Ryan Englin on Construction Genius Podcast: Fixing Performance Reviews for the Field

I went back on Construction Genius with Eric Anderton to talk about the two things contractors avoid the longest: accountability and performance reviews.

Here's the definition I gave Eric. Accountability is making sure people follow through on what they committed to. That word commitment carries the whole thing. You cannot hold someone accountable to something they never agreed to in the first place. Most of what owners call an accountability problem is a communication problem wearing a costume. You told someone what you wanted, you walked away because you were busy, and you never asked them to repeat it back. Three weeks later you're mad. They're confused. And the relationship takes the damage.

Eric asked me why holding someone accountable feels so uncomfortable even when you were clear. My answer: you waited too long.

I told him about a client with a foreman. Great guy. Amazing when he showed up. They had the attendance conversation once. Then week one passed and the superintendent figured he was getting back in the habit. Week two passed and everyone was too busy. Week three passed and nobody wanted to upset him because he was good and he had improved a little. Three months later it felt weird to bring up at all. The crew paid for it. The project paid for it. The client paid for it. And a simple conversation turned into a painful one.

Here's what nobody found out until much later. He was caring for a sick family member. We never asked. We only asked what the impact was on us.

That's the part I keep hammering. When you hold someone accountable, you are doing right by the people who are doing their jobs. The crew sitting there wondering where their leader is today. Your A players watch how you handle the person who isn't showing up. They draw conclusions. Every single time.

The fear is a story we tell ourselves. They'll be mad. They'll quit. They'll take someone with them. When people push through and just have the conversation, it is never as bad as the story. And if someone cusses you out and walks, you dodged a bullet.

Eric brought up kindness versus niceness, and he's right. Telling someone the truth is kindness. Staying quiet to keep the peace is not.

Then we got into performance reviews, and my position is blunt. Annual reviews are broken because they force you to cover twelve months in one sitting, and you tie it to a raise, and then you unload. Employees tell me in exit interviews that they were doing something wrong for eleven months and nobody said a word. That information had value eleven months ago. It has none now. I don't discipline a puppy three weeks after it pees on the floor. I don't correct a kid a month later. Why do we do it to grown adults with careers on the line?

No one should ever be surprised by a review. Same with a performance improvement plan. Same with a termination.

If I redesigned the review from scratch, it wouldn't be about performance at all. Performance gets handled in real time. The review is about misalignment of expectations. The PM thinks he's a five. His boss thinks he's a three. That gap is the conversation. And honestly, that gap is a report card on the leader, not the employee. If he thinks he's a three and I think he's a five, I failed to tell a top performer he's a top performer. Either way, I own it.

Run them quarterly at minimum. Monthly if you pull it off. When there's only thirty days of material, the conversation runs ten minutes. Ten people, two and a half hours a month, and everybody knows exactly where they stand. That's alignment, and alignment buys you back more time than it costs.

This all traces back to the same foundation I build with every client. Clear values, clear expectations, and a hiring process that puts those expectations on the table before anyone signs anything. That's what the Core Fit Hiring System does. The expectation-setting conversation I teach before the offer, the one where you slide the offer across the table and pull it back, exists so the review conversation is never the first time someone hears the standard. Everything I wrote in Hire Better People Faster points at the same idea. Get clear up front and the hard conversations get easy.

We also talked about FieldCon, the software I built to make these conversations work on a tailgate instead of in an office. The manager takes a short assessment, the employee takes the same one, the system finds the gaps and writes the conversation script. Hit record, have the talk, and the review writes itself. No typing. No spellcheck. Just the conversation.

One more thing from the episode. A client called me the morning we recorded because a project manager quit. All she wanted was a career path. Nobody ever had that conversation with her.

Have the conversation.

If you liked this, I go deeper on building accountability into onboarding and culture from day one on Titans of the Trades.