Construction Genius Ep 347 Luca D

Explore how to play long-term games in construction leadership by building skills, relationships, and trust for sustained growth.

Key Takeaways

Long-term success depends on investing time in skills, relationships, and trust.
Short-term focus can yield quick wins but limits future growth potential.
Trust is foundational for effective leadership and collaboration.
Balancing immediate tasks with long-term development prevents career plateaus.
Playing your own game is essential for meaningful professional and personal growth.

What the video covers

Playing long-term games involves focusing on building skills, relationships, and trust rather than seeking immediate returns.
Short-term opportunistic behavior can lead to early gains but causes plateauing in career growth.
The hunter vs. farmer analogy illustrates the difference between short-term gains and long-term relationship building.
Trust is built through reliability, openness, and ensuring mutual benefits in relationships both internally and externally.
Balancing urgent daily tasks with investing time in long-term assets is crucial for sustained success.
Managers who invest in growing their team's skills and trust outperform those who only seek immediate results.
Playing other people's games can limit career growth; individuals should allocate time to play their own long-term games.
Practical advice includes scheduling dedicated time blocks for long-term development activities.
Building trust internally means fostering confidence that engagement and listening will lead to positive outcomes.
Long-term games require patience and consistent effort over weeks and months, not just daily hustling.

Chapters

What are the three pillars of playing long-term games discussed in the video?

The three pillars are building your skills, building your relationships, and building trust, which together enable sustained growth and success.

How can construction leaders balance urgent daily tasks with long-term development?

Leaders should dedicate at least a few hours weekly or a few days monthly to activities that build skills, relationships, and trust, while managing urgent tasks as needed.

Why is trust important in playing long-term games according to the podcast?

Trust ensures that people believe engaging with you will lead to mutual benefits, fostering reliable partnerships and stronger internal collaboration.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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How to play long-term games. That is the topic of today's conversation. There's three pillars to playing long-term games with people. And that is building your skills, building your relationships, and building trust. If you have skill, that will help you to build relationships because

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you're solving people's problems. And if you're solving people's problems, that will help to build trust. And that is what we're going to be talking about today with Luca Dana. He is a returning guest to Construction Genius. And so you

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know that if I have someone returning, it means that they have something important to share. So let's dive right into how to build long-term relationships and play long-term games with people.

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This is Eric Anderson and you're listening to Construction Genius, a leadership master class. Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. If you're a construction leader, you know all about the perspiration. And this show is all

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about the 1% inspiration that you can add to your hard work to help you to improve your leadership.

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[Music] Luca, welcome back to Construction Genius. Thank you so much for having me back.

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Eric, one of the things that I see on LinkedIn many times is people post their work anniversaries, right? And I'm always amazed when someone has been working at a particular place for, let's say, over a decade. And I always make a comment,

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keep playing long-term games with long-term people. And I know you have some insights into why playing long-term games is important and how to structure those games. So, just lead us into that conversation and why that's something that our audience should be thinking

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about. Yeah, I think long-term games are very important. And the reason we often don't play them is because we have the impression that if we want to get the most out of the year, we need to get the

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most out of every day. And so we live every day, rather opportunistically, and we think if I get the most out of today, if I get the most out of tomorrow, I will also grow the most over

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my life or over my career. But this is often not true because if you want to grow beyond a certain point, you need to spend some of your days doing things that bring no immediate return but are required to grow beyond a certain point.

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For example, building relationships, building skills, building trust, and so on. Yeah. So, it's interesting because as you start talking about that, I was thinking about a conversation that I was having with a construction executive yesterday and I said, "What's your

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favorite part of the job?" And he said, "The hunt." Right. And so I thought about, as you were speaking there, this idea of the difference between the hunter and the farmer. So the hunter very much cares about today whereas the

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farmer cares about tomorrow. Is that a framework that you've thought about in terms of this idea of playing long-term games? Yeah, exactly. I see this, for example, in sales where there are some salespeople who try to get the

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most out of every interaction with clients and maybe they lie, maybe they pressure, maybe they use

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tactics that consume trust. And then there are other salespeople who instead try to play it in each interaction not to get the most

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out of it but to make the next interaction better. And what you see is that if you measure performance over the short term, of course, the first type of salespeople will generate the most sales.

