Can Servant Leadership Make a Sustainable Difference in Successful Teaming in the Construction Industry?

The story below is told by Buzz Bruner, Senior V-P of Betchel Corporation who was loaned to TXU responsible for engineering, construction and startup of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar project completion of the two units at Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant.  Buzz was highly respected as a fair and inspiring servant-leader whose teams performed at the top of the industry and consistently set records for excellence in safety, productivity and overall performance.

Before being selected for the job I was interviewed by a number of TXU senior managers and Jack Bentham, an industrial psychologist hired to help bring the team together. The key question I was asked by Jack was, how would I approach the project. At that time there were about 10,000 employees on the site for Unit One. Although I had never visited the site I told him that I understood there were 4 or 5 major engineering/construction companies, numerous smaller companies and TXU employees, all with their own culture and self interest which tended to create misunderstanding and high levels of distrust throughout a project. If I were selected I wanted to start team building with the following goals:

One: Develop a trust in me so that they felt that I was a TXU employee working only for the good of the project. Not Bechtel.

Two: Convince all of the companies to think of themselves as TXU employees working together for the best interest of the project, not their individual companies. Also I wanted to remind them that as contractors they had a moral obligation to work themselves out of a job.

Three:  Convince the TXU employees that they should accept the contractors as an extension of their own organization and not someone to distrust.

I felt that real change had to be developed from within. Not with canned programs or mandated from the top down but by the team leaders working towards a shared vision that made sense to them for their project. The idea was that any lasting cultural change had to be something they developed. They had to take ownership. The ultimate goal was to create a culture that would not just serve construction/engineering but would continue into the long term operations of the plant long after we had gone. We brought in some of Jack’s team to act as felicitators, not as dictators. The development team, lead mostly by Lance Terry and Jim Kelley, TXU’s Project Manager and Plant Manager, did a great job.

In Unit One the team developed the basic culture for Comanche Peak which we called “The Culture of the Nineties”. The goal was to bring the companies together to work as a single team. On Unit Two, with learning processes facilitated by Ann McGee-Cooper & Associates, (AMCA), we were introduced to the concept of “servant leadership” and how that not only contributed to high performance teaming but at the same time helped the individual employee grow both personally and professionally. That was what we named “Team Plus”.

Up until I started working with AMCA, most team building programs were aimed at improving communications and understanding between the various components of a project to create the open dialog and trust needed for an effective team. Servant leadership was not commonly stressed as a name during this time but it had to be inherently present, at least at a manager level. AMCA introduced a different approach to team building aimed not just at the contractor/client relationship but at the same time creating an environment where subordinates, supervisors and management could grow personally and professionally through servant leadership. With innovative and entertaining teaching modules such as the “whole brained” approach to solving problems, we learned to better understand and trust each other and for the first time that I know of this concept was also introduced to the manual crafts. The result was a working relationship between the client, contractors and crafts that is seldom found on construction projects, especially one with over 5,000 employees on site.

I will have to admit that when I first saw some of the teaching modules, such as how the right brain and the left brain could be brought together to create highly innovative whole-brained solutions to problems, I was convinced that it would never be accepted in the hardnosed construction industry. I was wrong. I learned that even old dogs can learn new tricks when the tricks are fun and deliver solid business results!