Developing Young Leaders: A Must for Your Future

Date January 24, 2025
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Ideas for developing young leaders for your construction business.

Developing young leaders in any business is important for ensuring future growth and success. Labor shortages, advancing technology, and evolving project demands make it even more crucial for today’s construction companies. Following are key reasons to foster new leadership, ways to attract individuals who can become your next generation leaders, and strategies for developing the leaders your company will rely on for its future growth and success.

Why commit to developing new leaders

It is critical to develop new leaders to ensure the future success and sustainability of your construction firm. Some reasons to commit to developing new young leaders for your business:

  • Succession Planning: An aging workforce, including within company leadership, is a common concern among construction businesses. Current management must commit to developing young talent to ensure seamless leadership transition, maintain operational continuity, and minimize disruption. Investing in young leaders creates a pipeline of professionals aligned with the company’s vision and culture, leaders capable of sustaining growth and overseeing a workforce equipped to tackle existing and future challenges.
  • Innovation and Adaptability: Younger leaders can bring your company new perspectives and creativity, a fresh look at processes and practices. They tend to be open to adopting new technologies, such as aspects of artificial intelligence, to improve operations and outcomes. Change is essential to growth in our rapidly evolving industry, and young leaders are more willing to embrace and implement changes.
  • Engaged Employees: Young employees who see an opportunity to develop into leaders in your company will be more engaged, more enthusiastic, and eventually make your company more successful. Leadership development opportunities boost morale, serve to retain your most productive workers, and build loyalty among employees. They signal that the company values their employee’s growth as well as the company’s, creating a positive and motivated work environment.
  • Industry-Specific Challenges: Young leaders, equipped with the right training, can help you address and resolve your most pressing challenges, including labor shortages and a need for better project management. They can bring efficiency, better planning, and improved collaboration to your teams.
  • Stronger Client Relationships: Younger leaders are more likely to be familiar with and understand today’s clients and their demands, including sustainability and innovation. Their ability to engage with clients on these levels can strengthen your firm’s relationships and enhance your reputation.
Attracting potential new leaders

Few college graduates joining the workforce today consider applying to a construction company because they are not tuned in to the leadership roles and opportunities that exist in the industry. Moreover, few construction companies are fortunate enough to hire young, talented people and keep them around long enough to make a difference because they don’t offer a clear path to a leadership role or don’t provide the education and training required to develop leadership skills. 

Attracting more college students to the construction industry requires a multi-faceted approach to addressing the image of the industry and the career opportunities it offers. Some effective strategies for attracting qualified candidates for leadership roles in your organization:

  • Highlight Your Firm’s Career Growth Opportunities: Emphasize the potential for moving into a leadership or management position, such as project manager or company executive. Make candidates aware of the variety of career paths they can follow—engineering, architecture, environmental sustainability, technology integration.
  • Showcase Your Use of Technology: Demonstrate your commitment to modern construction practices and tools like Building Information Modeling (BIM), drones, robotics, 3D printing, and green construction. Demonstrate how tech-savvy graduates can meaningfully impact your business and enjoy financially and personally rewarding careers.
  • Detail Your Training and Development Programs: Talk with candidates about apprenticeships and mentorship programs you offer. Tell them about the certifications and credentials they can earn that will help them advance their careers.
  • Change Outdated and Inaccurate Perceptions about the Industry: Consider a marketing campaign that corrects outdated stereotypes of construction as solely manual labor. Demonstrate how construction professionals shape communities and contribute to infrastructure in ways that substantially improve people’s lives.
  • Reach Out on Social Media: Share details of particularly innovative projects and insights on what made certain projects successful. Use videos to convey what a day in the life of a construction leader is like. Ensure your content resonates with younger potential employees.
Strategies for developing new leaders

If you apply good hiring practices consistently over time, you should find more qualified candidates. But once you get them in the door, it is even more important to continuously train and develop them into the leaders you want them to become. Leaving new hires to figure things out on their own is not an option in today’s business environment. If you are really interested in developing future leaders (and how could you not be?), you need to invest time and resources to help them develop the skills and mindsets they need to succeed. Some strategies for developing young leaders:

  • Mentorship: Assign experienced leaders to mentor young professionals, to share their knowledge and skills.
  • Leadership Training: Aspiring construction firm leaders need valuable skills like communication, decision-making, and project management. Consider bringing in experts from outside your organization to improve your organization’s culture and provide professional leadership development training to the young professionals in your organization.
  • Cross-Functional Exposure: Have your prospective new leaders gain broad industry experience by working in various departments. That will help them acquire a holistic understanding of your business and the construction industry and learn where they fit in best.
  • Use of Technology: Equip your aspiring leaders with industry-leading technology, then ask them for their feedback on how that technology can be applied for greater efficiency or improved outreach, all the ways they see to improve your success in the marketplace.
  • Encourage Innovation: Ensure that your organization’s culture is one that inspires and empowers young professionals to share and implement new ideas. Encourage them to come up with their own ideas on how to better market your brand and use technology in your business. 
  • Celebrate successes: Give proper recognition to those who come up with effective new ways of doing business or perform particularly well. Recognizing them will encourage other team members to come up with new and innovative solutions.

By investing more in developing young leaders, your construction company will recreate your culture in a way that positions itself to thrive in an industry that demands resilience, uses technology to its advantage, and needs forward-thinking leadership. HBK High Performance can help you train and develop the young people in your organization to be better leaders. For more information, call me at 215-367-3032 or contact me by email at mrwolf@hbkcpa.com.

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