How to Lead High-Performance Teams Without Burning Out (Lessons from a Top Exec) | (Podcast 472)

You don't want anything to fail, but if you don't allow people to fail in self correct, then you're, it's always going to be on you.

Yeah.

You're never going to be able to, you know, have any sort of fallback and you need to have that fallback.

So, Susan, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I can't think back. I think we've done 450 episodes and I don't think we've done anyone who is operating at the level that you're operating at in terms of the construction industry, and especially someone who's in kind of the sustainability side of the construction industry. I first got exposed to sustainability back in 2004, 2005. We were building our new office for 1-800-got junk and Brian, our CEO wanted something that was kind of sustainable. Didn't even know what that meant. And we had this team come in and they looked at every single potential part of the office and kind of what we created was an unbelievable space. But can you talk to us a little bit about that? Because I know that's something that's really core to you and I'm going to kind of ask a bunch of questions around that.

Sure. Well, since 2004, sustainability has really kind of evolved into, you know, what we consider it today and, and how we define it. But you know, back in the, you know, 90s, early 2000, sustainability was really looking at energy efficiency and how we can save energy with, you know, through our buildings and how can we save water. And it was really, if you can think about it, it was planet driven.

You know what, yeah, we did stuff with our, like our floors were made out of bamboo and our, our materials on the walls were, were some special material.

Right, right. So it's like all about saving resources. And so that kind of kicked it off. And the United States Green Building Council, or the USGBC for short, created a building rating system called leed. And it really just gave everybody a guidebook on, oh, you want a sustainable building, follow these principles, you know, do these things, things. And at the end of the day, depending on how many you do, you get, you know, a light green to a deeper green. You know, they had ratings from certified to platinum. But you know, you get a score, you get a nice little plaque, something to show off on your wall for when people visit your building. And so over time, you know, as we learn more about climate change and we are now experiencing pretty strong weather Events and the intensity of weather and how building codes had to evolve in regards to that, sustainability has really kind of taken a turn to resilience. So how do we bounce back quickly from a hurricane or a flood or tornado or a wildfire that, you know, LA just went through or is, you know, still reeling from? But it also, I think when the pandemic hit, it was kind of in sustainability's favor because we already knew that green buildings were good for the environment. But we also know that sustainable buildings or green buildings are good for human health because we spend 90% of our time indoors. And so if we're going to surround ourselves with products, right, that buildings are made up of, they should be healthy, non toxic products. And so when that pandemic hit and we all were stuck inside, we all started learning about mechanical systems and air quality and how do we, you know, make our space healthier for ourselves. And so with that, you know, sustainability evolved to human health. Not only just planet health, but human health. And now you kind of have the convergence of, of the two today. And you know, it was really strong in architecture, which it still is in the design industry, but construction was a little bit slower. Coming up to understanding, you know, what does sustainability mean to me on the job site, you know, what does it have to do with, you know, what I'm doing? And so where I work, where I sit, coming from the architecture side, going into the construction side, being able to kind of bridge that gap and that understanding that, you know, job sites are workplaces too and that we should be having healthy job sites and building sustainable buildings.

That's a really interesting approach for, or kind of an extension, I guess, from, from the core. And yeah, you're right. When we were building our, the head office for 1-800-got junk. I do remember a lot of the focus was around people. We weren't necessarily trying to win an award for the space. We ranked the year before as the number two company in all of Canada to work for. And I know that we were trying to build a workplace that felt environmentally friendly but was also, you know, for the people, was the lighting was better, the, the sound was better, that you kind of had that feng shui feeling kind of coming into it. And then they incorporated some of the stuff around sustainability. Where do companies go wrong with this stuff? Where do they end up either wasting time or money or energy around it?

