Good engineers, leaders by chance: a construction company looked at who runs its sites

Residential and commercial builder with about 1,100 direct employees, 14 concurrent sites in three states and 86 leaders across managers, engineers and site foremen. Most leaders had been promoted internally from technical roles.

The company lost skilled workers between projects and struggled to develop new resident engineers. The board suspected the issue lay in how people were led, but only had performance reviews written by each manager.

360° Leadership (LID)

Why this instrument. LID Complete combines the views of the leader, their manager, peers and team, which made it possible to compare how each engineer saw themselves and how they were seen on site.

Format: Complete · Respondents: 1,140 of 1,380 (83%)

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What changed in operations

• Leadership index moved from 52 (Emerging) to 63 (Structured).
• 81 of the 86 leaders completed the cycle with an individual development plan.
• Rehiring of workers from the previous site rose from 38% to 51%.
• Two resident engineer positions were filled by internal promotion, compared with none the year before.

What this case teaches

• Meeting deadlines is not the same as building a team. The 360° showed the difference clearly.
• Site foremen needed debriefs in their own language, not corporate material.
• The gap between self-assessment and the team’s view was the best starting point for the conversation.