This is just a simple model to help you get started building a plan and evaluation tools for any job role. The terminology used is craft related but applies to any position. Every job role uses a combination of knowledge and tools to add value by transforming something — that might be counting quantities from the construction drawings in estimating or installing those materials in the field. The materials might be physical or digital. The tools may range from million-dollar pieces of heavy equipment to hand tools to software.
The front line is the foundation of any business. Without strength across the board — from accurate quantity take-offs to quality field installation, from fast, accurate billing and collections to reliable payroll — the business simply doesn’t work. The whole model has to work together.
Scalability means building a steady pipeline of front-line talent while developing the organizational structure and management systems to keep everyone safe and productive.
Ultimately, you want everyone who is past their training stage in a role to be consistently performing their work in alignment with your company-specific standards. Your standards will progress through six stages as your company grows.
Each contractor will be slightly different in their specific standards. They will use different tools or software. They will use different vocabulary. Job role responsibilities at the task level may vary slightly. There are general standards across the industry. Some are explicitly defined — like building codes and accounting standards. Others exist more as tribal knowledge.
This baseline knowledge and competency in a job role is similar to that of a journey-level craft worker: beyond the apprenticeship stage, but not yet a master.
The “journey” level of competency has a rich, honorable history in the trades, with roots tracing back over 500 years. It typically refers to someone who has completed an apprenticeship and is now qualified to work independently as a skilled professional.
The word itself comes from the French noun journée, meaning a day’s work, span, or travel.
A 15th-century mason’s rulebook captures the pride and expectation of this stage: “Build each day’s work as if your name were on the lintel — even when it isn’t.”
Someone else described it as similar to achieving a Black Belt in a martial art. You have learned all the basic tools and moves. You have put in your time. You have consistently demonstrated your values and skills. Now the journey toward mastery begins.
If you are training someone starting at ground zero, you will be training and evaluating them against your company standards from the beginning. They will reach journey-level and be performing to your company standards at the same time.
If you have hired someone in with existing experience, they may have general knowledge and capabilities, but they will have to learn your standards. They may come in with lots of great outside experience — including better ways of doing things. That is always worth exploring, but the first step is to get them performing consistently to the existing standards. The first rule of improvement: start with a foundation of consistent standards and execution, then improve.
The only exceptions here are for 100% first-of-a-kind job roles or for extreme turnaround situations. Those are extremely rare. It is far more common for new employees — especially new managers — brought into a company to start changing things before truly understanding them. Always remember the four interlinked phases of management system improvement.
Moving up the progression beyond performing consistently to company standards are two levels:
- Teaching others the tools, materials, technical skills, and company standards.
- Identifying and helping make improvements to the tools and company standards.
These two are basic prerequisites before anyone in a front-line technical role can be considered for promotion to any level of a supervisory or managerial role. See the Management Role Promotion Checklist.
General capability progression through to target performance levels looks like:
- No experience with basic tools
- Competent with all basic tools
- Knowledgeable of all basic materials
- Basic technical experience in role (some tasks)
- Mid-level technical experience in role (75% of tasks)
- Journey-level technical experience (most tasks)
- Consistently installs to Company Standards (safety, quality, production)
This framework will need to be expanded for each job role.
- What are the specific tools and tasks they must learn?
- What are the company standards?
- Who are the subject matter experts (SMEs) who can train?
- What relationships do they need to build inside and outside the organization?
- How, when, and by whom will the person be evaluated and given feedback?
- How much time do they need to do this? For example, most craft apprenticeships are around 8,000 hours on-the-job (OJT) and 600 hours in the classroom.
You can't do this all at once. We recommend prioritizing investment in "High-Volume" job roles — defined as needing 10 or more in your company over the next five years. Look at your "Target Talent Model."
Convenient Planning Time Horizon: How far into the future can a person comfortably envision a result, then overcome both the anticipated and unanticipated problems to achieve that expected outcome?
Beyond technical competencies, this is another dimension to consider when evaluating someone in a job role. Different roles require different levels of independence — the ability to achieve outcomes without more than incidental input from a manager.
In craft terms, there’s the entry-level person who must be closely watched for safety and quality. Then there are people who can be laid out a day at a time for specific tasks and checked on regularly. And finally, there are those who can be handed a set of plans and pointed to a floor in the building.
The simple questions as a manager about a person is that when you give them a task to go do:
- How frequently do you feel the need to check up on them?
- How frequently do you have to provide corrective feedback on safety, quality, or productivity to keep them on track?
- How have the complexity of tasks you have given them changed over the last two years?
- How has that frequency that you need to provide corrective feedback changed over the last two years?
To learn more about planning time horizon, see Stratified Systems Theory (SST).
Working through this type of evaluation with your team for front-line roles is a great way to develop management capabilities. We’ve worked through many similar evaluations. Done correctly, it always helps align the team, improve systems, and ultimately improve outcomes. The approach varies depending on your company’s stage of growth and the management team’s development phase. We will openly share all lessons we've learned that may help you. Contact us to talk through the specifics of your team.
There are similar progressions for the next tiers of the organization that will be covered in other insights, including:
- 10 progression steps for people directly supervising and managing the front line, such as Crew Leaders and Foremen.
- 4 progression steps for people managing other managers, such as General Foremen and Superintendents.
- 25 progression steps for people managing a functional area of the company, such as Estimating, Project Management, or Field Operations.