I think that, you know, we're all still figuring it out. You know, we have a lot of science backed initiatives that we can go off of, but it also has to be met with budget and has to be economical. And I think a lot of times in the sustainability world, we have a lot of data that we're trying to sift through and make sense of and then explain to people and we can kind of get in our own way with terminology and just really, really nerding out on, you know, the topic of sustainability in the environment. I think, you know, we still have that presumption that sustainability has to cost more. And it, you know, that's only true depending on what you're comparing it against. You know, like, so if you're building a hospital, for example, there's a lot of evidence based solutions that healthcare follows to help patients heal quicker and have better healing environments that are, you know, sustainable. So it's something, it's something that we need to work through to say, okay, what's the low hanging fruit that we're already doing that's sustainability driven? And then above and beyond that, you know, what are we doing and how can we do it in a more economical fashion? So I think like that's where we are still, you know, struggling a little bit in the industry. It's getting people to kind of wrap their heads around that.

I mean as, as a layman and somebody who's, who's certainly not in this space at all. My guess is that a lot of the products for construction now that are sustainable are meeting the same pricing pretty close as the non sustainable, aren't they? Like haven't a lot of the products come pretty darn close to being, being the same price or close enough.

Within reason. I think that you've got, depending you could have a 3% or 5% premium. I, I bet I would, I would guess it's in line with what we're seeing with inflation and any sort of upcoming tariffs. Right?

So not like 50% like it would have been 20, 30 years ago.

Oh no, no, you don't have that much of a gap that you have to close.

Because I think that was the old excuse, right, is it seemed like everything was going to be so expensive to use it, so people just kind of said, oh, I'm not going to bother. And now it's really not that expensive as an excuse anymore. But it sounds like one of the excuses was to get buy in from the team or from the company. This is a movement that I think you brought to Pepper Construction too, did you not? Or is it a movement that was kind of happening at the company?

So I think sustainability in general was happening in the market. And when I came on to Pepper Construction, a lot of the drive was around a green building certification. So if the client asked you for it, that's when you would jump on and go ahead and, you know, follow that green certification. What I brought to the table was really trying to understand how do we go to our clients with these ideas, not just wait to be asked. And so in looking at doing that, you know, trying to close that economical or budget gap of saying, okay, if you put in this strategy now, here's the savings over the long term and really like looking at different ROI or return on investment scenarios. I think a lot of time, you know, as contractors, we're asked to price out different alternates, so different mechanical systems side, side by side. And with that, you know, it takes time to understand, well, I could give you the first cost right off the bat, right, the construction cost, but you're going to be holding onto that mechanical system for the next, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. You need to really understand what that long term investment is. On those different scenarios going forward, we would typically rely on the mechanical engineer to run an energy model to tell us what that was going to be. But that took a lot of time and we need to have answers so clients can make decisions. So we actually built our own energy modeling tool in house that could quickly model different mechanical scenarios tied to our construction pricing database so that clients could just look at it and understand, you know, the information straight ahead. What's their future utility going to be?

Great.

What is their first construction cost going to be and what is that resulting ROI and payback period? And so just kind of like challenging assumptions or maybe confirming assumptions, you know, it's just putting the numbers side by side so they can make the information or that informed decision. And what I discovered was that doing like letting the data talk for me, I didn't really have to say anything. It was just kind of proving itself out. And so I used, I took that lesson and have just kind of recycled it over and over again with different initiatives through the construction industry and what we want to push and strive for.

That's amazing. I really love that approach actually of then you're not having to sell it at all. You're letting the client buy themselves into the process. When it comes down to the work site sustainability and building that kind of approach, how does your company rationalize that? Or is that just again, building one of the best companies to work for and just taking care of people and you're going to have less sick days and happier employees and Better productivity. Is that kind of the approach from it?

