Hey, it’s Collin. Welcome to Engineering Echelons, a newsletter full of ideas and insights to help engineers excel at management.

Here’s what I’ve got for you this week.

• New and noteworthy news

• A management perspective to consider

• Leadership insights to delve into

• And more…

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Alright, let’s get into it.

Noteworthy Headlines

Dodge Momentum Index falls back 7% in October (Dodge Construction Network)

Highlights:

• In October, commercial planning declined 2.9% while institutional slowed by 15.2%

• Year-to-date, the DMI is up 35% from the average reading over the same period in 2024

Project Stress Index climbs 1% amid rise in bid-date delays (ConstructConnect)

Highlights:

• A noticeable fall of 8.2% in on-hold activity was completely offset by a 1.9% increase in abandonments and an 8.5% rise in bid date delays

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Management Perspective

One of the benefits of diversifying across multiple market sectors and geographies is that you become a little bit insulated from the ups and downs of the market. This is usually reaped from the overall organization, and pockets of volatility can still exist amongst different teams.

Workshare is one of the best ways to spread workloads across the company’s workforce. When done effectively, worksharing mitigates the effects at the extremes of market cycles. It:

• Moderates the need to hire additional staff when times are good

• Lessens the amount you have to cut when times are bad

• Promotes collaboration and cross-functionality within the organization

So, how do you workshare effectively? I think about it in terms of operations and financials.

Operations

Identify staff with the right capabilities

Randomly adding available staff to a project is asking for trouble. The right skill sets and experience need to be sought out when searching for staff across the organization to help deliver a project.

Get commitments

Many department managers are open to loaning out labor when they are slow and then clawing it back when things change. This model is fragile and creates issues down the road.

Instead, documented agreements, such as a simple email, outlining the staff, the effort (hours per week or month), the schedule, and the scope, need to be formally executed between the supervisors and/or staff themselves. These agreements can only be modified when both the borrower and the lender consent.

Hold staff accountable

There needs to be mechanisms in place to hold staff accountable for the projects they are delivering. This is easily accomplished when a project is within one geographical area and under a specific market. When labor is loaned amongst different groups, managers need to collaborate to ensure performance is maintained.

And a lot is modeled from the top. Managers need to demonstrate to their team that work on their projects and projects in other departments matters.

Financials

Incentivize departments to collaborate

When different geographic areas and/or departments are structured as separate cost centers, overhead costs are broken out and allocated to each unit accordingly. When sharing resources between the units, overhead costs need to be rectified between the loaning department and the borrowing department.

This can get quite complex. The important thing to remember is that the point is to align incentives to promote collaboration. Having a good accounting department helps.

Track workload composition

It’s useful in planning future workloads to know what the past looked like. Without tracking the financials of loaning and borrowing labor between departments, it’s difficult to quantify the amount of collaboration that happened. By examining past efforts, managers can glean better insights into how to staff for the future.

Management Insights

Will Guidara on hospitality:

“When you work in hospitality—and I believe whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business—you have the privilege of joining people as they celebrate the most joyful moments in their lives and the chance to offer them a brief moment of consolation and relief in the midst of their most difficult ones. Most important, we have an opportunity—a responsibility—to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.”

—

Viktor Frankl on success:

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

—

Matheus Lima on politics:

“Politics is just how humans coordinate in groups. It’s the invisible network of relationships, influence, and informal power that exists in every organization. You can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away. It just means decisions get made without you.”

Management Resource

Hire people who give a shit (Alexandr Wang)

Novel concept, I know. But it’s an important reminder of what you’re actually getting at when recruiting people to a world-class organization.

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Get in Touch

Did something strike a chord? Tell me about it.

Or…

• Let me know if you’ve found something worth sharing.

• Let me know what challenges you’re having as a manager.

• Let me know what challenges you see other managers having.

Send me an email at [email protected]

Looking forward to hearing from you. See you next time.

Collin

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