Darnell and Emotional Intelligence Get Shout Out from ENR

I received an email a few weeks ago from Brent Darnell telling me and a number of his other LinkedIn contacts that ENR magazine published a review of his book, “The People Profit Connection.”  Due to time constraints, workload, prior obligations (ok fine, it was procrastination), I just got around to reading it yesterday – it was good.  A positive review from Engineering News Record on Darnell’s book about applying Emotional Intelligence to the construction industry is a step in the right direction for an industry that tends to be on the side of emotionally inept.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a mention of Mr. Darnell on this blog.  Way back in February of 2010 I did a write up on the PPC shortly after reading it for the first time.  At the time, I was gung ho on emotional intelligence and transforming the construction industry into what I thought it should become.  However, 2010 brought challenges that made this difficult.

I didn’t fully realize how far I had strayed from my once unwavering ambition to infuse emotional competence into the construction world, until I re-read the PPC this weekend.  2010 brought challenges for me like none I had ever experienced.  I was for the first time, 100% responsible financially for the projects on which I was working.  Not only was I responsible, but the margins we were working under were slimmer than I had ever seen.  I was also doing hard bid, high risk work.

This stress produced more self interested thinking and my people skills tremendously declined.  I was snappy with clients, designers, and subcontractors.  I think I knee-jerked to the old school, “kick ass and take names” mentality.  Trust me, it’s easy to do when you’re doing a project with a liquidated damages clause of $1000 per day for a late finish.  One week late and I’m eating at the soup kitchen.

So I’ll cut myself a little slack because of the pressure I put on myself, but I won’t let myself off the hook entirely.  It just goes to show  how easily you can lose sight of this stuff.  I’ve studied this for years and when the pressure was on, I kind of lapsed into more entrenched ways of doing things.  You gotta be careful.

With all this said, the pressure of hard bid contracts certainly doesn’t help the movement of trying to get some more emotional competence in construction projects.  In bad economies, margins slim down and hard bidding increases.  But hopefully as things improve, we’ll get into more collaborative projects with a more even distribution of risk.  And hopefully, more emotional intelligence.