by: Joe Powell, | David Skuodas, Mile High Flood District
You ran your selection process. You hired the best architects, the best engineers, and the best GCs. They have great professional credentials. And then, as researcher Joe Powell puts it, you assume that means they are going to collaborate. But great professional credentials don’t necessarily lead to great collaboration.
Powell would know. He has been chasing this dilemma for a long time, most recently as Chairman of the University Research Institute (URI). "We've been trying to figure this out for about 22 years," he says, and he is the first to keep his own work humble. "People like us, we study things, but we don't actually do anything," he says, reaching for an old Mark Twain line that "a man who's carried a cat home by the tail has far more information than the man who's only read about it."
The point of URI’s recently published "What Great Owners Do" paper was never to put everybody to sleep with stuff they already know. It was to search the topic for "subtleties and interesting observations that people these days can actually use and relate to."
Here is the subtlety worth your time. Technical skills do not automatically translate to collaboration effectiveness. Owners often assume that they do and hope for the best. And the tool that might fix that gap is one most Owners have never used: behavioral science.
Owners are the leaders by default
Why hang this on the Owner and not the designer or the contractor? Because, as Mike Bellaman (CEO of Associated Builders and Contractors) says, "we see Owners in a leadership position by default because they’ve got the money and they're the ones that originate the project." They assemble the team. They hire the engineers and the contractors. And anyone who has led a project knows that "the culture... the systems, the process, and the definition of success and the actual results are driven by leadership." It is not that Owners are the problem. It is that "Owners are in the position to be the leaders and set the tone for great projects." They can set the tone for a collaboration disaster, too.
Spencer Moore, who runs design and construction projects at MD Anderson Cancer Center, says it the same way. "It starts with the Owner," he says. "They're the power broker there. They have the power. They hold the purse strings." A designer and a builder can both be invested in working collaboratively, but they cannot drive collaboration on their own. The Owner must. And the way the Owner shows up sets the ceiling for the entire team. When "they show humility, they show willingness to admit a mistake," the rest of the team follows. "I am not the smartest person in the room," Moore says, and he says it like a man who has learned to surround himself with highly talented people.
The hardest decision comes during procurement
Long before collaboration is a question, there is the matter of hiring the team, and that is where risk appears. "Hiring anybody or any firm or any contractor to me is one of the hardest decisions to make," Moore says. “Especially at a state agency that has to follow a clear, particular process and make the call on, at most, maybe two hours with these firms." Two hours to choose the partners you will spend the next three, four, or five years with.
Two hours is plenty of time to read a resume. It is nowhere near enough to know how these talented people will behave together once conflict arises (and it will). So, Owners fall back on a hopeful assumption, the one Powell keeps poking at, that the best credentials will sort the collaboration out for them. They will not, because "human collaboration comes and goes." Sometimes it comes and goes fast. "It will come and go in one meeting," Powell says. You start on the same page and by the time the meeting is over you do not care much for each other.
That churn is exactly the gap behavioral science is built to watch.
What " behavioral science" means for design and construction teams
Behavioral science is the systematic, empirical study of human action to understand, predict, and influence behavior. It focuses on why people act the way they do by examining cognitive, emotional, and social factors.
In the context of a project team, it means understanding the people who’ve been assembled for a singular purpose and likely have never worked together (or even met) before. Accomplishing this isn’t as simple as a one-time survey blast, and Powell is happy to say so. "We make fun of the people that think they can do those with a Survey Monkey," he says. "You need to use real life behavioral science, and you need to use real life data analytics."
In practice, trained behavioral scientists run short, recurring team surveys. The ask is small. "It averages nine minutes," Powell says, "nine minutes a month." The pitch to the team is just as plain: "Will you talk to us about how you perceive this team working for nine minutes a month?" And there is a quiet door at the bottom of every survey. "If you want to talk to a real human about this, check this box. We'll call you."
What makes it science instead of noise is what they do with the answers. They watch statistical trends rather than jumping on one or two data points. And they are careful about what they are measuring. "We don't measure individual personality traits," Powell says. "We measure whether or not the humans are collaborating." If that sounds soft, his job-satisfaction example sharpens it up. For decades, behavioral scientists chased how to measure whether someone likes their job, and the answer turned out to be exact. "There are six questions you ask," Powell says, "asking them in exactly this way, in exactly this order, and here's the algorithm you use to evaluate it." That is a different universe from the manager whose "administrator knows how to work Survey Monkey." That, Powell says flatly, is "a bad idea."
Bellaman, who has used behavioral tools to build ideal candidate profiles and score people on a one to five scale, backs the payoff from the outside. The science, he says, "takes a very, very subjective area and gives you objective data." And data is powerful for a manager who has been running on a hunch. Often a PM already senses there is "a real problem with Fred," Powell says. When the analysis confirms it, "they love that because all of a sudden they have every right to take management action."
Personality assessments help, if you actually use them
Here is where a lot of Owners trip, because the market is flooded with personality tools and most of them get used badly or not at all.
