Balancing the Project Team for Long-Term Success

In this blog, I’m continuing my reading from Elevating Pre-Construction Planning and diving into a critical topic, team balance.

Once you’ve built a functional team with the right leader, clear goals, and healthy behaviors, the real challenge begins: maintaining that balance over the long haul. When a project team is pushed past its capacity, cycle times increase, throughput slows, and errors become more frequent.

Overburden can sneak in from many directions, excessive administration, pointless meetings, unnecessary approvals, constant changes without extra help, or owner-driven variation. As a leader, my top priority is preventing this waste of valuable time and energy by keeping my team balanced and healthy.

Three Key Metrics for Evaluating Balance

1. People & Positions

Ask yourself: Do I have the right people on the team, and are they in the right roles? Having too few people doing too many jobs or misaligned roles, creates burnout. And yes, sometimes you have to remove “high-performing assholes” because the damage they do to morale outweighs their contributions.

2. Personal Organization & Schedule

A balanced team follows leader standard work, has personal organization systems, and protects the blend between work and home life. As a leader, it’s my job to protect their time, not exploit it. That means making schedules and organization systems visible so I can step in when someone’s workload becomes unsustainable.

Instead of asking, How can I get more out of people? I ask, How can I get people home on time?

3. Project Conditions

Even a well-staffed, well-organized team can be thrown off balance by project conditions such as:

• Design changes & change orders – Isolate changes and don’t overload the team without additional resources. 
• Constant variation – Standardize meetings, agendas, and processes wherever possible. 
• Lack of support – Hire, borrow, or outsource help when needed. 
• Too many or too few people – Right-size the team to keep communication smooth. 
• Waste & inefficiency – Remove waste like a hawk with “Paul Akers goggles.” 
• Unhealthy conflict – Address and resolve toxic dynamics fast. 

The Monthly Team Scorecard

I use a monthly scorecard to measure areas like:

• Proper roles and workload balance 
• Healthy work-life blend 
• Physical and emotional health of the team 
• Stability, focus, and alignment 
• Healthy conflict and chemistry 
• Labor quality and quantity 
• Design and engineering cooperation 

Aggregating these scores across the team provides an early-warning system for imbalance, so we can fix problems before they snowball.

The Reflection

Balancing a project team is about more than just keeping schedules and tasks in check, it’s about preserving morale, focus, and energy. Owners, reps, designers, trades, and even corporate demands can throw your team into a downward spiral if you’re not actively protecting their balance.

Once the energy required to keep the project under control exceeds the total energy your team can give, things will collapse. My job is to make sure that never happens.

Key Takeaway

A balanced team is a productive team. Protecting your people’s capacity and morale is the single most effective way to keep projects on track and profitable.