Whether they call it partnering, team building or sponsorship, contractors are reimagining mentoring as a tool for shaping organizational culture.
When a new employee arrives at Ronsco, Inc. in New York, the first hour of the first day is devoted to safety.
At Robert A. Aird, Inc. in Maryland, new hires are introduced to the values and expectations that define the family-owned business.
At Interstate Drywall Corp. in New Jersey, company leaders are working to better define the culture they want future employees to inherit.
Each company takes a different approach. But all are asking the same question: How do you develop people while strengthening the organization?
Increasingly, the answer involves moving beyond teaching technical skills to help employees solve problems, work safely and contribute to company growth.
In other words, mentoring has become a way to shape organizational culture.
Mentoring Itself Is Evolving
The topic of mentoring has gained urgency as contractors confront labor shortages, worker retirements and heightened competition for talent from other industries. Experienced craft professionals and managers are hard to find, while today’s younger employees often enter construction with different expectations about communication, career development and workplace culture.
The latest management research suggests mentoring is evolving beyond the informal “follow the veteran” approach. More companies use structured onboarding and leadership development programs. Mentors themselves increasingly receive training on how to coach and develop employees.
An emerging idea is that mentoring should not always be a one-way exchange. Younger employees bring valuable technology skills, fresh perspectives and new approaches to problem-solving.
All in all, research published in MIT Sloan Management Review says top companies view mentoring not simply as a culture-building system. Instead, mentoring shapes and reinforces organizational culture, the researchers say, through the conversations employees have with supervisors and coworkers.
“Culture becomes meaningful to employees not through mission statements alone, but through everyday interactions within teams,” writes Spencer Harrison and Kristie Rogers in the MIT Sloan Management Review article “Building Culture from the Middle Out.”
Culture Doesn’t Happen by Accident
Dina Cipollaro-Beck, MA, a generational expert and trainer with Fundamental Training Solutions, agrees that mentoring is a key culture-building tool. Wall and ceiling company executives need to pay attention to it, she says, because a company’s culture develops whether leaders intentionally shape it or not.
“It is the personality of an organization,” she says about culture. “And it can’t be faked.”
Cipollaro-Beck has worked with a variety of construction organizations including the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, various regional drywall associations and other trade groups. Healthy cultures, she believes, are built through consistent actions, not so much by posting slogans in the break room and on jobsites.
“It’s action and behavior that drive culture more than any words could ever say,” says Cipollaro-Beck.
Company values may appear in handbooks and onboarding materials. But workers tend to absorb the values they see modeled every day by their forepersons, project managers and supervisors.
“If your company values honesty, but 20% have a work ethic that is dishonest, well, the result is your company now has a culture of dishonesty, regardless of what your core values might say,” Cipollaro-Beck says.
Trust Is the Foundation
If culture springs from daily interactions, then shaping a culture of mentoring requires trust. Successful relationships, Cipollaro-Beck believes, require employees to answer three questions affirmatively:
- Can I trust you?
- Do you care about me?
- Are you committed to my success?
Building that trust rarely starts with a formal mentoring program. Instead, it often begins with small, intentional actions. Trust is built through consistent daily interactions, she says.
For younger workers, Cipollaro-Beck encourages mentors to communicate something many employees rarely hear.
“Tell them, ‘I see potential in you,’” she says. “Say, ‘I want you to be successful here.’”
She describes this type of affirmation as giving someone an “A” before they have earned it, and it sets the effort to build a strong company culture off in the right direction.
Building Culture Through Daily Actions
Trust may be the foundation of culture, but consistency is what sustains it.
Lee R. Zaretzky, president of Ronsco, Inc., offers a practical example through his company’s effort to build a strong safety culture.
Though well known for its safety performance today, having won numerous safety awards, Ronsco was not always safety conscious, Zaretzky says. The journey began after a costly workplace injury forced the company to rethink its approach to safety. Developing the safety culture initially “was cost-driven,” he says.
Changing attitudes about job-site safety took years of work. Early on, workers often viewed safety reminders as enforcement rather than values education.
“At first, it was perceived like we were a safety cop,” Zaretzky says.
Over time, however, the company shifted away from focusing on safety rules to explaining why safety mattered. New hires now receive safety orientation immediately. Experienced workers model the safe behaviors expected throughout the organization. And supervisors, Zaretzky says, have learned to focus on coaching rather than simply correcting mistakes.
Ronsco’s safety culture gained traction particularly after Zaretzky himself earned his Certified Safety Professional credential. He says building a valuable culture requires leadership to be visible.
“The only way to change a company culture is from the top down,” Zaretzky says.
Today, Ronsco pairs new employees with experienced workers who embrace the company’s safety standards, and this is mentoring at its most basic level. Ronsco, however, calls it partnering.
