310 - Building Bridges: The Art of Team Alignment in Construction Leadership with Group PMX's Michael Giaramita

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Michael Giromito, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of a company called Group PMX, which is a construction project management firm. You have what I think something like 45 years or plus of construction project management experience, and you've just published a new book called It's All About Your Team. And welcome to the show. I'm really interested in learning more about you and your work today.

Well, thank you for having me. It's a great opportunity for us to get to know each other and share. I think we have a lot of common interests.

Absolutely. So let's just start off with a little bit about your backstory. How do you get into construction management and ultimately get into the firm that you've built today?

When I was about 16 years old, living in New York City or New York, I had this dream about building a transit system around Manhattan because you couldn't get around Manhattan. You can get across and up and down, but you can't get across. You can't get around. So that was one of my dreams. So I went to school at Colorado State University to study transportation engineering. And the day I get there, they cancel that major. That was not a good thing. I went out to other things and basically wound up in doing construction management and civil engineering. That's how I got into the business. And I was always tinkering as a kid too.

So engineering was, civil engineering was a natural thing for you to get into.

Yeah. And construction management. Yes.

And construction management. So is that what, I mean, outta college, that's what you began doing? You had a job in a construction management firm or working for a contractor or?

So I went to work for Brandt Root in Texas doing big petrochemical plants. That was my first experience. And wow. It was the interesting thing about that was it was called EPC, engineer, procure, and construct, which is what design-build is today.

Right.

Right. But it was really easy back then because you're sitting there with a client. The client says, by the way, what I want you to do by next year on this date, like December 31st, I want product coming out of that hose and into that tanker.

That's it.

Pretty clear, right?

Yeah.

Pretty clear.

Money is no object. Make it happen.

Yeah, that's it. Just go do it. So that was, it was interesting.

That's pretty impressive because the petrochemical plants are complex. They're complex. It's a complex system.

Yes.

Learning how to put one of those together, I would imagine was a pretty steep learning curve.

It was very steep, very interesting learning, even just with rebar, what the terminology was you're using every day.

And right.

You, it was embarrassing at sometimes, but you got through it.

Tell us about the firm that you have today. P, P, Group PMX.

Yeah, so Group PMX. So let me explain what PMX is. When about 25, 30 years ago, I wrote a paper on what program management was. So the Construction Management Association of America, CMAA, said that program management was multiple construction projects. And I said, I said, no, that's not really what it means. So what I look at is everything is based on project management. Project management is a core skill set you need to do project management, program management, construction management. So I define program or program management as PM, project management, to the X power. Ah, so if you're doing 2 projects, it doesn't mean 2, or 3 projects, 3. It's X because it's exponential, because you're considering everything that goes into that program and, and looking at it from a, from a holistic view versus a single project view. So PMX, that's why I named the company PMX. And they make—

so large construction firms or owners that are doing large, multiple construction projects, they've gotta manage the entire portfolio of projects. And I take it what Group PMX does is help people manage that portfolio in a way that makes sense.

That's if you buy light bulbs, you wanna buy 5,000 light bulbs, you buy 3. Right? So you try to organize it so that you don't have, you don't have all this excess stuff that you don't really need. Right. Project, one project I did was Denver Airport that didn't understand what program management was. They built a whole airport without coordinating those drawings and those procurements to make everything the same. And it was a problem at the end. That's why it got delayed at the end.

Wow.

One of the reasons, one of the reasons it got delayed in the end.

Hmm. So describe for us just generally what kind of your typical client.

So we work 50/50 public and, and private. Some of our private sector clients, Delta Airlines is a big client of us. JFK Airport, we're doing two projects there, which are both, which again are, are pretty much private. Delta, we built a new $4 billion new terminal building at, at LaGuardia Airport. Great project for us. We were part of a team, which also helped us exercise our One Team, Shared Success philosophy, which is what we're spreading around the industry. As working in the construction industry, working on as an attorney in the construction industry, there are thousands of teams on a construction project. It's not just one. And we figured out a way to make their One Team, Shared Success, and we're putting that in place and we're getting great exposure to that theme, but One Team, Shared Success.

