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I'll be honest — I learn something new on almost every episode of Constructive Conversations. But my recent conversation with Wally Adamchik was one of those that genuinely changed the way I think about a few things. Within the first ten minutes, he had already challenged me on something I said during a recent presentation of my own. That's the kind of guest I love having on.
Wally is a former U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot who attained the rank of major before leaving the Corps. Today, he's a construction leadership coach, speaker, and consultant who works across the country helping leaders develop people — and his phrase says it better than I can — on purpose, not by accident. You'll find him at a lot of the major industry conferences, and his website is wallyadamchick.com.
Here's what stuck with me most from our conversation.
Every Day Can Be Better — But Only If You're Intentional About It
Wally runs his work around four core beliefs, and the first one sounds deceptively simple: every day can be a great day. The catch? It requires intentional effort. Without that, individuals and organizations hit a plateau and just stay there — grinding through the routine without ever getting on the growth curve.
The second belief, which Wally ties closely to the first, is that we all have unmet potential. He made the point that everyone listening to a podcast like this has already reached some level of success. But that success can lull you into settling. "We have more in us," he said. And it's not about throwing more hours at your work — it's about optimizing how you work, how you collaborate, how your systems support you.
That resonated with me. I coach a middle school girls basketball team — my daughter's team — and after a conference championship game we weren't even supposed to be in, a parent told me the girls had "exceeded their potential." I took offense to that, honestly. I pushed back: they didn't exceed their potential, they barely reached it. Wally made the same point from a different angle. He asked: who's really the best judge of someone's potential? Sometimes it takes someone on the outside looking in and saying, I see more in you — and then holding that belief for them until they can hold it themselves.
That's the essence of what he calls the leader's job.
Leaders Are Born and Made
It's an age-old question, and Wally's answer was refreshingly concrete. He used running as his analogy. We were all born to run — it's a human capacity. But Usain Bolt's fast-twitch muscle fibers are different from yours and mine. That's DNA. And yet Bolt still trained. Same with leadership: some people are naturally more inclined toward it, but all of us can get meaningfully better at it.
What I found more useful, though, was Wally's take on how you develop someone who isn't a natural leader but needs to step up. He shared a quote that has stuck with him: a leader creates and sustains in somebody the belief that they can do something — until they can sustain that belief themselves. That's the whole job, in one sentence. You hold the belief for them. You repeat it. You give them room to make mistakes. And eventually, they own it.
Do Your Own Job First
One of the more practical sections of our conversation was about where leaders get confused between managing a workload and actually leading people. Wally's first principle here: do your own job first.
What does that mean in practice? If a foreman is on a machine, he's functioning as an operator. If a superintendent is doing the foreman's job, he's functioning as a foreman. And it ripples all the way up — if your president doesn't have a solid controller, the president becomes the controller. Everyone ends up one level below where they should be.
He described the leadership-vs.-management divide like this: leadership is about people, culture, and change. Management is about systems, process, and consistency. At the frontline supervisor level, you're probably spending around 80% of your day in management mode. As you move up the chain, that should flip — presidents and CEOs should ideally be spending 80% of their time on the leadership side, setting direction, aligning the organization, not buried in budget lines or org charts.
I admitted on air that I've struggled with this myself. After 28 years in public accounting, it's hard to dial back on tasks I've always done — even when I know someone else should be doing them. Wally validated that struggle and also named the trap underneath it: sometimes we keep doing our team's work because we genuinely want to help them, not overwhelm them. But in doing so, we enable them to not step up, and we stunt their development. He called it potentially one of the biggest disservices a leader can do to their team.
Delegation Is a Spectrum, Not a Leap of Faith
The word "delegation" carries a lot of baggage. When most people hear it, they think 100% handoff — pass or fail, sink or swim. And because the risk feels binary, we avoid it.
Wally reframes it as a gradation. Start by delegating just the gathering of information. Then maybe they gather it and make a recommendation, but check in before implementing. Then full ownership. It becomes a risk-managed development tool, not a leap of faith. When you put it in those terms, delegation becomes less scary for the person delegating — and more meaningful for the person receiving it.