Moore is a believer when it is done right. He has leaned on StrengthsFinder for a long time. "We've used it for 15 years in our department," he says. Out of 34 strengths, his teams zero in on "the top five strengths of people," and it has helped them understand each other better. His pet peeve is the assessment you run once and abandon. He did a DISC-style exercise on one job and it died on the vine. "We didn't do anything else with it. We just left it. We never came back to it," he says. His rule: "If we're going to use StrengthFinders, I love to use it and to use that all the way through."
Powell draws the line cleanly, and it is not a knock on the tools. The danger, he says, is not the test. "Our concern is that there are groups out there testing things and nobody knows what to do with the results." An assessment is only worth the action you take on it.
If you want the science boiled down, Powell offers what he calls the Cliffs Notes version of collaboration, and it rests on two things. First, trust. "If I don't trust you, I'm not collaborating." Second, need. "I might trust you, but if I do not need you to get done what I'm trying to get done. I'm probably not going to collaborate." The third variable, the one humans oversell, is likability. "I don't need to like you," he says. "If I trust you and I need you, I'm gonna work with you."
There is a knock-on effect when trust and need are really there. In the old days, Powell says, the minute things got “scratchy” the first order of business was to assign blame: that is an architectural problem, that is a GC problem. When a team is truly collaborating, "the entire team sees it as a team problem, and they move forward to fix it, as opposed to spending the time assigning blame."
Measure it once and you have measured nothing
This is the part Owners need to hear. Collaboration is not a box you check at kickoff.
Powell's running joke is the half-day partnering seminar. "We hire a partnering consultant, and the partnering consultant comes in and holds a seminar for half a day. And okay, we got the partnering thing done," he says. "Well, you do. You do, in fact, have the partnering thing done for half a day. But unfortunately, your project's going to go on for five years."
Moore frames the same truth more gently. The work is "a constant," he says, "just like in your marriage or your other relationships, you always have to make sure you're connecting."
Bellaman has the war story that nails it down. On one project, his relationship with the public agency's top person was excellent, the field metrics looked good, and everybody assumed it was going great. Then a scheduled follow-up surfaced what no metric would have. "We found their team hated our team," he says. Because the team had agreed up front to keep revisiting how they were doing, they had the candid conversation, made personnel change, and finished it as a project they were proud of. Without that follow-up, the frustrations "would just have continuously mounted." That kind of standing check-in, Bellaman says, is "one way to bring that partnering agreement alive and keep it alive throughout the entire process."
Collaboration must be measured continuously. Powell's closing list is short and emphatic. “Collaboration is a big deal. It comes and goes constantly. So please don't measure it once and think it's done. Use behavioral science and data analytics, not Survey Monkey, because raw human survey answers are mostly noise," and "noise is data that you should not listen to or take action on." And get "the entire team... onboarded" to what the data is for, because a team that does not understand it is "an airball." Do all of that, Powell says, and "you get projects on time and on budget." Then he catches himself: "That’s the preaching."
That onboarding warning is not theoretical. Upper management tends to love the idea, and then you announce it to the architects, the engineers, the GCs, and the major subs, and they say "get this crap out of here." It is "just more crap for me to do." How does Powell know to onboard the team first? The hard way. "We've been slapped around now for 22 years on this particular undertaking."
A word in defense of partnering
It would be easy to read all this as a takedown of partnering. It is not.
Partnering done badly is a one-day event you never revisit. Partnering done well is the very thing these conversations are arguing for. Bellaman, who has been through many forms of it, calls a partnering agreement "intent," a way for the team to "declare our intent," and the whole game is about keeping that intent alive. The behavioral data does not replace the intent. It is the heartbeat monitor that tells you the intent is leading to positive behavioral outcomes.
Even the partnering consultants usually come around. Powell says, "they end up calling us sooner or later and saying, you know what we talk about in our partnering meetings? We talk about... the collaboration data."
None of it is a magic wand, and David Skuodas (Mile High Flood District in Colorado), who co-led these interviews and wrote a book on being a good client, found an interesting image for that. He has been turning over an old alternative-rock album title, "Happiness is Not a Fish That You Can Catch," and thinking the word “partnering” could replace the word “happiness” to capture the theme of this article. "No silver bullet," he says. There is only the steady, unglamorous work of paying attention.
Why an Owner would bother
Because the people who design and build your projects now have a choice. The talent shortage flipped the leverage, and good contractors get to pick. "How can I create the conditions for them to win?" is the question Bellaman says smart Owners are asking.
So, can behavioral science help Owners deliver better projects? The honest answer running through these conversations is yes, with a catch. It works if the Owner leads it, if the whole team is onboarded, if the assessments actually get used, and if you keep taking the team's temperature long after project kickoff. Get those right and you are no longer guessing whether your group of dream professionals are also a dream team. You have the data. And as Skuodas says, that is the whole job, because "the lifeblood of your organization (or project team) is who you attract and how you empower them to be successful."