A few weeks back I published a piece about Intentional Balance, The Mainspring Group’s first core value and a driving force for why we exist. Today, it’s our second core value I’d like to spend some time thinking about – Care for People. First though, let’s go way back in time. To the early 2000’s – when I was just getting my start in homebuilding.
I knew absolutely nothing about homebuilding
In 2003 I was nothing if not wet behind the ears. My first real job was a temporary admin position supporting the operations team of a large regional homebuilder. No, I am not counting the weeks I spent failing at selling cars as my first real job, sorry Kia. I knew absolutely nothing about homebuilding, construction, business, I was even inexperienced with Excel back then… but that didn’t stop me from showing up every day and trying to learn what I could. After all, I had a newborn at home and it was time to step up.
Fortunately, I was blessed to have some incredible colleagues and mentors. One in particular was my direct boss at the time, Jim. He took a personal interest in helping me learn. When I think about how hard he worked to help me grow I get a little emotional. Jim spent hours upon hours with me going through individual cost codes – he would explain the phase of construction we were talking about. After that, how each individual piece and part went together, and then we’d talk about every itemized product in our purchasing system fit into that phase of construction. So, by the time my temporary engagement was supposed to end, I had learned enough to take a new position as estimating assistant. From there quickly to estimator, then supply chain, and the rest is history.
Jim helped me learn and grow because he cared about me as a person, not just because it was easier to train me than to hire someone. I was a disposable temp, it was his care and investment in my growth that made me valuable enough to keep me around. And the longer I worked with him, the more valuable I became because the learning and development was simply part of his leadership approach. If you had potential, Jim saw it, if you were willing to apply yourself, he’d invest in you big time. I’ve always been a sharp guy (“sharp” was Jim’s word choice actually, on my first performance review – I still remember that), but I have Jim’s investment in me as a person to thank for the career I have pursued ever since.
Jim helped me learn and grow because he cared about me as a person
What if we took care of people for a more fundamental reason? ... People have intrinsic worth
Often when businesses talk about taking care of people it’s more pragmatic than benevolent. In fact, one of the most popular quotes about this is from Richard Branson who said, “if you take care of your people, they’ll take care of the business.” This isn’t bad, but I think it could be better. What if we took care of people for a more fundamental reason? Maybe because people have intrinsic worth, because people need meaning in their lives, or because caring for people means caring for ourselves?
Homebuilding has a knack for burning people out. People are barely trained, overworked, under appreciated, and find themselves doing a lot of firefighting. We know these people because at times, we’ve been these people. When we say one of our core values is Care for People it’s those people we are thinking about. The front-line operators, the people who actually get things done in a homebuilding company.
Everything we do at Mainspring is aimed at helping individuals inside homebuilding companies have a better life. We want them to feel a sense of purpose and pride in what they do, and to be able to see past the daily difficult situations to the broader work we all do of building people’s dreams – this industry can be pretty inspiring if you have the chance to look up and around at what we do.