Learnings and Missteps The Podcast

Your phone buzzes. Someone needs “a quick minute.” You drop what you’re doing, solve it, and feel great about it. Then it happens again. And again. Suddenly it’s 7 p.m., your own work is untouched, and you’re wondering why everyone keeps coming to you. In this episode, we unpack solutionizer syndrome: the habit of leaders who become hyperreactive, get pulled in every direction, and quietly train their teams to bring problems to them before trying anything on their own. It feels like leadership,

Brittany Jacques grew up on her grandfather’s excavation sites, then became a behavioral social scientist. She spent two years in the field watching how construction crews really communicate. What she saw changed how she thinks about retention. The industry puts enormous effort into project infrastructure and almost none into people infrastructure. Jesse and Brittany get into why entry-level workers leave and what leaders can do about it. They cover how to bridge generational communication gaps

Tara Cristel was owed about $200,000 on the biggest job her glazing company had ever done. She’d filed a lien, and the banks wouldn’t lend against the money because nobody could say when it would show up. So she did the one thing still in her control. She started talking about it, out loud, on the internet. And that’s how The Subcontractor Project got going. Day to day, Tara runs a subcontracting business, and she’s got the pink hard hat to prove it. In this episode she explains how a system th

You walk away from a conversation and nothing happens. No follow-up, no rapport, no real connection. What if the problem isn’t that you’re boring, but that you’re trying too hard to be interesting? In this episode, we break down why leading with your resume, credentials, and accomplishments can quietly sabotage the connections you want, and what to do instead. Resume stuff has its place on a job application. Face to face, it often builds a wall. In this episode, you’ll learn: The mindset shift

A “big zero” in writing credentials and a C in English. That’s how Doug Berry describes his qualifications, and he’s now a children’s book author, a sci-fi novelist, and a Josie Music Award nominee headed to the Grand Ole Opry. Doug is a recently retired Air Force veteran from South Carolina who asks the question most of us are afraid to answer: why am I not working on my dream? For Doug, it started when he watched his Air Force buddy study to become a pilot. It led him to send about 5,000 emai

Fourteen years on the tools. About twenty in safety. A safety expert witness. An author. And a woman who got a 98 on her journeyman's test, better than the guys who did all four years. Kim Pierce is the kind of safety professional Jesse says he wishes he'd had on every job. She doesn't stand over the crew like a "bird dog" and then tattle to the foreman. She shows up early, asks what's coming, explains the why, and finds a compliant way to get the work done. In this conversation, Jesse and Kim