You Don’t Just Have a Labor Shortage. You Have a Decision-Making Shortage.

The employees already there were not lazy. They had learned that making a decision created personal exposure, while passing the file to another desk did not. So the file moved.

You Don’t Just Have a Labor Shortage. You Have a Decision-Making Shortage.

I spent years in government watching agencies answer slow work with the same remedy: hire more people.

Headcount went up. Training did not keep pace. In more than a few cases, the new positions added people without adding much capacity because the number of people in the building had never been the real constraint.

The employees already there were not lazy. They had learned that making a decision created personal exposure, while passing the file to another desk did not. So the file moved. Then it moved again. Eventually, enough time passed that the delay itself became the explanation.

From the outside, that looks like understaffing. In practice, it was a queue of decisions nobody wanted to own.

The departments that produced results did something different. Their managers made a few reasonable calls every day and accepted responsibility if one went sideways. They did not take reckless bets. They simply refused to let every non-routine question become a committee project. The difference had little to do with how many names appeared on the roster.

The Labor Shortage Is Real. It Is Also an Incomplete Explanation.

Construction does need more people. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that the industry must attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027 to meet demand. In the latest national AGC-NCCER workforce survey, 92 percent of firms that were hiring reported difficulty filling open positions, and 45 percent said worker shortages had delayed projects.

Those numbers establish a real labor shortage. They do not prove that every delay blamed on labor would disappear if another crew showed up tomorrow.

On a jobsite, headcount and capacity are not the same thing. Capacity also depends on whether someone can sequence the work, recognize a constructability problem before it becomes rework, resolve a scope question, and give the field an answer while the answer still matters.

Add fifty people to a project where every non-routine call has to climb to the same two names and you have not increased capacity by fifty people. You have made the decision line longer.

That is the distinction I would put in front of construction executives: you do not just have a labor shortage. You have a decision-making shortage. The first is visible in the open positions. The second hides in the time people spend waiting for permission to proceed.

The Org Chart Is Not the Decision Map

I once worked with an association that lost its executive director. The seat stayed open while the board ran a search. During that period, the administrative assistant kept the organization running. She knew the members, the vendors, the calendar, the history, and which problems could wait until morning.

When the board hired a new executive director, the way decisions moved did not change. Daily questions still went to the person who knew how the place worked. He held the title. She kept the organization moving.

Strategy stalled because the board never brought the formal authority and the working knowledge together. The new executive director did not last long. The board could see that the organization depended on the administrative assistant daily, sometimes hourly.

Nobody inside the association was confused about who made the decisions. The org chart was confused. The people were not.

That happens in construction too. The superintendent’s name appears in the box, but the veteran foreman knows which sequence will work. The project manager owns the outcome, but the estimator remembers the assumption buried in the bid. Hiring against the chart will not solve a problem that lives in the real decision map.

Leaders Build Judgment by Letting People Decide

Trial work taught me that preparation has a limit. Something happens in the middle of a trial that no amount of preparation anticipated, and the lawyer has to make a call with the jury watching. You never feel fully prepared for that moment. Over time, however, the earlier decisions—good and bad—give you something to draw from.

I have taught this to law students, lawyers at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute, and people I have mentored: sound judgment grows through real decisions, feedback, and consequence. Mistakes matter, but only if someone examines the reasoning instead of merely punishing the outcome.

The lesson is not to celebrate mistakes. It is to stop pretending people can develop judgment without risking one.

Construction has hard lines. Nobody should improvise around safety, code, or engineered limits. Within those lines, however, people still need room to make the calls that belong closest to the work.

Too many organizations ask a foreman to think like a superintendent while routing every decision to the superintendent. They ask a project manager to own the outcome while withholding the authority needed to affect it. When the work slows, management concludes that the company needs more people. More people will not fix authority that still sits in the wrong place.

Six Questions Worth Asking Before You Hire

Before you approve another requisition, walk through the operation and answer these questions honestly:

That last question is the whole argument. If nothing changes, the hire may add labor, but it will not add the capacity you think you are buying.

What Breaks If You Ignore This

The schedule breaks first. Crews wait. Sequences slip. A delay gets charged to the labor market because that explanation already makes sense to everyone.

Then the less visible costs start to build. Supervisors become bottlenecks. Field questions turn into rework or change-order fights. People learn that initiative creates risk, while waiting creates cover.

The more expensive loss takes longer to show up. The people with the judgment you actually need do not stay forever in organizations that refuse to use it. Eventually, they go somewhere that gives them room, taking years of pattern recognition with them.

You may eventually replace a pair of hands. You cannot quickly replace fifteen years of knowing which shortcut will come back at you in year three.

None of this argues against hiring. Construction needs people, and the workforce numbers are real. Hiring may be necessary. It is not sufficient.

Before you post the next job, identify the decisions that keep climbing, the people already trusted to make them unofficially, and the consequences they face when a reasonable call goes wrong. Then put the authority, the training, and the accountability where the work actually happens.

If you add headcount without moving appropriate decision authority closer to the work, you have not solved the capacity problem. You have made the line more expensive.