How? All right, now you got my interest.

Okay.

We both know when you take a massive construction project, a billion-dollar project, you have thousands of people, hundreds of subcontractors, suppliers, all different trades coming in.

Mm-hmm.

And they all have their own agendas and they all have their own way of doing things and they all think they're the best. How do you make, turn all that into a team?

Okay, so it's, it took me, so let me One project I did, probably my most challenging project, was for the International Monetary Fund in D.C. I was called in when the project was in its fourth year, was supposed to be complete. It was 50% complete. The client called me and it was $100 million, some $100 million maybe over budget. Called me up. He said, Mike, I have this problem. Can you come take a look at it? And so I go down and I go to the first meeting and was about technical issues. Everybody in that room hated each other beyond the point of hatred. It was, "Fuck you, your mother, your sister." It was horrible.

Been there.

And so he said, "What can you do about this?" I said, "I don't know. I gotta think about this one because I've never seen a situation like that." In fact, at the end of the first meeting, I got up and I said, "I'm from New York and I'm offended by you guys. I've never seen a problem like this." So they all loved me right from the beginning. So. I spent the next 6 months aligning the team, getting them to understand what it takes if you collaborate with each other, work together. And the first thing that, that you got to think about is down to the trade level. The trades are where the money is spent. People, they think they're just these trade guys. They're the ones that swing the hammer and put things in place. So when you start to treat them with respect and you remove the obstacles that are constraining them from doing their job, Guess what happens? All of a sudden they're making money, they're happy, and everybody starts to play along. So that's—

they do good work.

Yeah, and they do work. And so I took some of the tricks I did. I took the architect QA people and put them on QC. I said, we don't need punch lists anymore. What do we have punch lists for? Go in there and start to solve the problem in the field. Let's not have the punch list. So we started doing that, and we started winning arguments with the engineers who say this wasn't right or that wasn't right. We taught everybody what the proper protocols are and everybody started to listen and the whole place just changed within. We finished that job, which took 4 years to get 50% complete. We finished the other 50% in 2 years and almost without zero change orders.

Wow.

It went very well. And I learned a lot about the people. And that's why the book, it's all about your team.

I was going to say, so it is all about your team. It is. And this is something that people don't get. Leaders don't get it either.

No.

That it's, this is all about the people. I'm working on my 5th book right now, all about leadership empathy, how to listen to your team.

Right.

And so tell us about your book. This just came out, All About Your Team. What, what's up with the, as a book author, I understand what's going on, but what motivated the book and, and what's the book about?

So my partner said, Mike, you got all these ideas, like you should write 'em down. So I started to write 'em down. I teach at Columbia once in a while, the university, and I, so I organized the book in a teaching mode, like 12 chapters. Then I started to fill it in and I got filled in and I started thinking, well, maybe this should be a book. Maybe this shouldn't just be a teaching thing, but turn into a book. So a lot of it, half of it's about just lessons I learned in the industry on how to do a better job. And mostly they were focused on process and procedures and things I did that people thought Like I did a project in Houston where I was managing design of a freeway, about 12 miles of freeway. And the— we were— I was working for the MTA. We were building a transitway in the middle of that project, which was the last thing to be turned over. So I did the design and we turned it over to the highway department. Oh yeah, this is like a 7-year project. And I said, no, wait a second. I think we could do this in about 3 years. No, we can't do it. We've never done a project this size and this scale. So anyway, they hired a consultant. They looked over my shoulder. A year later, a year, 3-year project or 40 months on the longest segment, finished it on time without changes. And just, just started thinking about through my career that I was disruptive and I did things that were not the norm, but they worked out.

Right.

And so they, they just, I don't know, I just look at things a little differently. And I've been very fortunate in my career to be able to have the chance.

You've been doing this stuff for what, 40, 45 years now? What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

So it used to be product, but now it's about the people. I get excited about changing behavior. Culture beats strategy. There was somebody said that, I forget who it was that said it was pretty famous, but it does. You build culture. It's amazing what happens. And you listen, and the way you get culture is you listen to people. You figure out what's going on, what's wrong, what's really the problem. And you start to align them, which took 6 months at the IMF to align the people to change the behavior. And once they see that, they're unstoppable. It is unstoppable what happens.

