What Construction Taught Me About Problems That Look Like People Problems

In 2019, I landed what should have been one of my dream assignments.

I was working on the Midfield Satellite Concourse project at LAX, and Mike brought me onto his crew to handle the big AHUs and their Building Management Systems.​

The pitch was basically:

Give Chuck a bunch of big pieces of equipment and leave him alone.

Perfect.

Each unit had devices to install, conduit to run, wire to pull, panels and devices to terminate, and a whole system to integrate so it all worked together.

Roughly two to three weeks per unit.

Assuming everything went according to plan.

LOL.

I loved that kind of work.

Put me by myself on a large piece of equipment, hand me the drawings and materials, and walk away.

I could lay it out the way I wanted.

Make it efficient.

Functional.

Clean.

And when I finished, I wanted to step back, look at the work, and be proud to put my name on it.

It was good for Mike too.

Instead of teaching another guy how the equipment worked—where every device went, how everything interconnected, what wire was needed, how the BMS tied it all together—he could hand that whole headache to me and focus on running everything else.

Win-win.

At least that was the plan.

There Goes My Zen

It didn’t take long before Mike started interrupting my happy little world.

• "This guy fucked something up."
• "That guy was driving him crazy."
• "I had to let another guy go."

Somebody else was one mistake away from getting smoked.

And then came the question I’ve heard some version of my entire career:

At first, any one of those incidents could have been exactly what Mike thought it was.

Sometimes a worker screws up.

Sometimes somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Sometimes somebody doesn’t care.

Sometimes you’ve got the wrong person, and the right answer really is to let them go.

People problems are real.

I want to say that plainly, because it matters later.

But then another guy had a problem.

Then another.

And another.

And I started recognizing a pattern.

I’d seen versions of it before, with different contractors and supervisors on different jobs.

I’d just never seen it at this scale.

LAX MSC was enormous, and I could read the tea leaves.

If we kept going like this, Mike was going to run from fire to fire, the crew was going to keep screwing up, and sooner or later all that chaos was going to wash over my little island too.

I wasn’t going to get my AHUs done.

And look, at that point I was about eighteen months from retirement.

I’d had the exact retirement date on my calendar for more than decade.

I wasn’t about to spend those last eighteen months living inside somebody else’s chaos.

So Mike and I needed to talk.

Maybe the Workers Weren’t the Problem

The more I watched, the more I realized something.

Mike had never run a job this big before.

Neither had I, to be fair.

And that’s important, because I don’t want to rewrite myself as some omniscient old master who had it all figured out.

I didn’t.

The difference wasn’t that I magically knew how to run a giant airport project.

The difference was how we approached problems.

I’d spent years trying to build work so it could scale up or down.

I thought in processes.

• Systems
• Structure
• Sequencing
• Training

What does this person need to understand before they can do that?

What needs to be finished before the next thing can start?

Where does the information live?

What happens when I’m not standing there?

Mike operated more like a firefighter.

A problem appeared?

Run over and put it out.

Another problem?

Run over there.

Another?

Handle that one.

And Mike was good at fighting fires.

That’s not a knock.

I’ve worked for and alongside a lot of foremen who operated exactly the same way.

The urgent thing screams, so you handle it.

Then the next urgent thing screams, so you handle that.

You work your ass off all day.

You go home exhausted.

And because you were busy every single minute, it feels like you were productive.

Meanwhile, the important things that weren’t screaming never got done.

Training.

Planning.

Clear expectations.

Standard methods.

Making sure people understood not just what to do, but why, and how the pieces fit together.

Nobody screams at you today because those things aren’t finished.

They become tomorrow’s fire.

Mike didn’t need to become a better firefighter.

We needed to stop setting so many fires.

I Made Mike a Proposal

So I sat down with him and suggested a different arrangement.

I’d give up my little dream of hiding out by myself on the big equipment.

Instead, I’d take over training and running the crew.

But I did not want the foreman title.

I’d done that.

I didn’t want the phone calls.

I didn’t want the emails.

I didn’t want the administrative bullshit.

At that stage of my career, I definitely wasn’t chasing another title.

I told him I’d basically do the field part of the foreman’s job without the title or the headaches.

As long as the crew was okay with it, I’d help them learn the BMS work, lay out the job, show them how the systems went together, and build their understanding instead of just handing them isolated tasks.

Then Mike could step back and actually run the project.

I was willing to give up work I genuinely loved.

And here’s why.

