31/2025: We will restart, refreshed.

Image © Jose 2025

We were discussing, there is still some work to be done in the house, work that must be done by our General Contractor and his team, work that cannot be done in a day and that will generate noise, debris, some chaos. Perhaps not much more than we have been enduring, but for my wife who works from home, she is tired and beyond grumpy. We have a vacation period coming up, a few weeks by the beach in Portugal, so why not plan for the work to be done then, sort of leave, and when we come back, all is done. Great idea, right?

We both looked at each other hard and decided not to, which is silly if you think of it. The GC and team have done so much work in the house, so much of it was done in the first three months when we were not around, why not delegate to him the responsibility of doing what he is being paid for?

Realistically? Delegation can be a good thing for everyone, but only when it’s done well. Otherwise, it can frustrate everyone involved and lead to wasted time, money, and trust.

Reality is, some of the core tenets of delegation have been broken.
The first one is trust. We have lost trust in the GC and in his ability to do the things we want in the way we’d like them to be done. We understand that we are the ones responsible for defining, in as much detail as possible, what we want, but there will always be moments when there are decisions – sometimes the micro-decisions I discussed in an earlier post – where he and/or his team need to make calls. And we have spotted so many of these situations where we do not align, do not like the result, and sometimes it cannot be changed. Others could be fixed, but will get us in construction mode again. Much of this is because he has concurrent jobs taking place (some would say “obviously”) and he is not around. His team has a certain level of experience and of judgment and discernment, and that has failed us more than a couple of times.

The second tenet is really about clarity, clarity in defining what needs to be done, in the level of expectation, clarity of communication which presumes a shared language. My brother-in-law was saying the other day that when he started to work as a contractor, he asked himself what the architect was being paid for in most of the projects. Now, he says he has come to love having them on the job, because, as he says, everything is in writing and is so detailed there is very little room for things to go wrong.

But there are several assumptions in this concept: one, that we know exactly what we want; two, that what we want is the best option, the feasible and viable one, beyond the desired one. My team has heard me say that we need to coach our business partners not to ask us to do a box with a hole on the bottom and a latch, but to ask us to design a better mousetrap. This applies for when you are asking for design work. This clarity we are discussing is about asking for a box with a hole on top and a latch, with details about the box, the size of the hole, latch quality and the whole nine yards.

And we are either unwilling or unable to provide the level of detail and clarity that would reduce the risk of things going wrong, and if the GC and his team have shown that we cannot trust their judgment and discernment, then we cannot delegate properly.

The third tenet of delegation is also tricky: authority. Basically, the GC must have enough decision-making power to carry out the job without being blocked. And in theory, he has. But if he is not around when these moments arise, and if his team has a wide aperture to make decisions, having authority alone won’t do the job. It’s great when he is around (he has shown he has the authority) but for us, many times this authority has come in handy more when we need to change things that were not done correctly, or were done poorly and below our expectations. In those cases, he does have the authority to say “fix it.” We need him to have the authority on time, not just after.

The fourth tenet of proper delegation is accountability. But that in itself has limitations, because while there are mechanisms to track progress and correct course if needed – we can establish a daily meeting where we discuss work done/to be done, we ask for photos/videos, we hold payment till completion – once you start going down that road, and especially if that is not the road we have been travelling on (the GC and us), then we must be prepared for the unexpected.

Basically, we have established a relationship of mutual understanding with our GC, he acknowledges his mistakes, proposes solutions, negotiates compromises. My sister-in-law is much harder on these things, she is of the opinion that if it is not well done, it must be done again, no matter the cost nor the consequence. My brother-in-law, who is a contractor, reminds her that the reason why things are not done according to expectations is because we (the client) did not specify it correctly. You see where this is going…

So, we are shutting the house down, stopping all work in progress, going for a few weeks of vacation. This way, we will not be concerned about what is being done, how it is being done. When we come back, we will hopefully be refreshed enough to proceed with the present way of working, basically defining what we need done, with some level of detail about the how, and then be very close to the ground and attempt to identify all those micro-decisions where we can influence the outcome of the task at hand.

Some say this should be the job of the GC (what he is being paid for), but what we have learned is that neither him nor his contractors, which by the way are specialized and good at what they do, can do things in any way different from what they do unless specified in copious level of detail, in a way that is viable and feasible from their perspective, that follows code requirements, that can be done within the quote they presented.

We will restart, tanned and refreshed after our vacation, hopefully this period of rest will be good, for all involved.