Well, I think when you look at job sites, they're not the easiest work environments to show up at. And safety, number one priority. Right. And so when we look at safety, it's usually looking at like, everybody goes home safe at night. And one thing that's not necessarily looked at often is the long term health effects of that job site and that hard work on your body over time. And when I say job sites or workplaces too, I mean that like the people who work and build the buildings that we occupy every day, that is their work site. It might seem temporary to you because you're just watching a building get erected, but the person that's hanging that steel is just going to another job site to erect more steel on a, you know, in a different location or the scene never changes to that person, you know. And so we wanted to look at health on the job site through a safety lens because it's really kind of looking at your, the safety of your health and your well being. And how we did that was, I don't know if you've ever walked on a job site. Sure. Okay. So they're not very glamorous. They could be hot, they can be cold. Cold or dirty. A job site trailer is probably less than desired working environment. You know, you don't have the best lighting, you don't, you know, wood paneling. And so we decided to kind of reinvent the job site trailer and look at like, okay, how far can we push this, the bar, you know, what, what can't be done or what, you know. And so we design and built in house a class A office space that is a job site trailer. And we call it our net zero trailer. And so it's got passive house, standard walls, has VRF systems, we have 27 solar panels on the roof powering the thing. So it's completely off the grid. We built a little nice kitchenette. So you have a full size fridge, you know, in there and you know, coffee maker and somewhere to like microwave your lunch. And so just really we have bamboo floors, just like your first office space. So just like really looking at like what a job site trailer could be. And we unveiled it in 2018 at Green Build and in Chicago. And we got calls all over the country asking if we could build, you know, other general contractors, these trailers, which unfortunately we weren't actually in the trailer, you know, market. So we actually partnered up with a trailer manufacturing out of St. Louis. So if somebody wants a net zero trailer, they can call Craftsman Industries and they will build you your very own Net zero trailer. We shared all of the documents, all the drawings with them.

So I love it.

Everybody is like open to do it and it's just gotten a lot, it's gotten a lot of press and it's currently sitting at the Columbus Zoo right now in Ohio. And I'm proud to say it's been through two polar vortexes and it has done just fine. And everybody's inside with their coats off, being comfortable. So I think like that was kind of the testament to, you know, does this thing actually do its job? And it does well.

I love that the company is actually thinking about sustainability and thinking about health and thinking about this, this whole kind of area across the entire business. You're not just looking at building a building. I'm friends with the CEO of a company in Dubai building a company called Iowa. I'll drop the link into their to the chat for you to take a look at and I'll put it in the show notes. This building that they're building is off the charts. I think it just won the international building of the, of the year, like globally this year. You know, the water is being blessed, there's crystals at certain parts of the building. Like it's, it's ridiculous what they're doing. Like it's at another level. But I don't know if the job site's any better. Right. I think with their end product is going to look good, but I think their job site's a job site. I think what you guys are looking at is probably what matters even more because when you start that trickle up approach where every single employee is feeling cared for, they're going to put more work into or you know, more performance into the work. I think you're actually going to see some of your costs come down because your labor and your people care more that the, the cost of building these places is actually going to equalize. So I think you're doing some good stuff. Can you talk about what it's like working inside of a male dominated industry as a woman, as a female leader? It's. Or is it still male dominated?

It's still male dominated. It's not as much as when I started, you know, when I went to school for architecture, I was, I think one of five females in my class. And so just kind of coming up the ranks through my career, you know, I see more females being like elevated. It's funny in sustainability there's more females and males in this space which, you know, kind of Flips the script. But as far as construction, you know, you would, you would think, oh, you know, it's male dominated on the job site, so it's a boys club. But I have not experience that good.

Okay.

Yeah. So I think, you know, just having more. I love seeing women on the job site, especially as a foreman or a laborer, you know, working with their hands on a job site I think is very empowering. We do a lot of work with organizations that are focused on getting females into the construction industry and into any other stem related industry, which I think is very, very important for girls to have exposure to. I think my generation and generations after mine, I have just been able to take advantage of a lot of opportunities that generations before us kind of broke that glass ceiling, you know, for us to take advantage of. That I'm really, really grateful for. So I want to do my part for, you know, the next generation coming up after me.

Talk to us about working with the CEO of the organization. What's it like working day to day with the CEO? And then do you ever, do you ever battle with them around this area? Or are you guys completely in alignment now?