One, Mike is a good guy.

Two, I wanted the project to work.

Three, the pattern we were stuck in was threatening all of our work.

And four, I was convinced that replacing another electrician wasn’t going to fix what we kept seeing.

We didn’t have an endless worker problem.

We had a system problem that kept showing up through workers.

The Same Problem Wearing Different Names

That’s one of the biggest lessons construction ever taught me.

When one person repeatedly fails, you may have a person problem.

When different people keep failing in the same place, doing the same kind of work, under the same conditions?

Start looking upstream.

Maybe the training sucks.

Maybe the drawings aren’t clear.

Maybe the material isn’t there.

Maybe another trade hasn’t finished.

Maybe nobody explained the standard.

Maybe the sequence is wrong.

Maybe the guy giving instructions has everything locked in his own head and doesn’t realize nobody else can see what he sees.

Maybe you’ve built a job where success depends on one experienced person constantly rescuing everyone else.

You can keep replacing people.

Sometimes you should.

But if the system stays the same, don’t be surprised when the next person’s name eventually gets added to the list.

That’s the trap.

Every individual failure hands you another piece of evidence that says:

See? People are the problem.

This guy couldn’t handle it.

That guy didn’t get it.

The other guy didn’t care.

And because each incident involves a real human being making a real mistake, the explanation feels obvious.

But sometimes you’re staring at the symptom instead of the fault.

As an electrician, I learned this a long time ago:

If you keep replacing the fuse and the fuse keeps blowing, eventually you should stop blaming the fucking fuse.

Find out what’s making it blow.

What Changed

Once I started working with the crew, I tried to make the work understandable instead of keeping all the knowledge locked inside one experienced person’s head.

• What are we actually building?
• How does the BMS work?
• What’s the difference between power and controls?
• How does this device affect that piece of equipment?
• How does an AHU fit into the larger mechanical system?
• What should you be able to handle on your own before you’re trusted with the next level of responsibility?

Eventually I built a progression for teaching the work—almost like belts in martial arts.

Start here.

Learn this.

Demonstrate you can do it.

Then take on something bigger.

And the goal was never to create helpers who needed me forever.

It was the opposite.

I wanted them to take my job.

By the time I left, two of the guys were getting pretty damn close.

And one of them had previously been headed toward getting laid off.

Think about that.

Same worker.

Different system.

Different expectations.

Different training.

Different result.

But here’s the part I need to keep honest, because systems thinking becomes nonsense the moment it turns into:

“Nobody is ever responsible.”

Some people really are the wrong fit.

Some don’t care.

Some won’t learn.

Some need to go.

Individual accountability still matters, and firing someone is sometimes exactly the right call.

The point isn’t to stop holding people accountable.

The point is to diagnose before you reach for the easiest explanation.

Otherwise, replacing people just becomes another form of firefighting.

New worker.

Same environment.

Same failure.

New worker.

Same environment.

Same failure.

Eventually you have to ask whether the common denominator is really the endless parade of employees—or the conditions they keep walking into.

🥋 Dojo Drill

Think about one person you’re frustrated with right now.

An employee.

A coworker.

A student.

A contractor.

Maybe even somebody in your family.

Before you decide:

“What’s wrong with this person?”

Ask a different question:

“What condition might be producing the behavior I’m blaming on the person?”

Then look upstream.

• Were the expectations clear?
• Did they actually get trained?
• Do they know what good looks like?
• Do they have the information, materials, authority, time, and tools they need to succeed?
• Is the sequence sensible?
• Are they getting contradictory instructions?
• Does the process actually work without you constantly stepping in to rescue it?

And here’s the big one:

Has this same problem happened with more than one person?

Because if three different people keep tripping over the same spot, you might want to stop replacing the people.

Look at the floor.

People problems are real.

But sometimes what looks like a people problem is just a system problem wearing somebody’s name.

Diagnose first. Hold people accountable second.

📚 Leader’s Library

​​​Turning Pro​ by Steven Pressfield​​​

Why?

Turning Pro is about the moment you stop waiting to feel ready and start treating the work that matters to you like a professional would—with consistency, commitment, and responsibility.

Turning pro doesn’t mean you suddenly become an expert.

It means you stop letting mood, fear, distraction, and Resistance decide whether you show up.

You may still be a beginner. You may still screw things up. You may still have a long way to go.

But once you decide the work matters enough to practice it seriously, you’ve already changed where you’re standing.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck