The Energy of the Team!

The Energy of the Team: The Leadership Pattern That Turns Around a Struggling Project

There is a category of problem in construction that does not appear on the schedule and does not show up in the cost report. It shows up in the way people walk across the site, in how long it takes to get a response in the morning huddle, in whether the foreman’s shoulders are back or forward when they talk to the crew. Morale. Energy. The invisible force that determines whether a team that is behind catches up or falls further behind. When energy is high, people move faster, solve problems more creatively, communicate more honestly, and absorb setbacks without losing their forward momentum. When energy is low, the same capable people become reactive, cautious, and self-protective. The project that loses its energy does not just lose morale. It loses production. A leader who understands this and knows how to address it holds one of the most valuable tools in construction leadership.

The Problem That Compounds When Nobody Addresses It

When a project gets into trouble, the response is typically focused on the schedule: how far behind are we, what can be accelerated, where we can add resources. All of those are legitimate questions. None of them address the condition that is often driving the schedule problem in the first place, which is that the team is down in the mouth. The workers arrive without enthusiasm. The foremen manage reactively instead of proactively. The superintendents and project managers are spending their energy on damage control rather than on creating conditions where the crew can actually perform. A team in that state does not respond to schedule pressure the way a high-energy team does. Add more resources to a demoralized team and you often get more people doing less work, not the same people doing more of it.

The System Did Not Set the Team Up for Success

The projects that lose their energy rarely do so because the people were weak or uncommitted. They lose it because the system failed them. Too many change orders without a clear strategy for managing them. Inconsistent leadership presence during the early phases, when culture and standards are formed. An environment of blame rather than problem-solving that made people cautious about surfacing issues early. A schedule that was unrealistic from the beginning, so that falling behind felt like confirmation of failure rather than a signal to adapt. When a team’s energy is down, the question worth asking is what the system produced, not what the people lacked. The system failed them. The job of the leader who arrives in that situation is to fix the system and rebuild the energy, in that order.

Two Stories That Prove the Pattern

Jason Schroeder describes a project in Texas where morale was in the basement. Too many change orders, too much chaos, people down in the mouth across the whole team. A general superintendent came in and did something deceptively simple: he separated the change order work from the base contract work, clarified what the team was actually responsible for, and gave everyone buttons that said “we can do it.” When the job finished, he replaced the buttons with ones that said “we did it.” The psychological impact of that sequence was real: clarity about the scope, a symbol of shared identity, and a visible marker of the transition from struggle to success.

Weston Woolsey at Oakland Construction followed the same pattern on a recovery project. He came in, stabilized the project, broke the team out of the spiral they were in, drove them to win something measurable, kept them winning, and then rewarded the team in a way that created proximity and social reinforcement of their success. Within days, the team that had been demoralized was joking with each other and building momentum. The same people. A different system and a different leader who understood the pattern.

The Pattern That Actually Works

Every successful project recovery Jason has observed follows the same sequence, even when the leaders doing it have not named it explicitly. The steps are consistent enough to be treated as a system.

Stabilize first. Before anything else can improve, the environment has to stop getting worse. That means cleanliness, safety, and organization on the site. It means cancerous behavior, meaning the conversations that drag the team down, create factions, or undermine trust, has to stop. It means visible order: people knowing where to go, what to do, and that the people in charge are in command of the situation. Until the environment is stable, energy work has nowhere to land. The team that is still in chaos cannot receive an energy injection that sticks. Stabilize first.

Break people out of their cycles. A team that is down in the mouth has been reinforcing that state through their shared behavior. Someone has to interrupt the pattern. This does not always require conflict, but it sometimes does. It requires energy that is noticeably different from the energy currently on the site, enough of a contrast that people cannot simply continue their existing pattern without acknowledging that something has changed. This is where the leader’s physical presence, the posture of their body, the volume and conviction of their voice, and the urgency of their engagement become production tools as much as any system or schedule.

Drive them to win something. The first win does not need to be large. It needs to be real. Identify something specific, achievable within the current week, that the team can accomplish and point to as evidence that things are moving in a different direction. The purpose of the first win is not the outcome itself. The purpose is the chemical and psychological state that winning produces. When people win, the body responds. Endorphins release. Posture changes. The way people talk about their work changes. The win is the trigger for the state change, not the destination.

What to Do Once the Wins Start

Here is what happens after the first win, and why most recovery efforts fail at exactly this stage:

• The team has had a win and the leader’s instinct is to push immediately to the next challenge, skipping the reward and recognition that would consolidate the team’s identity as a winning group
• The energy that was built by the win dissipates without reinforcement, and the team slides back toward the low-energy state they were in before
• The leader keeps driving without pausing to let the team feel what winning feels like as a shared social experience
• Without the shared social experience of winning together, the team remains a collection of individuals rather than a group that feeds off each other’s momentum

The correct response to the first win is to celebrate it, then immediately set up the conditions for the next one. Give the team something: a shared meal, a recognition moment, a brief break that puts them in physical proximity to each other as a winning group. What Paul Akers teaches, and what Jason has seen work consistently, is to tour people through the wins. Let the owner or the company’s leadership see what the team has accomplished. Let the team present their own success. The moment someone has to articulate their accomplishment to an audience that cares about it, they own it differently. That ownership is what feeds the flywheel.

