Team leaders at Grunder Landscaping have a lot of responsibility. They are our eyes and ears in the field, project managers on job sites and play a key role in ensuring our entire team is trained in best practices.
Each day, our crews spend about 30 minutes total at our shop, but they spend hours with their own crew on job sites. Our team leaders are the ambassadors for our culture on the job site, and we invest heavily in training, teaching and empowering them to lead their crews. Each crew working effectively together is critical to our success and our team leaders hold an important role in making that happen. They’re invaluable to our success, and we do whatever we can to support them in their roles.
Part of the reason why our team leaders, and, in turn, our company, are successful is because we are a systems-focused company. Our systems are set up to reinforce our expectations and to make it easier for teams to exceed them. Those daily expectations include:
- They know their work tickets backward and forwards. They know what’s needed the day before they get on the site and have a plan for attacking the job.
- They reiterate the plan for the day to the crew in the morning and on the way to the site, including how many hours they must meet or beat for the day and the tasks assigned to each person.
- They tell the crew the first priority on the site before arrival so work begins immediately.
- They look for opportunities to train their teams every day. On-site and in-the-field training are a must, and they often using driving time to teach too. Our team leaders motivate and compliment their teams on a daily basis.
Do your team leaders know what is expected of them on a daily basis? Use these expectations as a starting point, and you’ll see improvements in quality, morale and teamwork. As our friend Mike Haynes of LOVING said at GROW! two years ago, nobody comes to work in the morning wanting to do a bad job. Give your team the support and the systems to do great work and they’ll do the rest.
If you’d like to see firsthand how these expectations work to create a team that works well together, join us at our next Grunder Landscaping Co. Field Trip on June 23-24, 2021. This small, in-person event takes you behind the scenes at my own company so you can see the ins and outs of our operation. Sign up online.
Have a great week!