The partnerships reinforce company culture through observation and example. Employees watch how experienced workers approach safety, communication and decision-making. And those lessons carry greater weight than any written policy. More importantly, partnering creates an environment where workers feel comfortable discussing near misses and unsafe conditions.
“We don’t ever turn a blind eye to safety in favor of productivity,” Zaretzky says.
Relationships Matter
For Sarah Aird-Nichols, director of operations at Robert A. Aird, Inc., culture involves creating a sense of family, and that begins by building strong connections among teammates.
The family-owned company has spent more than 50 years building a reputation for quality work and customer service. Nichols wants those values to influence everything from project management and onboarding to client communication and leadership development. At the center of Nichols’s philosophy is a simple belief: The client and their needs are number one.
Nichols recalls helping a long-time client obtain budget pricing information for a project outside the company’s market area. Rather than decline the request, she connected the client with trusted industry contacts who could help.
“We understand the value of our clients’ time and budgets and the importance of listening and learning everything about their needs,” Nichols says.
The same relationship-centered philosophy influences how Nichols develops leaders and introduces new employees to the organization. She encourages employees to think beyond their own responsibilities and consider what will help the entire project team succeed.
Many employees have been with the company for decades, reinforcing a culture that emphasizes teamwork, loyalty and mutual support.
“I don’t want anybody to work for me,” she says. “I want them to work with me.”
Passing the Torch
Nichols says the team philosophy extends to onboarding as well. New hires receive formal orientation and training designed not only to teach procedures, but also to introduce them to the values and expectations that define the company.
At the same time, Nichols wants to preserve one of her firm’s main assets: decades of institutional knowledge. To do that, she has created the Aird Inc. Academy.
“We’re informally calling it ‘Aird Inc. Academy—Passing the Trowel,’” Nichols says.
She says the training initiative is designed to capture and develop technical expertise—building science, moisture management, for example, but also leadership lessons for future generations. In developing the course, Nichols’s approach challenges traditional ideas about mentoring. Rather than viewing mentoring as a one-way transfer of knowledge, she increasingly favors the idea of sponsorship.
“I’m sponsoring you, but you’re also sponsoring me,” she says.
In Nichols’s view, the most effective mentoring relationships are not one-directional. Instead, sponsorship creates opportunities for both the mentor and the younger team member to learn, contribute and grow, and for a positive company culture to flourish.
Defining the Culture
Sometimes, the challenge for contractors is putting their organizational culture into words.
Michael Chanfrau, chief operating officer of Interstate Drywall Corp. in New Jersey, says his company is doing that process. While Interstate Drywall has long operated with a set of shared values and expectations, company leaders have recently begun discussing how to better define and communicate them.
“We’ve got a great group of people, and we do good work,” Chanfrau says. “But what do we stand for? What’s our primary focus? What is the mantra everybody should be living by?”
The discussions have prompted a broader effort to examine the company’s identity, including plans to update its website and corporate brand, and to develop a mission statement that reflects the organization’s long-term vision.
“We’re trying to come up with a cleaned-up, modified mission statement that is truly representative of who we are,” Chanfrau says.
He adds that much of the momentum has come from younger employees. As Interstate Drywall identifies future leaders and gives them greater exposure to company operations, many have expressed a desire to better understand the company’s purpose and direction. Their questions have encouraged leaders to think more intentionally about culture and how it is communicated.
Underlying many of these efforts is Interstate Drywall’s status five years after becoming employee-owned. Chanfrau says the organization is beginning to see a cultural shift as employees, as owners, increasingly recognize that they share responsibility for the company’s success.
In that sense, the effort to define Interstate Drywall’s mission statement is also an exercise in mentoring. It gives employees a clearer understanding of what the company stands for and helps future leaders carry those values forward. Defining the company’s mission and values helps employees better understand where they fit with the organization while also creating a stronger sense of ownership and purpose.
More Than Mentoring
Ultimately, mentoring helps employees understand why their work matters. At the same time, employees increasingly expect leaders to communicate openly, recognize contributions and make their efforts visible.
For construction firms, that may mean recognizing a foreman who develops younger workers, a project manager who strengthens communication between the office and field, or a superintendent who creates an environment where employees feel comfortable speaking up.
But recognition is just the beginning. Sources say a broader shift in how contractors think about mentoring and organizational culture is underway.
Culture is no longer viewed as something that happens accidentally. It is planned, reinforced through communication, sustained through trust and demonstrated by leaders who invest in the lives of their employees. Organizations that intentionally develop people are better positioned to retain them, transfer knowledge and strengthen their culture.
In that sense, mentoring has become less about teaching a trade and more about shaping an organization’s future. CD
Mark L. Johnson writes regularly about the wall and ceiling industry. You can reach him at linkedin.com/in/markjohnsoncommunications.