So this is a family owned business. So I think you have, you know, you have to kind of go into that. So I. Not that a family owned business is any more important than any other company, but I think like there's an extra level of ownership there, right. That's kind of like you grew. This is the fourth generation in this company. So it's like you're born into it. You literally are born into it if you are a pepper, right. And it's kind of just part of that family dynamic. And as a non family member, you know, I think going into it, you have to respect that, right. That there is that, that culture, that family owned culture. And working with the CEO, you know, at first, you know, wasn't all like sunshine and butterflies. You know, they have a job to do running this company. They've got to read the market, they need to understand financials, they need to do what they think is best for the company with the information that they have at hand. And when I first met the CEO, I'm just coming in brand new and he's been here basically his entire life, right, because his dad was the CEO of the company and his grandpa was the CEO of the company. Now he's just next in line. And so talking about sustainability, what I learned was it wasn't, it wasn't about sustainability. It was about, to him it was about air quality. And you Know, looking at, okay, what is our air quality? And he's noticing that the air pollution is getting worse. Right. And so we didn't even talk about how buildings are connected to that. We just talked about air pollution and where is the air pollution coming from. And then he, you know, he had, he had a comment about, well, we're just getting a lot of rain lately and our job sites are really, really flooded and we've got to do something about it. Right. So he was more talking about, like the, the impact of all these things. And where I'm coming from is the preventative of all those things. And so I kind of had a flip my script with him to focus on what he cared about at that moment and then tie it back to, okay, well, this is why sustainability is important. This is why sustainability can mitigate the air quality or the flooding on the job sites. And this is why we do the things we do. And once I was able to kind of connect air pollution to carbon emissions and greenhouse gas gases and how everything was getting trapped and then talk about how buildings are around 40% of those emissions are directly tied to buildings, then it started to, you know, we started to get on that same page. And then we talked about, okay, he's like, well, then what can we do about it? You know? And at that time, Paul Hawkins book Drawdown had just come out and it was a book of 100 strategies on how you could actually reduce carbon being in it, in the atmosphere. And out of those a hundred strategies, 25 were building related.

Wow.

So we started talking about, okay, out of those 25, what would make the most sense in the control of a contractor? Like, what can the contractor control? Because we're not designers. And so we went through and we picked five strategies that we would just introduce to our clients. Like, did you know, we're raising awareness, we're not trying to push this down your throat? And we developed a model where we would apply those five strategies to our projects that were coming in the door just to show them. If you adapt these, here's what your building could look like, and here's the positive impact your building could make over the long term for the health of the occupants, for the health of the planet. And so just kind of meeting him where he was and where his concerns were has allowed me to really kind of understand different people's perspectives and what they care about. Right. But then also kind of learning how to translate sustainability to fit those, those different needs and concerns.

I like that. Kind of odd G. Shuck's approach to it too, where you're just kind of explaining it and just kind of throwing it out there and seeing how it sticks and the people that like it, you're going to be able to run with the ones who don' can either explain it and try to sell it or, or just kind of move on. Right. But it sounds like this, has this permeated the entire organization? Now do you think that, that culturally everyone at Pepper is in line with this or is it still something that's being sold throughout the organization?

I think it's, it has been adopted. It is part of our company's commitment. We track it every year. So we have two company wide meetings a year. The results of that program are being presented to every employee twice a year. It gets reported to our board once a year. And then we have monthly meetings with each of our company presidents so they can kind of see where they're tracking. So just really building it through. And then I email the entire company once a month just with topics around those five strategies so they understand any sort of regulation coming down the pipe or new technology or new conversation that they can have with their clients. What they've, what a lot of, a lot of folks have realized is that it gives them kind of new information to reach out to their clients about or learn about their marketplace. And I think that people love to learn new information and so it kind of keeps it fresh.

Makes sense. Can you speak a little bit around the family business component? I mean, Pepper's not a small company though. How many employees approximately do you think are across the organization?

Well, I guess the fields with the field staff, because we have office and field, I think we're close to a little over a thousand people.

Okay, so.

And we're Midwest based.

Yeah, so. So it's not a small company. It's not like it's a, you know, 50 person company where, you know, grandpa's rolling in and mom's sitting there in the book doing the bookkeeping. But there's still a bunch of, as you said, the peppers are still.