I’ve been doing annual reviews with our foremen and senior tradespeople lately, and something keeps coming up.
People feel connected. They know what we’re trying to achieve, what’s expected of them, and what they can expect from each other.
One practical example is how easily people move between our sites. Someone finishes on one project and joins another crew, and they can get on with it. Different architecture, different challenges, but a familiar way of working.
That’s encouraging feedback. We’ve spent several years working on this, and it’s good to hear that our people can feel the difference.
A fair bit of that work happens in a group we call The Craftsmen.
From book club to leadership group
The Craftsmen started with five of our carpenters and a book club. Early on, we invited leadership coach Jason Biggs to facilitate a couple of sessions and help get the leadership coaching ball rolling. His “From Boss to Coach” approach gave us practical tools for the conversations we needed to have, and it’s been a touchstone for the work we’ve done since.
It has become a regular forum for our foremen, senior tradespeople and emerging leaders to work on how we lead, alongside the technical work of building homes.
Being a very good carpenter doesn’t automatically prepare you to lead a crew. Suddenly, your effectiveness depends on how well you communicate, plan, delegate and help other people develop. Doing everything yourself might feel quicker today, but it doesn’t get the next person ready for tomorrow.
Those are skills that deserve deliberate practice too.
For several years, we’ve been doing what Jason calls “feedback reps”. We talk about what’s working, where we’re getting stuck, and what we could do better. Then we practise having those conversations with each other.
It sounds straightforward. It isn’t always comfortable.
Getting better at the uncomfortable bit
Most of us like the idea of feedback until someone has some for us.
Then we’re quite keen to explain the circumstances. There’s usually some context they’ve missed, a good reason we did it that way, or something they could have done better themselves.
I’m certainly capable of all three.
One of the things we’ve all had to get better at is pausing long enough to ask: “What might be true here?”
You don’t have to agree with every piece of feedback. But if your first response is to defend yourself, you can miss something useful. And if people learn that raising an issue gets them an argument, eventually they stop raising it.
That’s a problem when you’re building complex homes. We need people to speak up when something doesn’t look right, ask for help when they’re stuck, and tell us when our own approach is making their work harder.
The Craftsmen gives us somewhere to practise. Over time, we’ve become more willing to have the conversation, listen to the answer, and stay with the discomfort long enough to learn something.
That applies to me as much as anyone. I can hardly ask our people to take feedback seriously if I’m only interested in giving it.
Agreeing what good looks like
Having a collection of very good builders isn’t necessarily the same as having a very good building company.
If everyone has their own expectations about workmanship, planning, communication and responsibility, a lot depends on which individual happens to be running the job.
The Craftsmen helps us work through those expectations together. What does good look like? Where are we falling short? What have we learned on one project that would help the others?
Our people bring considerable experience to those conversations. They also have to make the resulting decisions work on site, so their involvement matters.
There’s a standard we come back to often: what we say and what we do are the same thing.
It’s easy enough to say. The work is in noticing when we haven’t lived up to it, being willing to hear that from someone else, and following through.
That’s where shared standards start to mean something.
What that means on site
Every home we build is different. The experience of working with Faulkner should still feel recognisably Faulkner.
For our architects and clients, that means working with people who can think for themselves, communicate clearly and take responsibility for resolving problems. People who are comfortable asking a question before a small uncertainty becomes an expensive mistake.
For our crews, it means being able to join another site with a reasonable understanding of how the team will work together.
The feedback from those annual reviews suggests we’re making progress. It doesn’t mean every site runs perfectly or that we’ve finished the job. It does suggest that several years of conversations are showing up in everyday behaviour.
Passing it on
Another encouraging theme in our recent team profiles was how often our senior people talked about developing younger builders, without being prompted.
Jack Nevines runs apprentice training nights that go beyond the requirements of the qualification. Caleb Smaill, who began his own apprenticeship under Ross Faulkner, takes real pride in seeing apprentices he has trained succeed.
That matters for the future of Faulkner, and for the trade.
We want our people to build careers here, with opportunities to take on more responsibility and help others do the same. The Craftsmen is part of how we prepare them for that.
Our ambition is to become New Zealand's leading builder of homes designed by Architects. That gives us plenty to live up to, and we’re going to need a whole team capable of helping us get there.
Hearing that team describe how connected they feel, and seeing them invest in the people coming through behind them, is something I’m bloody proud of.
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Ross McConnell is Managing Director of Faulkner Construction, an award-winning Auckland builder of homes designed by Architects.
Ross brings an engineering and business background, including a Berkeley MBA and years leading growth-stage companies, along with deep respect for the craftsmen who bring complex architectural buildings to life. He's interested in what makes a great build work beyond the craftsmanship: how builders, architects and clients work together, how cost and risk are managed, and how disciplined people, processes and technology create better outcomes.
Ross is leading Faulkner towards a simple but ambitious goal: to be recognised as New Zealand's best builder of homes designed by Architects.
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