“We have $50 million in capital just sitting there. We can’t reinvest it in the business because we just don’t have the leadership chops.”
This is what a CFO recently said to our founder and CEO, Andrea Janzen, over dinner, not in a boardroom. When Andrea brought it back to our team, what struck us wasn’t the dollar amount. It was the direction the problem was coming from. This wasn’t a company in distress. It was a company succeeding at a level that had outpaced its own leadership capacity. Growth had created the constraint.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since, because it reframes something the industry tends to treat as separate problems. Workforce shortages, the retirement cliff, burnout, difficulty attracting younger workers, and thin leadership pipelines – these are all real and all urgent issues.
Underneath those challenges, however, is a more specific problem: companies don’t just need more people. They need more people ready to lead. We’re on the precipice of losing massive amounts of institutional knowledge as over 40% of the workforce is set to retire in the next five years.
The way the industry has been developing leaders isn’t keeping pace with what leadership actually requires right now.
We know this because we’ve spent years working in a part of the industry most leadership conversations skip over. What we learned there turns out to be directly relevant to the problem the CFO from dinner couldn’t solve with capital alone.
What the industry has been selecting for
For most of construction’s history, the path to leadership was straightforward. You knew the work, you’d been around long enough, you got promoted. Technical mastery plus tenure equalled leadership role. In a stable environment where the leader’s job was to execute efficiently and their teams largely expected to be told what to do, that model held.
That environment is gone.
The problems companies face now – technology adoption, workforce volatility, the loss of institutional knowledge, and increasingly complex projects – require something different. Leaders who can build trust quickly, develop the people around them, communicate through uncertainty, and create conditions where problems surface before they become expensive.
This isn’t about abandoning structure or accountability. It’s about recognizing that transactional leadership – directing, executing, rewarding output – is no longer sufficient on its own. The workforce entering construction right now expects to understand the why behind their work. They want to be brought into the vision, not just handed tasks. Companies that can’t offer that are going to keep losing younger workers to industries that can, which makes every other pipeline problem worse.
Most senior leaders already sense something is off. They’ll describe the supervisor who knows the work cold and can’t get traction with his crew. The project manager who is technically excellent but can’t hold a client relationship together. They know the way they’re identifying and developing leaders isn’t working the way it used to; they haven’t had a clear framework for why.
We do. Because we built one working with the part of the workforce where the gaps were impossible to ignore.
Why women became the lens
72% of women in the construction industry have never or rarely had a woman manager or supervisor. That number comes from our Building Better research, conducted in partnership with NCCER, and it’s the one that tends to stop a room.
Women in construction have been navigating the leadership gap longer than most, with less margin for error and fewer of the informal advantages that quietly smooth the path for the men they work alongside. For most, access to real sponsorship (not mentorship, which offers guidance and support, but the kind where someone in a decision-making room says your name when an opportunity comes up) has been limited or nonexistent. Our research shows that women in construction experience sponsorship half as often as mentorship. The standard of proof has been higher, and the doors have been harder to open.
When women don’t have the informal networks, the sponsors, the benefit of the doubt, there’s nothing masking the fact that the development system itself isn’t working. The gaps become starkly obvious.
Consider this: in research we’ve conducted with women we work with, 78% were told at some point that they needed to be more confident to advance. 70% of those same women were also told they were too aggressive, too bossy, or something worse. The industry knows what it wants in a leader. The problem is that when those qualities show up in a woman, they’re often not welcomed, because they don’t fit the cultural expectation of what a woman is supposed to be like. A culture that tells women to be more confident and then penalizes them for it has no clear picture of what it actually wants from its leaders, and that confusion doesn’t stay contained to women.
What working with women in construction taught us
Many of the women who come through our programs don’t walk in thinking of themselves as leaders because what they’re doing doesn’t match the image of leadership the industry has shown them. Motivating a team through a difficult stretch. Building a jobsite culture people actually want to show up to. Holding a client relationship together under pressure. Developing the people around them without being asked to. None of that registers as leadership. They simply see it as ‘doing their jobs’.
Research across industries consistently shows that women veer toward transformational leadership behaviors more naturally – building relationships, communicating vision, and developing the people around them – while men tend toward more transactional approaches. These are tendencies, not rules, and there are outstanding transformational leaders of every background. But it does help explain something we see repeatedly in our work: many women are already leading this way without recognizing it as leadership.
Our work is largely about helping them identify those behaviors as leadership, articulate the value they create, and deliberately leverage them to strengthen their teams, shift workplace cultures, and advance their own careers. According to our Building Better research, 86% of women in construction want to be in a leadership role at some point. The ambition is there. What’s missing is an industry that recognizes it, and a development system that knows how to work with it.
The implication for construction is direct: when you invest in women’s leadership development, you’re not just developing individual women. You’re introducing more transformational leadership into your organization immediately. Given what the industry needs right now, that’s not incidental. It’s the point.
What the outcomes of transformational leadership actually look like
Transformational leadership gets dismissed as soft. Relational. ‘Nice to have’ when things are going well.
So let’s be specific about what it actually produces.
A woman moves from a sales role into managing a sales team. She struggles at first, not with the work but with knowing whether she’s succeeding when success is no longer measured by her own sales numbers. Her manager reframes it: stop measuring your direct influence on results and start measuring your influence on people. She shifts her entire approach. Instead of running numbers reviews, she gets her team focused on genuinely understanding their customers: their pressures, what they actually need, and how to help them. Her region goes from the red to the black for the first time in five years. The value of that turnaround: over $10 million. She attributes it entirely to that shift in how she led.
Then there are the project manager stories, and there are enough of them that they stopped feeling like exceptions a long time ago. They go like this: a client relationship is deteriorating. Someone steps in differently, being curious rather than defensive, transparent about problems rather than managing optics, genuinely interested in what the client needs. The relationship stabilizes and eventually transforms. The client then awards the company additional projects without going to bid. The only stipulation: the transformational project manager leads them.
Most recently, a young woman was placed into a role she didn’t feel ready for. Her manager stayed close, sitting in on client meetings and supporting her through the uncertainty. The client didn’t just accept her. They wrote her role into the project as a contractual requirement.
These outcomes aren’t personality-dependent. They’re produced by a specific, learnable set of behaviors: building trust, developing people, surfacing problems early, and making the people around you more capable.
The industry has been calling these ‘soft skills’ for decades, but these are the skills that determine whether a company can execute on its growth, retain the people it has invested in, and build the next generation of leaders fast enough to stay competitive.
The thing companies keep missing
We’ve written extensively about what women bring to the table. We’ve spoken about it at conferences, published research, and built programs around it. The people who already care about advancing women in construction understand the value. They’re not the ones who need convincing.
The ones who aren’t yet paying attention tend to think of it as a separate workstream. Something important, but distinct from the operational problems they’re actually trying to solve – retention, burnout, leadership pipelines, capital they can’t deploy, and younger workers they can’t keep.
That’s the disconnect. Not resistance. A failure to connect two conversations that are actually the same conversation.
Investing in women’s leadership development is not a parallel track to solving construction’s leadership problem. Women are underrepresented in the industry and that alone makes them an obvious place to focus when the labour shortage is this acute.
But the case goes further than representation. Investing in women surfaces leaders the current system isn’t seeing, builds the capabilities the industry now needs most, and shifts organizational culture in the direction the workforce is already demanding. It addresses multiple urgent problems at the same time and does so not eventually, but often within months.
Women were always the logical starting point, underrepresented enough that the industry can’t afford to keep overlooking them, and naturally positioned to model exactly the kind of leadership that moves companies forward. Investing in women’s leadership development shouldn’t be considered a separate initiative sitting alongside the real work of solving construction’s leadership problem; it’s actually the heart of the solution.
Where to start: Two things worth sitting with this week.
First, a question: think about the last three people in your company who were promoted into leadership. What actually drove those decisions? Technical performance, tenure, and visibility in traditional roles are honest answers. If that’s what you find, it’s worth asking what you might be missing in the people those criteria don’t surface.
Second, an action: find one woman in your organization who is known for bringing people together, holding client relationships, or making her team better, but who hasn’t been formally identified as a leader or given a clear path forward. Have a direct conversation with her about where she wants to go, and then do what a sponsor does: figure out what opportunity or exposure would get her there, and be the person who opens that door.
Neither of these things requires a program or a strategy overhaul, just a willingness to ask different questions and have conversations that most companies have been avoiding for too long.
If you want help identifying the gaps in your organization and what to do about them, that’s exactly the work we do at Ambition Theory. A good place to start is our latest Building Better research, and if it resonates, we should talk!
