Foreman school

Running the day from the field: huddles, handoffs, and holding a line.

• What a foreman actually does all day

  A field-side log of a foreman's real day. Most of it is moving information, not swinging a hammer, which is why the channel you hand him matters.

• Why good crews quit: lack of organization, not lack of pay

  Your best guys do not leave over money first. They leave the chaos. Here is what disorganization costs a worker, and what it costs you to replace him.

• New foreman: your first ninety days running a crew

  A ninety-day plan for your first foreman job: learn the crew, own the morning, own the close-outs, and stop being the best tool man on site.

• Should the boss or the foreman be the bad guy on site

  Somebody has to hold the standard, and it keeps landing on one guy. Here is why the enforcer role burns people out, and the fix that keeps everyone human.

• Told you're too soft to run a crew? Read this

  If your boss says you are too soft to run a crew, the problem is not your voice. Here is how to hold a line on consistency and the record instead.

• Done, approved, signed off: who gets to call a job finished

  On a small crew, done, approved, and signed off are three questions. Here is why three different people should answer them.

• End of day reports from the field that don't feel like homework

  Daily reports die because forms feel like homework after ten hours on the tools. The version a tired crew will actually send is one photo and one line per job.

• How to hand a job between crews without losing the details

  A handoff fails when the details live in the outgoing crew's heads. Here are the seven that always drop, and how to make sure they carry.

• How to run a morning huddle that takes five minutes

  A five-minute huddle keeps the crew straight without eating your morning. Here is the minute-by-minute, plus the three things that stretch it to twenty.

• How to train a lead man to run jobs the way you do

  You cannot train a lead man by talking at him. Here is how to make the way you run a job visible enough that he can learn it and run one himself.