So tell me, I guess you can use the construction industry as an example, but if, but if, if you're a leader listening to you talking now, and let's say you're in software, you're in tech, nothing to do with construction, what are the general principles that you can pull out of what you're talking about, how you get teams to align?

So the first one is really understand where you want it to go, right? You set your goals, then you try to align them with your goals in, in a way that makes sense to them. The first thing is removing the obstacles. I can't say it enough. Every day we had a design problem, I got everybody in the room. What are we gonna do about this? We're not gonna delay because delays are the most harmful thing. And it could, as you probably know as an attorney, that was, that, that stops everything, right? That's where everything goes. Bad. So you teach people to resolve the problem. Don't point fingers. How do we resolve it together? How do we get together and make it the best we can? And you do that, and people start to listen, people start to learn, people start to see that they can get through the problems and maybe even come into a meeting and say, I have a problem today, instead of trying to hide it under the rug. So getting them to do that. The second thing, and the most impactful thing after alignment, is putting an organization in place that allows them to function properly, getting them aligned in an organization that's targeted at delivery. I want to get this job done. How do I do that best? And that really worked very well. And then the last thing is having some technology and tools to measure the progress and adjust and being able to at all times be able to, to adjust to it. Like the first thing I did on this IMAP project, I put in a program that measured the amount of people coming to the job every day. So what does that do? The first thing is if you have 100 people need on the job and only 50 show up, guess what? You're only getting 50% progress that day, right? It's a really simple thing. Does any owner ever do that? No. But if you do that, simple things like that, measure things that you need to do on a daily basis, and, and then you can adjust and react.

So what is it, Mike? What is it about you that makes all this work? What's unique about you?

I don't know. I think it's, I've always thrived to be, I guess I was always different, right? I think that's part of my, I'll give a taste. When I was in, when I was in high school in 9th grade, I failed gym. How do you fail gym?

How do you fail gym?

You fail gym, you don't go, right? You don't go.

You don't go. Okay.

And when you do go, you be, you're a little, you be disruptive, right? You're not listening and Anyway, my punishment was they made me go to gym 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, 5 days a week. That was my punishment. I had to go 5 days a week. Guess what? 50 years now I've been working out, right? So what a great thing, right? It happened. That became very popular. So you learn from being, you should learn from being somewhat disruptive. You learn to change that. And in fact, last 2 years ago, I was awarded this award in New York.. It was called 50 Over 50. So they had 50 people age over 50, and the name of the award was the Age of Disruptors. Now, okay, so you go from disruptive as being a very negative and a little ashamed of that to being a disruptor. You can be proud. So it's a lens, another lens of looking at what you do and do it in a way that's disruptor, not disruptor.

It disrupts the status quo, gets people upset, but gets things done.

Yeah.

Wow. So how do you, we both know being in, in, I having worked in the business for a long time, there's an enormous amount of conflict, big egos. A lot of it, not very, not always the smartest people at the trade level. They're good at the jobs, but beyond that, they're not the smartest.

I call those prickly people.

I call, I call them prickly people. How do you learn how to manage all that and get these people to work together?

Because I've worked in every, not, I worked in construction myself, so I understand the trades. I think they're people. They're just people. And when you treat them, if you see an electrician, you go into a room, you see him putting in the electrical outlet crooked for the last 5 rooms, you tap him on the back, say, listen, we really want this to be right. Can you understand if you put a level on that and you keep it straight, there's no, there's no more rework, right? You, you, you get outta the room, you're done, and you start to look at all the things that are wrong. And then you go back in a nice way and train everybody in, in the right way to do things and get them aligned. And all of a sudden they're each competing with each other. When they start doing that, the world changes because they all wanna be better than each other. They're, that's ego. That's ego, but ego in a good way versus the bad way.

