Episode 158 | Signal vs. Noise: Prioritization, Delegation & Focus for Construction Leaders

Being busy doesn't always mean you're moving your business forward.

In this episode of The Mobilization Mindset, Scott Peper and Drew Aldridge discuss how construction leaders can separate signal from noise by focusing on the decisions that truly drive growth.

In this episode, they discuss:

 - Why being busy isn't the same as being productive
 - How to identify the highest-value work only you can do
 - The difference between reacting to problems and planning ahead
 - Why effective delegation starts with systems, not people
 - How empowering your team creates more capacity for growth

Scott and Drew also explain why the best leaders don't try to solve every problem themselves. Instead, they build frameworks, develop their people, and spend their time on the decisions that move the business forward.

Learn more: https://mobilizationfunding.com/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Signal versus noise. Signal is if you're presented an issue, a problem, a decision that only you and you are uniquely qualified to decide, that is signal. Everything else is just noise. If you can delegate it, it's noise. If you don't have the ability to delegate that, then you haven't built and empowered the people within your organization to be able to delegate that.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Welcome everybody to the next episode of the Mobilization Mindset. My name is Scott Pieper, CEO and founder of Mobilization Funding. And today we are going to be talking about focus. How to determine as a business owner, as a leader in construction, as any leader, whether you're even trying to lead yourself, how do you decide what to focus on each day so that you can progress and move forward? Drew and I are going to spend some key moments here talking about opportunities that you can use each day to determine what is the most highest signal of thing you should be spending on, or what is just the busy noise. Welcome to the show, Drew.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Yeah, I'm pumped to be here. And I love I love this subject because you bring it up all the time. This is kind of one of those four or five core things that you you you kind of pour into me on. So uh the first question I have is how how can our one of our customers, prospects, our listeners, whoever they may be, feel busy as a CEO or as a president of a company, you know, owner of a company uh all day, but not feel like they're really moving the needle much?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Because you got to remember inside any business or even your own personal life, there's things coming at you all day long that you have to react to. And what makes you feel the difference between an accomplished day and fulfilled versus just being busy is whether or not the things that you did that day are moving you towards your ultimate goal or the ultimate goals of what you have for your life or for your business or for your family or whatever it is that you're working on. And so a lot of times people have not laid out clearly what their goals are, what they're trying to accomplish. And so then therefore, you're you don't have tasks or things that you're working on that day that are work towards that. So you might accomplish 15, 20 things and knock down a task list and you feel good about knocking out the task list, but then you sit home and you don't feel good about what you did that day. And that's the difference. It's you're not tying the things to your goals or you haven't established your goals such that you're working towards them on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

And what I'm about to say is not gonna make sense to anybody out there who hasn't actually taken the time to write down their mission, to write down their goals. I would add core values into that as well. But being busy and productive are not the same thing. So as you look at your day, uh where to the audience out there, where are you spending most of your day? Are you on the job site putting out fires? Are you talking to uh the accounts payable team or uh at your customer trying to figure out how you're gonna collect? Or are you doing things within your business to move the needle? Are you deepening those customer relationships? Yeah. So um that that that you know, being busy and productive are fundamentally not the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah. And let me tell you why this is important. Because the second you walk into your business or your office that day, things are gonna start coming at you, which is a hundred percent normal. It's gonna happen, should happen. And so, how do you combat that? Because you're gonna someone might say, Scott, Drew, great ideas there, geniuses, but uh uh there was a fire, three fires when I walked in and it started pouring at me. What do I do? Well, I'm gonna tell you put out those fires and take care of them. What I'm also gonna tell you is you better identify exactly what the four or five things are you need to be doing that day before the fires start.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Which is called what planning. That's called finding those signals. And maybe you work on those things before fires start, which is typically around eight or nine o'clock in the morning at a construction site. Or maybe it's in the evenings and you need to be doing them in the daytime. Whatever it is, you know the you know the temperature that flows throughout your day. You need to be spending your time early or late, whatever it is, getting the things done that you need to get done before your fire start that you have to react to as a leader or a business.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

All right, great. So I'm a listener. Scott, uh, how do I even tell the difference between signal and noise?

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Signal and noise, and there's a lot of great lines about this now, but the difference between signal and noise is what is the highest priority items that need to be accomplished on a daily basis that are moving you or your business towards your goals? The goals for the business, the goals for the team, the collectiveness of whatever it is. So if you're talking about your family, those are family items. If you're talking about your health, those are the highest point of health items. If you're talking about your business, which people, processes, culture are you trying to work on that day that are going to move you towards where you're going?