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But if you measure performance over a longer time frame, the second type of person will get the most sales. And of course, we need there are some contexts in which there are no repetitive sales at all. And then we can make other

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considerations, but that's generally the principle. If it's not with customers, it might be with your colleagues. There are some people who delegate only to get things done right now. And there are people that delegate not just

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to get the task done, but also to grow the person, to grow the skills, to grow the trust relationship. And you see that, for example, the managers, that first type of managers that see trust and engagement as a resource to consume, they

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tend to grow more at the beginning but then they cannot grow beyond a certain point.

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Yes. And instead the other type of manager, the one that sees trust and engagement as a resource to build, they are the ones that manage to grow beyond a certain point in their career.

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So how does someone shift from a short-term perspective? Because again, in construction I have things that I need to get done today but at the same time, if I'm building a project, we have weeks, months, sometimes even years that we're

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going to be interacting together. So how does someone balance the need to perform today with the need to develop those relationships and perform in the future?

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Yeah. So of course, as you say, there are certain days in which you just need to be in the now because you have a deadline, because you have something, but for me the test is over a two weeks or

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over one month period and the question is during this month did you spend a part of at least a few hours building long-term assets?

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Did you spend at least a few hours building skills, at least a few hours building relationships, and at least a few hours building trust? And if the question is no, I spent the full last month fully to get the most out of

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every day, then you need to know that if you keep doing that, very soon you will plateau, which means you will not be able to grow beyond a certain point.

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And if you want to unlock beyond the plateau, you need to spend at least a few hours every week or at least a few days every month doing things that are not urgent but are necessary to grow beyond a certain point in the future.

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Skills, relationships, or trust. Okay. So let's explore that a little bit. I think I understand the skills and the relationships aspect. We can always get back to that. But when you say building trust, how does one build trust?

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Yeah. So externally, trust means I will be a reliable partner and you will gain from engaging with me and not just buying from me but also like sharing things, being open in your communication. And internally, for me, trust is not what

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we sometimes think when we think about trusting that my manager or my coworker is a good person but trust that if I listen, if I engage with my coworker, if I listen to what he says, good things will happen to me. This is

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the kind of trust you want to build. So for example, as a manager, you want to build trust that if you say that something is important, it is indeed important; that if you guide your people to do a certain task or to follow a

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certain procedure, that would be good for them as well. Good things will happen to them. Not just that you are arbitrary or that you only do things that are just good for you, that you are an extractive kind of person, let's say.

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Yeah, it's interesting. So when you talk about playing long-term games, I think one of the frustrations that people find in life is that they are playing other people's games and they don't necessarily define the game that

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they want to play. How do I make sure that I'm playing the game that I want to play as opposed to playing other people's games?

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I think this is very important and I see it a lot, especially in young people that maybe spend a lot of the first few years playing other people's games as you say and then they at some

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point they discover that despite them working super hard, their career or life didn't advance to the point that they expected it to be. And so I think that for me it's a lot about understanding that while since we are in

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a society, you will need to spend some part of your days, part of your work working on other people's tasks. It cannot be the only thing that you're doing. So just as before I was saying at least a few hours, at least a few days

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every month needs to be spent on building the future. The same thing is at least a few hours, at least a few days, ev...

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advice instead is either you do not work overtime because you want to fully dedicate yourself to other things outside of work, which is an acceptable choice, or if you are ambitious professionally, do not work overtime on doing more of

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the same things that are already in your task description or things that are on your boss's to-do list and so on, but instead spend extra time to develop things that you need to go to the next stage of your career. It could be skills

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that you are not using right now but are necessary to grow into a managerial role for example or it could be relation building relationships that are not necessary for your current job but are necessary to grow again beyond a certain

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point professionally. Yeah. So my thought that comes into my head there is that one of the ways that people succeed in business is especially when they're young is actually by saying yes. And it's not until you get older in

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your career that you can say no. That's the mindset there, right? And so I get promoted, I get new opportunities that you're describing there because I've taken care of a whole bunch of other opportunities and issues in the role

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that I'm in. Let me ask it two ways. Number one, how does a a more senior manager protect their younger people from falling into the trap of doing other people's work? And then how does a younger person assert themselves in such

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a way so that they're not coming across as someone who is like you know this is just my job and I only do my job and is not hampering or hindering their own career.

