. When the goal is to stay under budget, a leader with financial acumen or strong operational discipline is more likely to be successful. Resist the urge to create a long list of generic leadership traits. Each skill should connect directly to the company’s needs and the role’s success outcomes.
Finally, consider what kind of leader fits into your C-team’s and organization’s culture. A highly collaborative organization may need an executive who excels at strong, open communication. And if your construction leader works closely with architects and engineers, they need to respect and build productive relationships with leaders in those disciplines.
When you build clear leadership profiles, you help the hiring team evaluate candidates beyond credentials or charisma. You know whether each candidate’s leadership approach will work in your environment, and you can focus on the leaders who fit.
Aligning Stakeholders Before the Search
The most effective way to build role clarity into your hiring process is to get everyone on the same page. All your stakeholders should consider the success outcomes, role boundaries, and leadership profiles for your construction leader. And in integrated organizations, that includes the engineering leader and the lead architect.
The goal is full alignment on what the role requires and what success looks like before you contact a single candidate. Because each stakeholder carries a different mental model of what the new hire should own, you have to discover and reconcile those differences. You might have everyone on the hiring team answer the same questions or map out responsibilities independently and bring them to the discussion.
Getting full stakeholder alignment isn’t easy. It can require a lot of extra time and effort up front. That’s why many companies turn to retained executive search firms. These hiring experts handle the heavy lifting. They connect with stakeholders to understand their individual visions for the role and the organization’s future. They help your hiring team create shared success outcomes, role boundaries, and leadership profiles.
However you go about it, aligning your stakeholders removes a significant source of friction from your executive search. Without this alignment, disagreements can surface during the interview process, slow down decision-making, and even lead to mis-hires.
Your Blueprint to Success
Role clarity doesn’t slow down a search any more than a blueprint slows down your construction projects. A clear picture of the finished product and the steps to get there make construction more efficient.
When the role is well-defined, you can evaluate candidates against a clear standard and make decisions faster. Plus, your new hire starts their first day with a detailed and accurate picture of how to succeed.
Check out our Role Visioning Tool to start clarifying your executive search.
