Direct Line Reporting
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If you have two bosses, nobody is the boss. General Contracting Project Managers and Superintendents are often victims of the two-boss problem. Through a combination of factors, they find themselves reporting to someone new on every new project.
The first of these factors is the understandable need for GCs to move staff around to perform their work. Having actively participated in resource planning sessions with our GC clients over the years, I see how this game of musical chairs can play out. It’s compounded further by project timelines relentlessly shifting up and back again. Honestly, it sometimes seems like a miracle that these projects get staffed at all.
The second factor is the GC’s reasonable desire to prevent senior staff from building mini kingdoms within the business that may not match the company’s corporate culture. When a Senior PM or Project Executive can claim a person as “theirs,” it can be problematic.
The third, and most predominant, factor I see, however, is the lack of effective leadership in that SPM/PX position across the industry. GCs aren’t comfortable asking their people to report to senior staff who lack the tools to adequately develop their staff. If they were, it would only make logical sense to push true supervision down to this level.
Instead, PEs, APMs, PMs, FEs, Asst Supers, and Supers often truly report to a single high-level executive who is so overloaded with direct reports that they’re scarcely able to provide meaningful leadership. They don’t know what’s happening on the projects under their care, let alone the people.
Meanwhile, in practice, staff absolutely report to those directly over them in the organizational chart on their projects. Is that person their boss? Why, then, is that not the person meeting with them for coaching, training, and evaluations?
It is time for GCs to ask more of their managers than mere resource management of the staff on their projects. Nobody has a better understanding of the staff’s strengths and weaknesses. Nobody is better positioned to build strengths and address deficiencies on your team.
By removing the onus of leadership from PMs, Supers, SPMs, and PXs, General Contractors are not only concentrating workload on too few people spread too thin, they’re robbing themselves and their managers of important opportunities for growth and fulfillment. Give your people one boss and make it the person who most closely oversees team performance. Coach and guide these people in the art of leadership, and you’ll create a brighter future for everyone on your team. If you can’t trust your managers in these positions, they’re the wrong people to lead your projects in the first place.
The Spark Notes:
When project teams constantly shift and staff end up reporting to someone new on every job, GC organizations unintentionally create a two-boss problem where no one is truly in charge.
GC leadership often shuffles people both to meet unpredictable staffing needs and to prevent senior staff from building personal fiefdoms—but the deeper issue is a widespread lack of effective leadership at the SPM/PX level.
As a result, frontline staff functionally report to their project-level supervisors while officially reporting to overloaded executives who can’t provide real guidance, leaving coaching and development to fall through the cracks.
GCs need to empower the managers closest to day-to-day performance with true leadership responsibility—because giving people one clear boss, properly trained and trusted, creates stronger teams and healthier organizations.