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So let me tell you an anecdote from uh my early career. I used to work for a large corporation in Frankfurt and one day I heard my boss mentioning that one of uh my boss's boss that he was talking

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at the coffee machine and he was mentioning that there was an employee in the team very young extremely ambitious extremely hard at working and he said something along the lines of I cannot promote her because she works too much

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overtime because her solution to getting things son is spending more time on it. And the problem is that if I promote her and give her additional responsibilities, she will either burn out or drop some balls because she doesn't have any other

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solution. And for me, that was the thing that hearing that conversation basically made something click in my mind that I understood that hard work while it necessary in some measure that cannot be the only solution. And you also need to

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be able to prioritize and to organize and so on. Yeah. So my advice to young people to answer your question specifically is that it's okay to say no to a few things.

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Yes. But of course, you need in the rest of the time to demonstrate with your skills and with your abilities and with your attitude that you are not saying no to things because you want to slack, but you are saying no because you are a

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professional and that's what's actually better for the long term of everyone. So, it's a lot. It's contextual like you probably also have two friends that the same two friends if you ask them a favor and they tell you the same exact answer

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no today I cannot you might think different things about them. One you might think oh he probably really cannot and the other one you might think like oh of course he never wants to do anything and that depends not on the

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answer itself but on the track record of that person. So of course if a young person demonstrate a general attitude and track record of doing things of being proactive and so on and then on top of that they say no to a few things

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with good arguments that would be okay. Okay. So then as I'm thinking about what you said earlier you you're talking about carving out time to work on things that are important. Now in construction particularly if you're a young person

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your day is spent working on things that are not only important but urgent. They have to be done today.

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And what advice do you have for the way someone manages their calendar? Because you talked about hours or days, which I understand, but how does that actually practically apply to how someone might plan out their month and when to block

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out the time to work on things like skills and relationships and building trust? Yeah. So, you have two options for that.

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The first one is you try to find the block of time. You look at your calendar next month. You try to find the two hours block of time and you book it out and you try to defend it. Yes.

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As if it were a meeting with your manager or whatever other thing because there are a lot of things that you say no to to other things internally.

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And the second way is that you begin again by doing it over time but being careful that you try to say no to other overtime thing. Then the second thing which is important in parallel to that is to look for sources of unnecessary

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work or free work. Unnecessary work you said. Yes. Only work. And by that I mean that almost all of the people I work with as a consultant when I ask them to show me their schedule of the past week and I

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asked them if there were parts of the schedule that were either of course with a bit of hindsight they could have not done or they could have done one hour instead of two hours like that meeting could have been 30 minutes instead of 1 hour.

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Yes. or tasks that are because of rework then you know that you have a bit of time by rework I mean for example tasks that are because there was a misunderstanding maybe you didn't delegate well and now you have to redo

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it and so on and these are good sources for time that you can free just by being a little bit more clear.

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Yeah that's excellent. Now, what's interesting, you said something earlier about not taking on tasks that are outside of your role and responsibility.

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And I think that's one of the major sources of time wasting that people have is that they're getting interrupted by people who are asking them to do tasks that are outside of their role and responsibility. And often the reason

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they're getting interrupted is it's the people who report to them who are interrupting them because either they're lazy or they're not competent or the person hasn't delegated effectively to them. And so what advice do you have for people to start eliminating some of

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those interruptions? Yeah. So if those interruptions come from your subordinates, one thing which is really effective is whenever you're doing the part of work for them. So of course like one thing would be to say no this is part of your job.

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Yeah. But a lot of time we don't do it because we don't have the confidence that they know how to do it or how to do it. Well, my suggestion is of course maybe then you need to do it for them but in that

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case do it with them so that hopefully they learn as the byproduct. Yes. Because the thing is that a lot of time I see that managers react to this by doing it for them and then putting a mental reminder of I will I need to

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train them on this but then they never have the time to train them on this.

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Yeah. And very often instead doing the task together with them is a way in which they can train at a fraction of the time.

