Construction is an incredible industry—challenging, rewarding, and full of opportunity. It’s also an industry shaped by assumptions about leadership that can become so familiar, they stop looking like assumptions at all. They simply feel like “the way we do things.”

Over the past 30+ years—from working in the trades to leading teams as a superintendent and operations director—I’ve seen how those assumptions can influence who we recognize as a leader and who we may unintentionally overlook.

I wrote this book to help us notice those assumptions, question what seems obvious, and rethink how we identify and develop leaders in construction—because sometimes the potential we’re looking for has been hiding in plain sight.