SPEAKER_00 5:07

And I'll even go a step further, and I'm talking to the CEOs and founders out there. Signal versus noise. Signal is if you're presented an issue, a problem, a decision that only you and you are uniquely qualified to decide, that is signal. Everything else is just noise. If you can delegate it, it's noise. If you don't have the ability to delegate that, then you haven't built and empowered the people within your organization to be able to delegate that.

unknown 5:36

Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

And piggybacking off your example, a critical task for you as a CEO then would be to teach and train your leadership about how to delegate the decisions that they need to make, how to understand the decisions that you want them to make and what the difference is. That would be a critical task.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

As an owner or CEO of tomorrow, you looked at your calendar that you had today, and you're an outsider, would you be thinking, I'm looking at the calendar of an owner CEO, or would you be looking at the calendar of the person that that that yelled the loudest? Right. Right?

SPEAKER_01 6:14

And what's the criteria for someone to get on your calendar?

SPEAKER_00 6:19

What's the criteria for someone to get on your calendar? Well, it better have to do with something with signal versus noise.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Right. Because if you're just if you can just have your calendar populated with anything and you're walking in and you have no idea what that might be about, or they're not a set of cans of meetings, then you are just in a reaction mode all day long.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Scott, this company has grown, mobilization funding that is, has grown substantially over the past two, three years, right? As our companies growing, and this will be so relevant to our listeners. How has delegation played a role in how in how you've helped grow this company? How how how have you let go? Tell strategies on delegating, et cetera, and how has that mindset shift changed over this period of time?

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Well, it starts by recognizing that you can't do it all, right? So number one, and then how you start to delegate is you have to empower people with a set of values that are gonna allow people to have the framework to make decisions within, which are your core values. Outside of that, then you get specific processes and systems that are in place that you have leaders executing those systems and processes. So you as a leader also can trust the system and frameworks people are making decisions off of and in what channels they're making them. And so when you delegate something to someone, you're not delegating to like go creatively design it from scratch. You're delegating them the ability to do it within the channels that we've all agreed on and within the frameworks that they can make those decisions on, and then they can use their own creativity within that to do it, to accomplish that task.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

The most successful organizations that least that I've talked to, uh, that are run by successful and effective founders and CEOs, are those where uh the CEO built those systems, built those kind of lanes to operate in with whatever functionality it may be within the company, hired good people, and then said, stick to these lanes, but I'm getting I'm gonna empower you to continue to optimize them, to continue to improve them. And then that is a series of self-improvement that it just starts happening on its own without the founder.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

That's right. And let me tell me, I'll tell you where where mistakes get made a lot. If you're a leader or founder listening to this, you're thinking, okay, great. The biggest mistake you can make is realizing that you have a channel that needs work. And what you do is you go out and you hire somebody, bring them in, and assume that now your delegation has begun. Because you're putting someone, especially if you hire someone very talented, into a horrible spot where you just plop them in and you think your problem solved, and now they just run. You want to allow them some time to like figure out the whole, especially if they're a leader, what is going on in the entire business? How is their individual department, lane, division, whatever it may be they're leading, how does that work amongst all of them? Let them see it. Tell them what your opinions are, how you've seen it and guided it, but then tell them to have the constructive framework to make it better. Where could where can they use their creativity? Don't just plop them in a spot and think to yourself, uh-huh, problem solved now. Yeah, delegate away. Sink or swim. Yeah, that doesn't work. That's a big mistake. You want to give people the room to onboard, and talented people will figure it out quickly and they'll they'll pick it up. You can they'll grab it and they'll start to learn, but you want to give them the idea to be creative. You don't want to put them into a fire right out of the gate without allowing them to be able to think.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yeah, yeah. And one thing that I admire about you, Scott, is you created a system here where we are religiously focused on the customer experience, right? And you'd agree with that. We are equally as focused on the employee experience. And that's just not having a good workplace and have where we're having fun. I'm sure that's that's part of it. But secondly, when someone comes on board here, we have an onboarding process, a training process. We explain to them where they fit into the whole ecosystem. And then over time, there's a trust built there, and then they have a little bit more uh aptitude to be able to help improve those systems. I mean, we just don't, it's not sink or swim. And I would suggest you all have a similar model.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

All right, everybody. I hope signal versus noise, critical tasks versus regular tasks, setting your goals, understanding the accomplishments that you can make have to do day by day with what your big goals are. Once you work identify those, you can work backwards and you'll feel a lot better about the things you do each day. Until next time, I hope you all have a great week and may God bless you.