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Y this is one thing. If instead the requests come from people that are not your subordinates for example I don't know peers or other departments or or things like this. Well if it's a one-off we can discuss. But if it's a recurring

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thing, then it's really worth it to spend a little bit of time fixing it once and for all, having a 10 minutes conversation trying to understand why they need it, what they need, if there is a way to solve it once and for all.

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For example, by giving a data source. I have a friend of mine called Molson Hut, which calls these cockroach problems.

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And that's because if you Did you say coach problems? Cockroach like cockroach. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Cockroach problems. Okay. Tell me about that. If you see a cockroach in your kitchen, yeah, you don't think, oh, it's only one.

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You know that there are 10 more hiding in the walls and you decide to take decive action not based on the one that you see, but based on the 10 that are lurking.

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Yeah. Yeah. And the same applies to these interruptions. When you see an interruptions, you need to think, is this just one of interruption or is the type of interruption that will happen 10 more times?

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Yeah. And if yes, then it's okay to spend three times the amount of time of the interaction to prevent the other 10.

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So, how do you help someone who feels guilty when they say no to to people?

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Well, I'm trying to understand to make them understand that they're not really helping the other person or the company.

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So if the person is a subordinate, I'm trying to understand that if they always do that, they prevent the other person from growing because either there is a root problem or there is a lack of skill and they're not solving that. And

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if instead uh it's about saying no to to other things, very often they might be not be helping the company or their own team. Because the thing is that at the end of the end, the manager has a

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limited amount of time and if he spends them on interruptions, he's not spending them on doing their job.

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Yeah. Then of course, we need to balance a little bit, but that's the principle.

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[Music] So, we talked about skills and uh you mentioned skills, relationships, and trust. Let's go back to relationships then. What are some effective ways to build relationships that take into account both social needs as well as business needs?

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So, for me, uh more than telling you what's effective, I will tell you what I see that's ineffective.

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Okay. Yeah, that'd be great. And uh what I see that's ineffective is uh dedicated team building activities which are done outside of work.

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Okay. So for example uh I don't know be with the team, bowling with the team and so on.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there is it's not that they are not effective in creating friendship but the thing is that they are not effective at making people work better together. Those are the types of friendships that they show up when

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people are having lunch, but then they completely disappear when people are working together. Yeah.

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And so for me instead, it's about understanding that business relationships have to have an element of helping people work together. It's a bit like if you think about two basketball players, if you talk about teamwork in the context of basketball, teamwork is not

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about whether those the the people playing are friends. Teamwork is about whether people feel that if they pass the ball, the other person will use the ball well.

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Yes. And so for me in the context of a business relationship the element of relationship and of trust is that if I ask you something you will the time you spend on that will not be wasted.

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Yes. And if you want my help I will not let you down. Right. So for me this is the this is the thing that needs to be built.

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Yeah. And so of course you can build it in a social way. You can build it in front of the beer. But for me, for example, in addition to maybe a first part of the conversation in which you're just

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talking trying to build a bit of a but there needs to be a little bit of things which is work related or at least industry related. So maybe you don't talk about the project but you talk about something related to construction

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or whatever in which you make the other person understand that you care that you are competent and that you care about them uh about their problems and that basically if at work they need to ask you something or they will be asked

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about something it the engagement will not be energy wasted or will not be risky For me, that's the number one thing.

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And that seems to be the way that one would build trust. Exactly. For me, that's the thing. Like building a relationship means building trust.

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Yeah. If you just go to the bowling, for example, you build the relationship part of a relationship without building the trust part of relationship.

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Yeah. And that goes nowhere. Yes. Yeah. So that then leads us back to the first thing you mentioned, which is skill.

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Yeah. Now obviously there's technical skills, there's relational skills. Where do you think someone early in their career should make an emphasis? So early in the career I think that the number one thing you need to do is to learn how

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to do your job properly. Of course, because if you are not able to if you struggle to do that, people will not trust you and you will find so hard to do your job that you will not have the

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time to do anything else. Right? So for me the first thing is get good at your job. Once you do that and you need to be good, not necessarily fantastic right?

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Good may be great but not not necessarily outstanding. The next thing to do is to understand what's on your boss's dashboard.

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Okay. So for example, understanding what does your boss care which is on top of what you care yourself. So for example, does the boss care about deadlines more than you? Does he care more about quality?

