High-Agency Leadership

What Redlines (and Corrections) Cost — Fixing Mistakes or Making One?

The hidden price of winning small debates with your team

While the examples and language below may be more familiar to those on the design side of the AEC industry, the idea that correction of others has cascading impacts is applicable to all forms of high-agency leadership.

If there’s one thing senior engineers, architects, and similar AEC professionals are familiar with it’s marking up a set of plans. While digital markups are now en vogue, we’ve all been on the giving or receiving end of plenty of red ink at some point in our career.

My question: what do those redlines cost?

For the very literal out there the answer is around $0.07 ($2 for a quality red pen, spread over dozens of projects and comments).

The next level of thinking has the expense around $100.07 (a few minutes of a high billable rate to make the comment, a few minutes for a lower billable rate to make the changes, and then a few more minutes for the higher billable rate to review the correction).

But what if I said some redlines cost more — much more?

That while the physical (if not comical) expense of red ink is easy to see, and the extra time spent burns through fee, the dynamics of employee engagement and autonomy aren’t as obvious when (red) pen is put to paper.

If We Keep Losing, We Eventually Give Up

Over the course of several studies, psychologists have shown something we all intuitively know: if we keep losing at a game, we eventually give up.

More specifically, they show that rats — like dogs, monkeys, many children, and some of us adults — love to wrestle (or “wrassle” if you’re from some parts of the South) for fun.

And again, like us, rats don’t mind being the underdog (small rat) taking on the favorite (large rat). But to keep the game going, large rats know something we sometimes forget: they have to let their opponent win (around 30% of the time studies show), or the game ends as the smaller rat moves on to find somewhere they can feel like a winner more often.

Now, you and your staff obviously aren’t rats, and design and construction work isn’t wrestling — but the insight is the same:

Every defeat, every correction, every being wrong or being told you’re wrong comes with the risk of disengagement.

I’ve been a licensed professional engineer for nearly 20 years, and I’ve gone through gallons of red ink, so in no way am I here to argue for not correcting what needs correcting — whether that be elements of a design, how a project is estimated, bought out, sequenced and built, or how staff goes about their work and complies with policy and procedure.

But the key phrase in the above is “NEEDS correcting.”

While some needed corrections are obvious — a bathroom missing an exhaust fan, an egress path that’s too long, a construction sequence that has the concrete slab sub showing up before underground inspections are approved, or an employee using the office for after-hours rendezvous (sometimes I definitely don’t miss owning a firm) — we often place more decisions in the black-and-white NEED category when they’re truly more a shade of gray and are more of a preference.

One lesson you spend a lot of red ink learning is that many back-and-forths between designer and seal holder, project manager and site super, or between AEC leader and someone on their team aren’t about decisions detrimental to public safety or clear reductions in the quality of the project.

Instead they’re about two parties both staking their claim to being at the summit of “The Best Option.” And the rewards are asymmetric (in a bad direction) for the AEC leader to “win” the debate.

If the more senior party wins out then the project (or on a macro scale, the performance of a firm) gets some marginal percentage better. But…

• More red ink is spent
• More time (read $$$) is spent on corrections, re-review, and (sigh) likely further corrections
• The junior party moves that much closer to disengagement, and at the extreme starts to believe they’re playing a “game” they can’t win

On the flip side, if the senior party yields to the choices of the junior party then the benefits accrue…

• A few less red pens to replace
• No time (again, read $$$) spent on corrections ad infinitum
• And a junior party that feels more confident, engaged, and granted more of the autonomy that’s essential to effective high-agency leadership

Knowing What Truly Matters

There are certainly times, both in the project work and running an AEC organization, that leaders need to step in and head off disaster. But there are far more times when red ink, time, and employee goodwill are spent on personal preference and trivial improvements.

And it’s the latter that gives rise to one of the best traits an AEC leader can have: knowing what TRULY matters. Then for the rest, learning what you can live with, even if it’s not “what you would have done.” Because insisting things always be done your way is how you create an unwinnable game — one your team eventually stops playing.

High-agency leadership is just about that — high agency. And effective AEC leaders know that learning to live with more of the decisions of others preserves what they need most from their team: high agency (and saves on red ink).

I’m Zack Tomlin, founder of Your Craft Your Climb. I help firms develop the senior and emerging leaders they depend on, through peer groups, workshops, and direct advisory support built specifically for the AEC industry.

Related reading: Experts vs. “Experts” — Evaluating Each and Why People Misunderstand Each Other at Work. Ready to put these ideas to work? Work with Zack.

Further Reading