Leadership in Construction: Managing Complexity

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Episode #625: Anthony Consigli - Digging Graves, Playing Football at Harvard, Learning From Failure, Taking Big Chances, & Growing a Business From $3 Million to $4 Billion

• Anthony's great-grandfather came from Italy and he was a stone mason. He had 6 sons. He gave each a trade. His grandfather had a business mind. Then WWII came. 4 brothers went and fought. His grandfather and blind uncle stayed back to run the business. He brought his son into it (Anthony’s dad) he was a heavy equipment operator. And did business leadership work after it.
• Hard Work: Born in 1967, 2nd oldest of 5 kids. Grew up in the 1970’s remembering his dad always working 2 jobs including Saturdays as a heavy equipment operator in construction with side jobs at night, his mom as a night nurse with his grandmother watching them during the day. Hard work and work ethic were drilled into them by their dad, grandfather, and uncles who all were in construction. All had stoic personalities. Anthony started working full-time in the Summer, Saturdays, and school vacations in the 7th grade when he was 12.
  • Cleaning the mortar off bricks from demolished buildings so that they could be reused, then digging and covering graves by hand at a bunch of local cemeteries.  Chopping wood and burning the rubber off electrical wire from demolished buildings so we could bring the copper to the scrap yard for cash. It was not your typical childhood but I can see now it gave me incredible life lessons at an early age that allowed me to flourish in business and be a strong leader.
• Anthony was a gravedigger -I was a big part of the business because it was a consistent revenue stream. Regardless of a recession, people were going to die. For that reason, his dad and grandfather never wanted to give it up. Anthony dug them by hand, year-round.
  • When I was in high school I was in charge of laying out the graves to be dug for the recently deceased. As the Catholic Church was not known for great record keeping the coordinates were often confused. I would cut the sod, save it and then start digging; 7.5’ long, 4 foot wide, about 5.5’deep. I had to take 22 wheelbarrows of dirt and wheel them up a plank onto a truck as that was the displacement from the coffin and concrete box. One night the phone rang at the house. My dad yelled at me to tell me I had buried the body in the wrong place. He may have had a few expletives in there. The next morning, I spent the day digging a new hole, moving the box to the new grave, and then filling in both graves while the family watched. I tried blaming the priest but this was a losing battle. Lessons like this taught us accountability. Own it. Do what you say you are going to do and clean up your own messes.
• Dump Truck Story - When I was 14  I was helping to demolish the interiors of an old convent and we were throwing all the old cinder blocks into a dump truck. My grandfather didn’t have anyone available to go dump the truck so he showed me the different lever and buttons; the clutch, the PTO, and gears, and told me where to go dump the truck. I knew a little about how to drive standard but had never driven a dump truck so he told me to leave it in first gear. I drove down the Main Street of the town with a long line of traffic behind me as I was going about 5 miles per hour. I got to the dump site, got the truck in position, enacted the PTO let my foot off the clutch, and got the dump body to start raising. I remember being so proud of myself. Like I had made it as a man. All of a sudden the truck jerked up violently and before I knew what happened the truck cab was in the air and the truck was upright vertically. I had forgotten to open the tailgate so the load had shifted and flipped the truck. There were no cell phones so I walked about a mile back to the site very embarrassed to call my grandfather. Construction has no shortage of occasions to be humbled as there are so many changing dynamics at hand all the time. But at the same time, being thrown into situations like this gave me this incredible tolerance for risk.  It was embarrassing but you could overcome that embarrassment.
• 1997 - Anthony became the CEO. $3m business at that time. Anthony pushed for bigger work. 25 people at the company then. 2024 - $3.4B 2,400 employees.
  • What happened? One big thing is a concept/book called Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard. Construction at the time was low bid, hard knuckles, people flipping the table, throw staplers. It wasn’t friendly. It started to get more professional over time. “Raving fans makes sense to me. Apply how you treat people in hospitality to construction. We work hard on client service skills. Being really professional. There is so much repeat business. That was harder than I expected it to be. Clients were rewarding us work over and over again. We were nice people to deal with. Raving fans stayed with us. We’ve done a lot of jobs at Harvard or hospital systems. We’ve earned that reputation. I came into the business during a bad recession. That bruised me. I had to tell people I couldn’t pay them. I worried about where money would come from.”