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Does he care more about customer relationship? Does he care more about relationship with suppliers? Why? What are the things that he thinks about and trying to understand why?

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Yes, this is for me the second thing. And then the third thing is to try to understand one more layer on top of that. So your boss's boss, what's on the dashboard? And then just be curious. uh what does finance care about? This is a

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super interesting for me question. And by that I don't mean of course like the very basics of finance. I don't know profits, cost or revenue. But what I'm thinking is when the for example, what does the CTO of your company care about?

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And for example, it could be cash conversion cycles. Yes. Why? What does it matter? And then you always think about how it relates to your job or to your boss or to your team's job. So for example, the CTO of the company might

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care about cash conversion cycle. What in your job impacts or could impact cash conversion cycle? That's a fantastic question.

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Yeah. And so this is the mentality that that I will do. And then the third thing on which I would care about is to understand the very important principle that as you progress in a corporate ladder, the job becomes less and less

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about doing things yourself. Yes. And skills and more and more about getting others to do things and relationships.

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Yep. And you need to understand this because very often people think once I get promoted I will start thinking more in terms of delegating and more in terms of relationships.

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Yeah. But it's usually the other way around. You need to demonstrate the ability to think in terms of delegation in the relationship in order to be promoted.

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And by the way since last time we spoke we spoke about AI. Yeah. It's very interesting because the more AI becomes part of the job, the more the work of everyone including lowle line employees becomes less about doing things themselves and more about

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delegating to AI and building relationships with people or colleagues. And so for me it's extremely important because in the past only people aiming at higher levels in the corporate ladder had to do the switch towards being good to delegate and to build the

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relationships. But the more AI enters a line level in your in your industry, the more you need to do the shift anyway just to be good at your line level job.

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Yeah, that's interesting. [Music] Think about the last time you promoted someone into a leadership role and it failed. Why did it fail? I can tell you one reason. People know how to build projects, but they don't know how to

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build and lead teams of people. Construction comes with its challenges that only insiders truly understand.

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[Music] So I published a video on recently a very short one that was addressing an issue that a lot of people struggle with particularly in construction. So, in construction, let's say I'm working in the field and I'm running a crew and we

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started at point A and we finished at point B and we put some physical structure in place and perhaps I was side by side with my guys doing the work and then I get promoted and I get promoted into a role where I'm no longer

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side by side with my guys getting my hands dirty, but I'm leading the people who are doing that. Just like you described there, I'm delegating. But my problem is I begin to feel guilty because I don't feel like I'm working

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anymore. My job description has been changed and I'm working and accomplishing more through others. At least that's what I'm supposed to do. But it doesn't feel like I'm doing anything. How does someone deal with that sense of of in some ways

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uselessness or that sense of guilt that they have when they do get promoted and they are delegating more?

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Yeah, the thing is that that guilt might or might not be justified in the sense that whenever you deal with the roles, I'm thinking for example about sports coaches, a basketball coach. Yeah.

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Or an army general. Yeah. We can both think about sports coach as there are some sports coach and some army general who indeed stop doing the work.

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Yep. And they should feel guilty of that. But we can also think about army generals and coaches which keep doing the work even though it's of a completely different nature.

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Yeah. Like even though of course they're not fighting in the field or running with the team anymore, people are their players and their soldiers are still perceiving like they're still doing their job. Yes.

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It's just different. So for me the question is you need to have those two models in your mind and make sure that you are the type of general or the type of basketball coach which despite doing a different job is still doing his job

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and still leading his team effectively. And if you if you do that you can be completely free of all the guilt and what does it mean concretely? So for me it means number one not being out of touch which means of course you will

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have to deal with different people maybe you start spending part of your day in the office that's completely fine. The question is what happens when you are back with the team. Do you start speaking in a language that is different

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from the one you were speaking before or do you keep having the same language?

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Did you lose the perspective of the problems of the crew or do you still remember the problems of the crew and now you're trying to bridge between the needs of the higher levels and the problems and the reality and the

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constraint of the crew for example. So that's another way to build trust right there.

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Exactly. Because a lot of trust is about demonstrating that you know the problems of the other person.

