Are You Showing Appreciation or Just Assuming People Already Know?

There is a foreman in Tucson, Arizona named John Bohr. He traced every circuit in color-coded pencil. He marked every outlet by circuit number. He kept his as-built drawings current. He took lean concepts that Jason Schroeder was teaching, wrote them on a list, and oriented his crew to them. His installations were exact. His communication was reliable. His people always knew what they were doing. In Jason’s words, John Bohr was the best foreman he had ever seen in his career. And for twenty years, nobody had ever said so in writing.

The Letter That Changed Everything

When Jason was working with Wilson Electric on a project in Tucson, he sent a letter of appreciation addressed to the company president and the local leadership, naming John Bohr specifically and listing four or five ways the crew had gone above and beyond. A couple of days later, the response came back from Wilson Electric’s leadership saying that in twenty years, they had never received written feedback like this, even though their people had been performing at that level on project after project throughout that entire time.

John himself, a no-nonsense professional from the Northeast who was built for getting things done, was softened by it. He was grateful in a way that Jason did not expect, and that response stuck. The realization was this: a person who delivers extraordinary work for two decades with no written acknowledgment develops a kind of numbness to the job. Not bitterness necessarily, but a gruffness, a quiet acceptance that recognition is not part of the deal. And what a loss that is, both for that person and for every project they work on.

After that experience, Jason made sending letters of appreciation to performing trade partners a consistent practice. And the outcome followed a pattern that anyone who has led people in the field could have predicted. The trades he recognized went out of their way to take care of him. Not because he was buying their loyalty with flattery. Because he was treating them as the skilled, committed professionals they actually were.

What Dale Carnegie Got Right

Jason referenced Dale Carnegie’s principle from How to Win Friends and Influence People that he calls giving someone a good name to live up to. The idea is that when you sincerely name the qualities you see in someone, something in them rises to meet that name. They become more of what you have described because you have shown them that you see it.

Applied to construction, this principle has real operational weight. The trades, the foremen, the laborers, the lead persons working on your project are not a faceless production resource. They are people who carry the same human need for recognition that every person carries. They want to know that the work they are doing matters and that someone with authority and perspective has noticed how they are doing it.

Jason made a point in this episode that deserves to be said plainly. The construction workforce is not a lesser group. The idea that someone who did not attend a four-year university is less capable, less intelligent, or less worthy of respect is not just wrong. It is damaging. It has caused generations of skilled builders to internalize a story about themselves that has no basis in the reality of what they produce every day. These are creative, capable, hardworking human beings who have followed a different path to mastery and who deserve to hear the truth about their value just as much as anyone in a corporate office does.

When a superintendent tells a foreman what they genuinely see in that person’s ability and leadership, and means it, the foreman carries that forward. They work harder. They communicate more openly. They bring their problems to the surface because they trust that the relationship can handle it. That is not a soft outcome. That is a production outcome.

Jason connected this back to one of his core beliefs about how construction culture has treated its workforce. For too long, the trades have operated inside a system that undervalued their intelligence, dismissed their creativity, and communicated through pressure rather than partnership. A letter of appreciation is a small but direct act of resistance against that pattern. It says: I see you, I know what this took, and the project is better because you were on it. That message, delivered sincerely and specifically, does something that no safety incentive program or bonus structure can replicate. It reaches the person. And people who feel reached perform differently than people who feel used.

The Habit That Changes Everything

The most practical part of this episode is the simplest. Jason proposed building a monthly habit into your leader standard work: send one written note of appreciation to a trade partner who has earned it. Not a token line at the bottom of an email. A genuine, specific, named acknowledgment of what they did and why it mattered.

Here is what that habit produces over time:

• Trade partners who feel seen and valued show up differently than those who feel invisible
• Foremen who receive genuine recognition become more coachable and more communicative
• Companies who receive written appreciation from GC leadership share it internally, which motivates entire crews 
• The relationship between GC and trade becomes one of mutual investment rather than transactional obligation 
• Your reputation as a leader who notices and acknowledges excellence becomes part of how trades talk about you

The last point is not a minor thing. Trade foremen talk. They compare notes on which superintendents and project teams treat them well and which ones do not. The leaders who build a reputation for genuine appreciation attract the best crews and the best effort because people want to work for someone who sees them.

There is also a self-directed dimension to this practice that Jason touched on near the end of the episode. The act of looking for excellence, of genuinely searching your project for the person or crew that deserves recognition, changes how you see your site. It trains your attention toward what is working rather than defaulting to what is broken. Leaders who practice appreciation consistently tend to carry a different energy on their projects, and their teams feel it. The culture of a job site reflects the posture of the people running it. A leader who notices and names excellence creates a site where excellence is the expectation rather than the exception.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

The Challenge

Pick one trade partner, one foreman, or one crew that has delivered something worth acknowledging in the last thirty days. Write the message this week. Make it specific. Name the person. Name what they did. Name why it mattered to the project and to you. Send it to their supervisor as well as to them directly. Then put a recurring reminder on your calendar to do it again next month. Be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise, as Dale Carnegie put it. As long as it is sincere, it will change something in the person who receives it and in you for having sent it.

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Dale Carnegie

On we go.

FAQ

Does sending appreciation letters actually affect project performance?

Yes. Trade partners who feel genuinely recognized bring more engagement, better communication, and more willingness to flag problems early. Goodwill is a production asset.

What should a letter of appreciation actually include?

A specific name, a specific behavior or result, and a statement of why it mattered. Generic praise does not carry the same weight as naming exactly what someone did and why it made a difference.

Why send it to the supervisor as well as the person?

Because the supervisor can share it internally, which amplifies the recognition across the whole company. Wilson Electric forwarded Jason’s letter to their leadership. The impact extended far beyond John Bohr alone.

What if I am too busy to do this regularly?

Jason’s answer is to put it on your leader standard work as a monthly calendar item. One letter a month is twelve relationships strengthened per year. The return on that investment far exceeds the ten minutes it takes to write it.