Be Consistent. Always.

The boxing analogy that Jason uses is right: construction leadership when a project is struggling is about staying standing. The leader who can maintain consistent positive energy day after day, whose shoulders stay back and whose head stays up even when the day is difficult, is the leader who eventually wears down the resistance. Not through force. Through consistency that becomes undeniable. At some point, fighting against a leader who keeps showing up with high energy and a clear direction becomes more exhausting than joining them.

The horse analogy completes the picture. When a horse is going downhill on uncertain footing, keeping its head up prevents a fall. Not because it eliminates the stumble, but because a horse whose head is up will stumble forward rather than roll over. A project team whose leader keeps their energy up will stumble through the difficult passage rather than collapse under it. The families that depend on those workers, and the owners who depend on that project, are protected by the leader who refuses to let the team’s head go down.

Built for Leaders Who Show Up When It Matters Most

The leader’s job on a struggling project is not to be the most technically sophisticated person in the room. It is to be the person who shows up with energy when everyone else’s is depleted, who stabilizes the environment before asking for performance, who drives the team to the first win before expecting momentum, and who sustains consistent positive energy long enough for the flywheel to take over. That is leadership in construction at its most fundamental. It produces the same results on a 580-person project that it produces in a superintendent boot camp with twenty people: stabilize, break the cycle, win, reward, repeat. If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

Keep the Head Up and Rev Through the Hill

The sand dune analogy says everything that needs to be said about project energy: if you are going up a steep hill, you do not approach it tentatively and hope for the best. You rev up, get momentum, and commit to the climb. The energy you build before the hill is what gets you over it. The leader who builds team energy before the project’s hardest phases and maintains it through them does not need to try to recover morale on the other side. They never lose it in the first place. As Benjamin Franklin observed: energy and persistence conquer all things. Bring the energy. Stay persistent. Lead the team over the hill.

On we go.

FAQ

Why is team energy a leadership priority rather than just a cultural nice-to-have?

Because team energy directly affects production output. A high-energy team moves faster, solves problems more creatively, surfaces issues earlier, and absorbs setbacks without losing momentum. A low-energy team becomes reactive, cautious, and self-protective, which produces slower decisions, less honest communication, and a production environment where problems get hidden rather than addressed. The schedule impact of a demoralized team is real and measurable. Energy is not separate from production. It is one of its inputs, and a leader who understands that treats energy management as a production responsibility.

What does stabilizing the project mean in the context of an energy recovery?

Stabilizing means creating an environment where the team can work without fighting the environment at the same time. On a site, that means cleanliness, safety, and organization that signal someone is in control. It means removing cancerous behavior, the conversations and interpersonal dynamics that are draining the team’s energy into internal conflict rather than external output. It means establishing visible order so that people know what they are supposed to do, where they are supposed to go, and that the people leading the project are actually leading it. Energy work cannot stick in a chaotic environment. The team has nowhere to direct the energy that a good leader brings. Stabilize first, then build the energy.

How do wins create momentum and why does the size of the win matter less than people think?

The first win does not need to be large. It needs to be real and attributable to the team’s effort. What the win does is trigger a physical and psychological state change: endorphins release, posture shifts, the way people talk about their work changes. That state change is the foundation of momentum, not the outcome of the win itself. A crew that finishes a challenging installation clean, on time, and inspected correctly in a week when the project was struggling has a reference point they can point to as evidence that they can win. That reference point, reinforced by recognition and a shared reward, becomes part of the team’s identity. The second win is easier than the first because the team now has evidence that winning is possible.

What role does physical presence and body language play in energy leadership?

A significant role. Jason describes the specific physical posture of leadership on a struggling project: shoulders back, head up, chest forward without aggression, projecting confident energy in a way that is visible to anyone within thirty feet. This is not performance. It is the physical expression of a genuine internal state of belief that the project can and will turn around. The body communicates before the words do, and a leader whose posture conveys uncertainty, defeat, or fatigue is broadcasting that state to every worker and foreman who sees them. Conversely, a leader who maintains the physical posture of confidence and forward momentum when everyone around them is down in the mouth creates a visible contrast that people eventually have to respond to. Motion creates emotion in both directions.

How does the reward phase of the pattern prevent teams from sliding back into low energy?

The reward phase works by converting individual wins into a shared group identity. When a team eats lunch together after a successful week, when the owner comes to the site and recognizes specific contributions, when a superintendent gives a speech in front of the whole crew about what they accomplished, the team stops being a collection of individuals who had a good week and becomes a group that identifies as successful together. That social identity, established through physical proximity and shared experience, is what feeds the flywheel that keeps energy high. Without it, the win is a data point. With it, the win is part of who the team is. Teams that know they are winners keep winning.