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Yeah. And that you are listening to them. Not necessarily agreeing and not necessarily deciding their way but listening. If the people feel that you listened truly, not just performatively, but you truly listen to them, they will be okay with

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whatever decision you take. Of course, you also need to take decisions competently because if you always take the wrong decision, but they will be okay with the decision. Whereas instead if they have the impression that you don't listen to them or you listen

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performatively, they will not trust. That's interesting. Okay. So, as we wrap up here, sometimes you start playing long-term games, but then you run across people who don't have that perspective.

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They're short-term thinkers. They're takers, not givers. All that kind of stuff. What advice do you have for someone who is in a situation where they need to make a change in a business relationship because it's not ultimately going to be falling into that realm of

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playing long-term games with long-term people? Well, indeed that's biggest danger to yourself is that you spend all the time with people that play short-term games and either you get caught into that or even if you start playing long-term

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games yourself because you see the people around you that are progressing faster, you think that their strategy is better, but you need to take into account that they will not grow beyond a certain point.

Speaker A

Yes. there. So you need to be able to evaluate by yourself what enables you to grow beyond a certain point and to know that you cannot imitate them. Now, what happens if your boss, for example, doesn't allow you to play long-term games, for

Speaker A

example? Right? So, in this situation, I think that the first thing that you could consider is to see if you really need your boss's approval to play them because it happens a lot of times in which it's okay to

Speaker A

again do what your boss needs up to a certain point and then play long-term game outside of that. like you don't necessarily need your boss's approval to to learn certain skills to build certain relationships and and other things. Y

Speaker A

there are other situations instead in which the boss is much more of an active problem like he really pushes you to work over time all the time on short-term things and it really doesn't leave you time to do anything outside of

Speaker A

that and then it's probably a good idea in that case to um to see if you can move horizontally within the company outside of the company. Yes.

Speaker A

Yeah. It's interesting. The number one thing is that you should differentiate between like situations that are temporary and situations that are formally temporary but are going to to be like that until you are proactively change them because a big trap is that you think like this

Speaker A

month I didn't have time but next time I will will you like is it a really temporary situation or is it going to be a situation which is going to be like that until you proactively change it.

Speaker A

There are situations in sometimes good to adopt for a short term some avoidance tactics but avoidance tactics can never be a long-term solution and and so you can make considerations based on that.

Speaker A

That's excellent. Excellent. Well, look, I really appreciate this this discussion. I I know for me long-term games with long-term people is a tremendous asset in building any relationship, any career. tell us a little bit more about yourself and how

Speaker A

people can get in touch with you. Yeah, so I actually wrote a book which is called winning long-term games.

Speaker A

It's my bestselling book to date and you can find it on Amazon. And otherwise uh I also published a few other books and my core work is uh I am an independent consultant and I work with uh with

Speaker A

companies to help them develop their people and solve all kinds of people problems. And uh people can find me on my website which is luca-delana.com with doublel and doubleln.

Speaker A

luca-delana.com with doublel and doublen. Excellent. Excellent. So we'll have links in the show notes to that that book on Amazon and to your website and uh Luke, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming back on Genius.

Speaker A

Thank you so much for having me, Eric. Yep. You're welcome. Thank you for listening to my interview with Luca.

Speaker A

Check out the links in the show notes for his book on playing long-term games and also contact him on his website if you'd like to learn more about the work that he does. And finally, give Construction Genius a rating and a review wherever

Speaker A

you get your podcasts. Like and subscribe if you're still on YouTube. And uh I'll catch you on the next episode.

Speaker A

Thank you for listening to this episode of Construction Genius. Hope you found that 1% of inspiration to help you in the next few days. If you like the show, please give us a five-star review on iTunes. Share it with other construction

Speaker A

leaders who you think would benefit. And always remember that the show is brought to you by Kick-Ass meetings. I've been working with construction leaders since 2004, teaching them how to run extremely effective problem-solving meetings that gets their people collaborating, taps

Speaker A

into their creativity. And to get yourself a free copy of the kick-ass meeting report, go to www.ericanderton.com/kickass meetings. Grab yourself that free report, read it, use it in your business. You'll find it extremely useful. And thanks again for listening.

Speaker A

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Topics:construction leadershiplong-term gamesbuilding trustrelationship buildingcareer growthskills developmentmanagement strategiesleadership podcastprofessional growthEric Anderton

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