November Is When Your Best People Start Looking
Dark by 4:45. Year-end closeouts stacking up. Budgets burning faster than anyone planned. And while you're chasing December substantial performance, your best project manager just updated his résumé.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: January is hiring season in construction. But the decision gets made in November. Bonus season. Reflection season. The season when a guy who's been carrying too much for too long asks himself one question: "Why am I still here?"
If you don't have an answer for him, someone else will.
We spend all year talking about the labor shortage. Half of it isn't a shortage. It's a leak. Good people arrive, get promoted for being technically excellent, get handed conflict and pressure and zero training in any of it, do the job well enough for a while - and then leave. And we call it a market problem.
It's not a market problem. It's a leadership problem.
The Bite: Run a Stay Interview. This Week.
Not a performance review. Not a raise conversation. Fifteen minutes with each of your key people, and you ask three questions:
"What would make you leave?"
"What would make you stay?"
"What am I not seeing?"
Then shut up and write it down. Don't defend. Don't explain. Don't promise. Just listen like the answer matters - because it does. Then do one real thing about it before Christmas. One. People don't need you to fix everything. They need proof you heard them.
From the Field
A PM got a counteroffer last month and turned it down flat. His boss was shocked. He wasn't. He'd been telling that company he was leaving for a year - in every status meeting, every skipped one-on-one, every "yeah, fine" when he clearly wasn't fine. They just weren't listening until the resignation letter.
A PM I coach owns the outcome on a $40M job and none of the people on it. For months he escalated everything up the chain and got ignored. He stopped escalating, started holding a line with the contractor directly - calm, documented, no fight - and suddenly the same people who wouldn't return his calls are booking meetings with him. Authority isn't a title. It's a behavior.
And one from my own workshop prep this month: trust isn't a soft skill. It's currency. You're earning it or spending it in every interaction - every commitment you make, every one you keep, every one you quietly let slide. Most PMs are overdrafting and wondering why the account's empty.
The Book on the Nightstand
Everything I coach comes back to one book: Kick Your Ego Aside and Put People First. Five proven principles for making every project a success - and the ego is the one thing standing between most PMs and all five. Grab it at peoplefirstleadership.ca.
Question to Sit With
If your best PM handed in their notice tomorrow, would you be surprised - or would you have seen it coming and said nothing?
Lead the people side as well as you run the project side.
Jonathan Cinelli, PMP, ACCPeople First Leadership416 717 4139 | jc@peoplefirstleadership.cawww.peoplefirstleadership.caHost - People First Podcast | Author - Kick Your Ego Aside and Put People First
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