• The significance of their logo? The arch… The Arch is our logo and helps support these values. The arch is from the oldest surviving picture of our great grandfather who was a simple, hardworking, stone mason building this big stone arch. The arch denotes teamwork as you can’t do it alone. It symbolizes forward progress, quality, and craft. All stuff we want to be associated with.
• Take Big Chances – We got through the first recession knowing we needed to be larger to be able to withstand the ups and downs of the economic cycle. We started taking some chances on some larger jobs with more demanding clients which was extremely stressful as we had no idea what we were doing. It was new territory.  This is where all the humbling experiences as a kid like digging graves helped as it gave me the courage to take some risks.  Failure isn’t final and you can push through mistakes. 
• Football at Harvard - Learned more on the football field than in any classroom. Discipline to a process. All the players at Harvard are there for the love of the game.
  • I was admitted to Harvard with OK grades, but I could snap a football and block.  I was surprised at the time Harvard accepted me.  Looking back on it now, I should have been shocked as I was a meathead.   At the same time, I think my blue-collar work history in a small family business, my being an Eagle Scout, and generally smart kid all helped. Harvard changed me in good ways despite my best efforts not to let Harvard change me in bad ways.  I had this perception of blue-blood kids walking around with ascots and monocles or hippies protesting every earthly transgression on the planet.  But that is not what I found.  I made the best friends of my life; incredible diversity with kids from every socio-economic strata you could think of.  Our team had a kid who was in an LA street gang and a kid who worked summers second shift in a limestone mill outside of Pittsburgh yet at the same time had a kid who was fifth generation Harvard who was just a nice guy.  Really smart but normal kids.  As much as I didn’t want to change, I needed to change; be more open-minded, more curious, have better dressing and grooming habits, and manners. It meant being able to engage in meaningful conversation on heady topics; not Hulk Hogan and the WWF or how tough Chuck Norris was.  I would always say that I didn’t learn much in the classroom at Harvard but that’s not fair.  Liberal arts education is a bit under fire right now but it has served me well.  I learned more through exposure to different people, other students smarter than me who were in random conversations and late-night debates. I learned more on the football field as I learned more about resilience, how to lose, and how to prepare.  The liberal arts education gave me an appreciation for continued curiosity, learning, and study which may be a more important skill than any in a fast-changing world.  It was the well-roundedness I needed.
• Leadership in Construction - Leadership means different things to different people. It can be easy in some settings. In football, all the players wanted to play. For a job site in South Boston, you walk onto a job site, you have 300-400 that don’t want to be there, some don’t speak English, then we get a union group, or an architect has other ideas, then traffic, weather, and things you can’t control. It’s hard for a leader to keep everybody working in the same direction. That’s a huge leadership task. I was thinking about that. A construction superintendent at 6 am is thinking about all of this stuff.  What makes someone good at that job? Sense of urgency, align and motivate hundreds of people, great planners, organized. Had a former Marine Vietnam Seargent who was great. A gym teacher who’s awesome, he’s in NYC with a job several city blocks. High sense of urgency, detail-oriented, motivates and aligns people. We do personality testing, and we’ve got a lot of people who are lower A and just as successful as higher A personalities. Such team players. Can put a team together. We like people who have played sports.
• Hiking – About 12 years ago, Anthony, his brother, son, and a few guys went out to hike a 10,000-footer in Colorado.  They met their guide who was this little, old dude who looked like he smoked pot fairly regularly.  As they looked to get started, Anthony asked him for the trail map and he said he didn’t have one.  “How do you know how to get to the top?" He pointed to the top of the mountain and said “It's right up there, we just need to keep going up." But when they were at the top, Anthony realized it was just an analogy for their business. We just needed to keep taking one more step up.
• ESOP - Consigli implemented an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) to make the company entirely employee-owned, fostering a culture of accountability, shared responsibility, and pride among their teammates, where employees directly benefit from the company's success and feel a stronger sense of ownership in decision-making; essentially, it aimed to create a more engaged and motivated employee base by giving them a stake in the company's performance.