Accountability Starts With Clarity — Not a Lecture
When it comes to holding people accountable, Wally's first move is to look in the mirror. Have you set a clear expectation? Have you actually trained them — not just explained it once, asked if there were questions, and sent them off? He called that approach "crawl-sprint," which is unfortunately how most organizations operate. Real accountability requires a crawl-walk-run learning sequence, not a sink-or-swim assumption.
Once the expectation is genuinely clear and the person has been genuinely trained, then — and only then — do you have the standing to hold them accountable when they miss. And here's the part that gets overlooked: when people do hit the mark, say something. Recognize it. Because if you're only acknowledging the misses, you're poisoning the well for the next conversation.
Wally also made a practical point about the consistency trap. If someone misses a deadline three weeks running and you don't say anything, you've effectively changed the standard. Then when you do finally say something, they have every right to wonder why it matters now. He put it plainly: accountability begins with clarity on expectations, then continues with actually paying attention and talking about it along the way.
The Production Numbers Idea I'm Stealing for My Own Presentation
This was the part of the conversation that genuinely changed something for me in real time.
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on data-driven construction. One of the best questions came from a project manager and estimator: How do I get the superintendents and foremen — the people responsible for reporting time and coding invoices — to buy into these processes?
I gave an answer about making them feel part of the team and not oversharing financial information. Good answer, I thought.
Then Wally went deeper. He made the point that field crews have no way to feel connected to results if results are never shared with them. You don't have to share net profit or EBITDA. But you can absolutely share production numbers — what was budgeted versus what was produced, in tons, feet, yards, whatever the job calls for. That gives field crews a score to play against. And Wally noted something I hadn't framed this way: the production numbers you bid are often based on historical data the crews themselves provided. Which means their accuracy in the field directly affects how realistic the next bid will be. That closes a loop in a way that can shift the conversation entirely.
I used a basketball analogy to connect it: when I tell my team we're going to hold the other team under 25 points and get 15 rebounds, those are production numbers. Then we go back after the game and review them. That's not complicated — and it makes everyone feel like they have a role in the outcome, not just a task to check off.
I'm putting that in the next version of my presentation.
Values Are Only Valuable If You Actually Talk About Them
Wally spent some time on the topic of organizational values, and his framing was sharper than most. He called it "Values 2.0" — meaning it's not just the generic list of safety, integrity, quality sitting on a conference room wall. It's values written in a way that reflects the actual character of the organization, with behavioral descriptions of what living those values looks like here, in this company, in this industry.
He mentioned several companies he works with — including CW Matthews, Strack, East Coast Infrastructure, and others — where he sees that level of intentionality on their websites and in their cultures.
His point: values without conversation are just wall art. When you integrate them into daily huddles, into feedback, into recognition — that's when you do the work of building an aligned team.
He extended this to individual leaders too. Most of us can name our values. Fewer of us can explain why those are our values — what experiences and influences shaped them. He recommended a book called True North Field Guide, a workbook that takes leaders through their life journey and formative experiences. His argument: the stronger your foundation in your own values, the more clearly you can lead from them when things get hard.
The One 24-Hour Action
I always close with lightning round questions. When I asked Wally what listeners should do in the next 24 hours, here's what he said:
Write down the one thing you want to start doing in the next 90 days. Then go tell somebody.
Not a list. One thing. Write it down. Make it real. Tell someone so there's accountability attached to it.
That's it. Simple, actionable, and — like most of what Wally talks about — harder than it sounds.
Where to Find Wally
The best place to follow Wally's thinking is LinkedIn, where he posts regularly. His website, wallyadamchick.com, is a good introduction to his work and beliefs. And if you're involved in the construction industry at any level — from frontline supervisor to executive — his programs are worth exploring.
I'll be back with another episode soon. Until then — this is Eddie Thompson. So long.
Constructive Conversations is brought to you by Brown Edwards CPA. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
