Hiring Leaders: Foreman Responsibilities and Job Skills

If a roofing company's owner is like the coach of a football team, an effective roofing foreman is the quarterback: a hands-on leader who can take a good crew and make them great. Foreman responsibilities vary from company to company but include managing the job process, maintaining worker cohesion, ensuring quality craftsmanship and keeping customers happy during the project.

Crews recognize and respond to a good foreman, resulting in higher morale and lower personnel turnovers. When those combine, it can mean higher profits.

While the job title is "foreman," this leader can be any gender. Women make up a growing part of the construction trades, and traits that make a great crew supervisor aren't gender-specific.

Let's take a quick look at what makes a great foreman and how they can be recruited and set up for success.

Expertise

There's simply no substitute for experience in the trades. A foreman needs to know the ins and outs of the trade, including how to handle the inevitable hiccups that arise on a job. Your foreman doesn't need to know everything about every type of roofing, but they do need a good general knowledge base, and they should be able to recognize when they're out of their expertise and need to bring in a specialist. They should also have a strong working knowledge of whatever your company's specialties are, whether it's slate or asphalt.

A foreman also needs expertise in the non-labor elements of roofing, including basic labor laws, building codes and OSHA regulations. Part of their job is to ensure that everyone on site is compliant, providing a vital layer of protection against injury or penalties.

Authority

Knowledge about roofing is one thing, but a foreman has to convey that knowledge in a way that will be followed. A great foreman picks the best method to communicate at that moment. Sometimes that means talking through a situation, and sometimes it means barking orders. This is especially true if crew members take shortcuts with quality or safety, which needs to be corrected immediately and decisively.

Empathy

Expertise is knowing the job, but empathy is knowing the people. It's what allows a foreman to stop crew members from trampling a client's flower garden, and it's why they won't fire a worker for their first installation mistake. But, an empathetic foreman won't tolerate repeat offenders, because they understand how a poor work ethic or attitude brews resentment in the rest of the crew.

Recruiting and Promotion

It can be tough to fill foreman responsibilities because the best candidates are rarely in need of a job. If you want to bring in an outside hire, you'll need to offer better benefits or pay than your competitors.

For this reason, many roofing companies like to promote from within. Just be sure that doing so doesn't create internal conflict. To avoid this, consider promoting a worker to lead a different crew. Some companies even assign "exchange students" from one crew to another to make sure they have mutual respect.

Empowerment

It's essential that a roofing foreman has the ability to make certain decisions on their own. While you may want to keep HR decisions reserved for yourself, the foreman needs to be in charge of their crew. If workers know they can talk management into overriding a foreman's decision, discipline can evaporate.

In the end, hiring a foreman is similar to most other positions. Keep looking until you find the right person, give them the tools they need to succeed and then let them do their job. Do that, and you can be like a coach who guides a star quarterback all the way to a championship.