Building Blocks for Change

Dominic Sarica, President and COO, BCCI Construction

BCCI is a commercial general contracting company, primarily in California. We have 27 individuals that are internal to BCCI that make up our leadership team.

We were interested in finding a speaker that could create content to deliver messages to our senior leadership group around how to manage change in, quite frankly, a very dynamic environment that we live in today.

Armond Balaian, VP, Silicon Valley Office, BCCI Construction

Yes, and also how to control your environment in order to get to that change. Looking at your own calendar and how to coordinate everything so that you don’t have everything piling up on top of you.

We’ve had a lot of changes over the last three years with our company. We’ve merged with a larger company, so we’ve had a lot of inter-organizational requests, as well as dealing with COVID-19 and how our marketplace functions right now.

So there’s just a lot of things coming at all of our employees. And we wanted to start out with our leadership team, so then they can take that to their teams in order to be able to control their stress, control their environment, control their technology, and get to good habits. That was kind of a key message that we wanted to bring to our leadership team so that they could dissipate it down to the rest of the workforce.

Dominic Sarica:

So Maura, in the sequence of events, we have a two-day offsite. She was our opening speaker, so we were able to take her learnings and process them, not only through the afterlife of the meeting, but actually at that meeting.

So we were able to create tiger teams and start to dive into some of these topics, like what is distracting us? And how do we get some of our valuable time back?

We immediately created a tiger team and we’ve canceled about half of our meetings, and the other half we took them and made them about half as long. That’s just a good starting place.

Armond Balaian:

That’s a great starting place.

Dominic Sarica:

Not kidding around. Those easy things really bear dividends, right?

And so immediate results to our colleagues and their time, and to better focus their time on what they feel are the important issues of the day. Not what we feel, in a lot of ways. And to that extent, I can literally point to immediate results based on Maura’s learnings.

Pretty interesting stuff.

And so for us to sort of capitalize on Maura’s tools and techniques around that wide-ranging but important subject of what’s causing these stressors, and what can we do about it? Can we eliminate them? Can we create tools and techniques to better manage? And those were the themes that kind of guided Armond and I to Maura.

I thought Maura was a delight. She absolutely fit right into our group. She was able to, as her bio says, improvisationally react and pro-act the situation. She wasn’t a “my way or the highway” speaker in any way, so from the first time we had an initial discussion to the opportunity to work live with her, she was a pleasure.

She was a very easy person to work with. Also, I thought very highly of Maura and how she just seamlessly fit into our “esprit de corps,” if you will, our culture.

Speaker, Trainer, Author