Power Skills for Hard Job Sites
Go behind the scenes, and discover tools and resources for improving your negotiation, and communication skills
Description
Project sites are complex social environments where real-time conflicts arise. Once shovels hit the ground, site and project leaders are constantly navigating competing priorities. Negotiating between owners, authorities having jurisdiction, subcontractors, consultants, and suppliers in these stressful, time-sensitive scenarios forms a large part of the job. This session focuses on 6 critical and essential human power skills required to successfully manage and operate construction sites. Go behind the scenes, and discover tools and resources for improving your negotiation, and communication skills.
Learning Outcomes:
- How to identify and establish your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement);
- Critical thinking skills needed when facing an integrative or distributive bargaining decision;
- Using a workshop dilemma, discover how to apply each bargaining style when confronted with a need to negotiate a solution;
- How to identify and leverage your own non-verbal communication in a face-to-face team environment;
- 7 key elements to be mindful of when using your own voice to communicate;
- How to speak so people will listen;
- Determining the best channel to use when communicating in all directions – from peer to peer, versus to client, versus to another project stakeholder;
- Understand the circle of safety as it applies to a construction site and workshop the trust split theory when working with stakeholders having differing project outcome interests
Intended Audience
This fully interactive workshop is a must for today’s contract administrators, project managers, coordinators, and site superintendents working in general contracting, subcontracting and real estate development offices.
Speaker
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Derek Smith, President/Lead Facilitator - Constructionlab
Derek Smith spent 15 years of his career in construction boots on-site and behind the drawing board and CADD equipment honing his craft; drafting and designing buildings. As part of the pioneering generation shifting the production of construction drawings and contract documents from the drawing board to digital format, Derek was engaged to work on some of Canada's most recognizable retail and commercial building projects from Newfoundland to Victoria. His roles have included prime consultant, job captain/owners' project manager for Chrysler Canada, and design firm principal for over $400 million in built work. Along the way, Derek honed his teaching and facilitating skills at St. Clair College in Windsor Ontario as an adjunct professor in the Architectural Technology and Interior Design diploma and undergraduate degree programs. Derek served a 2 year term on the Donald J. Smith School of Building Technology Program Advisory Committee at Fanshawe College in London ON between 2009 and 2011
In 2007, Derek shifted his career path by taking the helm at the mixed trade London & District Construction Association where he assisted unionized signatory contractors, and open shop contractors with day-to day challenges they faced in performance and outcomes of projects. In 2010, Derek assisted in bargaining OLRB board area 3 unionized employers to a strike free round, bargaining multiple collective agreements that avoided work interruptions in the ICI construction sector.
Derek is the principal of Constructionlab Ltd., and serves as the Executive Director of the Walls and Ceilings Association Ottawa (WACCA). His duties include assisting employer’s signatory to OLRB board area 15 ICI and residential agreements and navigating legislation, building code changes and more. WACCA is an accredited ErBA for the region.
Since 2013, Derek has worked with over 12,500 attendees in his workshops, developed over 15 general and topic specific industry courses and workshops and co-created with the Ontario Construction Secretariat, Canada’s only Fundamentals of Construction Labour Relations course recognized by McMaster University. Derek maintains a BCIN and limited license in architectural consulting and is a regular speaker/contributor at The Buildings Show held each year in Toronto.
Related Info
Handouts and lesson summaries are combination of digital and paper format