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Your biggest threat might be yourself
Engineering Echelons
Collin P. Wheeler
February 07, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
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
Something to consider
Some insights to delve into
And more…
First time reading? You can subscribe here.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Noteworthy Headlines
Construction Industry Must Attract 439,000 Workers in 2025 (Associated Builders and Contractors)
Highlights:
ABC created a model that forecasts a need for significant growth in the construction workforce in 2025.
If workforce cannot grow at this rate, ABC predicts that labor cost escalation will accelerate, exacerbating already high construction costs and reducing the volume of work that is financially feasible.
Average construction hourly earnings are up 4.4% over the past 12 months, significantly outpacing earnings growth across all industries.
ABC believes this model is conservative, meaning more jobs than predicted might be required. This is especially true if interest rates decline in the future.
Tariffs Give U.S. Steelmakers a Green Light to Lift Prices (WSJ)
Thoughts:
Important materials in construction, steel and aluminum are set to get more expensive. Keep that in mind when communicating with owners and estimating budgets.
The Top Import Partner of Every U.S. State (Visual Capitalist)
Overview:
This is a visual to help understand what locations will likely be most affected by tariffs.
Construction materials are sourced from all over, so take this with a grain of salt when thinking about specific projects.
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Consider This Thought
Many leaders believe their worst enemy is not other companies; it’s themselves. That’s because of complacency, and it’s especially dangerous in successful companies.
Here are a few warnings on complacency.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
A company is never more vulnerable to complacency than when it is at the height of its success. We must not let success breed complacency, cockiness, greediness, laziness, indifference, preoccupation with burueacracy, hierarchy, or obliviousness to threats posed by the outside world.
I abhor complacency.
You sleep on a win and you’ll wake up with a loss.
As our successes began to come, I seldom put my head upon the pillow at night without speaking a few words to myself in the wise:
“Now a little success, soon you will fall down, soon you will be overthrown. Because you have got a start, you think you are quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head—go steady.”
We must constantly remind ourselves as to why we are successful and what we must do to continue to remain successful, because if we become complacent, brother, it is all over with.
You need to fight off the ABC’s of business decay. Arrogance, Bureaucracy, and Complacency. When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies falter.
Are you the type of leader who allows complacency?
Delve Into These Insights
Phil Knight on leading:
“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
—
Greg McKeown on the importance of leaders creating clarity:
“When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive.”
—
Trevor Moawad on past performance:
“The most dangerous bias when discussing performance is our innate privileging of the past. We elevate the past. We give it too much importance. We serve the past when we should be giving it a wide berth.”
Level Up With This Resource
My Latticework (Collin P. Wheeler)
A latticework is a compendium of laws, rules, models, theories, heuristics, and observations about the world. I’ve compiled mine (and I continuously refine it) for myself and others to use. I hope you find it helpful.
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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