So how are you able to, for example, tell the electrician, we need you to level this so everything's lined up and square to the walls. Without getting people to bristle?

Because, because you just tell them that, by the way, if your boss is here, he sees that, he doesn't want you to have a punch because that costs him money. If you walk out of this room and it's clean, and look, you look back and say, wow, what a great job I did. And that's it. And so there was one incident we had this, we had level 5 finishes on, I guess you know what that is. That's the strictest level, it's smooth, very smooth finish. And at the project in, in DC. It was for level 5 finishing. There was a lot of arguments between the architect and the engineer and the contractors about level 5. So what I did, I called the Gypsum Board— Gypsum Board— and they could— there was a special Gypsum Board, but they know about Gypsum Board. They came in and they walked every incident. It was like 100 different places that were on this list that were, that was supposed to be defective. By the time they finished walking, the contractor learned And the engineer and the architect and engineer learned that probably they were half right, each half right. So we wiped out all the list and they all understood and they going forward, not one issue ever came up again. They were all trained the same and respectfully done because they weren't battling with each other. They were listening to a third party who is the expert. And so there's things like that you do. You wanna avoid that conflict. Don't get into conflict with them. Get around that conflict, do something that changes the behavior versus having the conflict.

So I suspect that listening is one of your most important tools. Tell me how it is. How do you learn how to listen?

I used to not listen very well.

So you're not alone.

So I do. When you ask a question, then you start to listen about what the solution is, especially when you're really engaged. It's pretty simple. Something sometimes I don't listen very well, which I need to learn more about. That's why I bought your book, by the way. But it's when you're really interested and you, and you want the end result, the end result is what you want, you do listen better. And you should do that all the time though, right? You should turn that switch on, leave that switch on all the time.

Yeah, it's hard because it's really easy to get distracted. It's really easy to get triggered, to get emotional, to deal with other people's emotionality when they're upset or bristly. It's tough. Tough. But that is the secret to life is learning how to listen. Where do you see you going in the next 10 years?

I'm 70 now, so I don't know, 10, 10 years ago.

I'm a little older than you. I just turned 75. So there you go.

Oh, congrats. Congrats. So I'll probably start to, I'm looking for succession right now. We do succession planning with the company. We're trying to grow outside of New York, out of, into, we won our first job in Delaware.

Wow.

And we're moving down south and up north and then possibly Europe. And if I get to Europe, I'll probably then go there and run that for a little bit, then retire.

That'll be fun. Good.

It would be fun. Yeah.

One more question, Mike, and I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

That's a good one. Oh, that's a hard question.

You would never know that I'm a jazz violinist.

Yeah. Okay. I don't know, I'm an avid sailor. I don't know, I don't know.

What do you do for fun?

I sail, I ride my Harley.

There you go, sail. What kind of boat do you have?

I have a DeFore, 46-foot DeFore.

Oh nice. My wife sailed across the ocean when she was 12 years old, left Chicago, sailed the Med on a 44-foot sloop with her family.

Wow.

It's been a year and a half.

I raced That would be, that'd be ultimate dream, but that's, that takes a lot of guts. Yeah, a lot of guts.

I'm looking right out my window here and there's my, my 18-foot Prindle catamaran racing boat.

Oh, I love, I had a 16-foot Prindle.

There you go.

That was my first boat, actually.

Really? This one we picked up, we got this one last year. I completely rebuilt it. I haven't, we're getting, just getting ready to sail it. Took me all summer to rebuild it, and then we realized we had a bad jib and then we got the wrong ship. One thing, they don't make those.

They make them anymore.

They don't make them anymore. So it's really hard. All the parts you get off of eBay are all used parts, and you just got to hope that you get the right part and it all fits and works.

I like the Prindle better than the Hobie.

The Hobie, I do too. It's a faster, sturdier cat, no doubt.

Yeah, different. I used to beat 18-foot Hobies on my 16-foot Prindle.

There you go. All right, thank you so much for your time today, Mike. It's been great talking to you.

You too. Thank you. And I look forward to reading your book. Absolutely.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please Please share this episode on social media. Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more?

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