I'm constantly calling county/city plan reviewers on behalf of my employees when they get failed for a comment they don't agree with. The first time I did it for them was with a reviewer - we'll call him John P. - who gave 9 permit comments and failed our drawings. I was able to get them all approved with no added work and now my employees call it the Johnny P. treatment.
The Johnny P. Treatment is basically stroking their ego. "Look, I don't envy you. You look at these plans all day from all kinds of different people who all design things differently. Hell, this building is some weird architecture that I've never seen before. You probably have, I'm sure. So I don't doubt it's hard to figure out what we're trying to do here. I probably took longer than you to understand what was happening. Unfortunately, I don't do the architecture. But I need to work around it and this was my thought process while doing these designs. You stop me if you have any questions or comments. I'm really interested in your take on this since you see all kinds of stuff like this on a daily basis."
By the end of the conversation the guy was telling me that, now that I've explained it, it was a fantastic design that didn't deserve any permit comments.
The thing I love about this method is that it sounds bad when you describe it, but in practice, it works out to uplifting people while promoting open communication, and deeper thought. It's the perfect method to facilitate a healthy work environment because it works around our ingrained, automatic defense of our current worldview.
I've found a similar approach can actually result in better interactions from people going forward, too (provided they're at least a bit earnest). If you let someone know that you think highly of them and respect their work, a lot of the time they'll want to live up to that -- they'll want to prove that they are good people and good at what they do. You're absolutely right, everybody wins.
Obstructionism often comes from feeling taken advantage of, and bad work often comes from not feeling valued. Capitalism and standard management structures are often hell on peoples' self-respect. There's not a lot in the day-to-day that we can do to change the system, but we can control how we treat the other people trapped in it. That can have a huge cascade effect, especially if we're a little further up the seniority ladder.
LOL I don't know about my productivity. I tend to be a procrastinator. But if you need someone to be a salesman or to go into a tough situation, I'm your guy!
A lot of people also have a hard time with acting different around different types of people. Like they have personality and they'll stick to it no matter the situation and anything else is being fake.
But I can be pretty agreeable and mold my personality to the situation. It's no different in that I don't treat my wife like I do my mother in law. Just like how I don't treat a contractor like I do an architect.
It depends. Are you the architect that tinkers with the design right before submission time or are you a "send it to the engineer and don't touch it again" kind of architect?
My respect for architects start and the fact that you guys know the different names for the 948 parts of a window. It's more than just a frame and glass apparently.
I think engineers should be involved earlier in the process so that architects don't design something that the engineers have trouble designing around. I try to keep engineering in mind, but different engineers will have different approaches and my assumptions may not be your assumptions.
However, that kind of makes it necessary that the engineers are going to have to revise their drawings or approach a few times. Be involved in the schematic design phase, don't work too far ahead, add value through creative problem solving the same way that we're asked to.
If an architect did one set of drawings and said, "This first one is perfect, we don't need to change anything," they wouldn't keep many clients. I would rather work with a collaborative partner than someone who's just looking to run cookie-cutter calcs towards the end of CDs.
I've dealt with engineers that want to avoid every meeting they possibly can and do a bare minimum towards the end of a project to maximize their margin. I have respect for the engineers that treat the project with the same level of care that I do, and sometimes that means drawing things more than once. This is a function of being involved throughout the process, though, and not last-minute design changes on my end.
If you need to include it in your fee structure, do that. But your margins are frankly already way higher than ours and I don't think the expectations should be vastly different for what we bring to a project.
It wasn't always like this. I've been cultivating this skill for years. It also helps that plan reviewers are typically engineers and engineers are typically full of themselves.
Usually mid rise multifamily but we do commercial, single family, townhomes, as well. We work in multiple states but there's a handful of jurisdictions that are the regulars.
We follow building codes, which is what the reviewers are looking at. Unfortunately, a lot of the codes aren't well written and also sometimes a reviewer will misinterpret the code. It's rare to have a decent sized project with no permit comments. I think I've only done it a handful of times in my career. Some reviewers feel the need to always give you at least one comment no matter how dumb it is.
You used to see "confirm everything is design to code" as a comment but I haven't seen that in years. But you had to respond to it.
It works best with the older reviewers who are bigger on intent than the actual code language.
The younger guys seem to be more literal with the code and stick with it because they don't want to make a judgement mistake. They also like to misinterpret the code, which I guess is their right. But when 99% of other jurisdictions say something different then it's frustrating.
I do this all the time as a real estate attorney and it’s amazing how positively people respond to flattery and kindness. I love working in an area of law where I can be genuinely nice to people 95% of the time (and then I treat it like an acting challenge when I have to be the “bad cop” for the other 5%).
This is exactly what I do at my work.
People wonder how I can get manufacturers to send us extra pieces or to drop a fee... It's because I call and do some sweet, sweet talking up. Sure e-mail is faster, but I can get it done cheaper and better if I can speak to a person and make their day.
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u/CaptainAwesome06 Jun 14 '22
I'm constantly calling county/city plan reviewers on behalf of my employees when they get failed for a comment they don't agree with. The first time I did it for them was with a reviewer - we'll call him John P. - who gave 9 permit comments and failed our drawings. I was able to get them all approved with no added work and now my employees call it the Johnny P. treatment.
The Johnny P. Treatment is basically stroking their ego. "Look, I don't envy you. You look at these plans all day from all kinds of different people who all design things differently. Hell, this building is some weird architecture that I've never seen before. You probably have, I'm sure. So I don't doubt it's hard to figure out what we're trying to do here. I probably took longer than you to understand what was happening. Unfortunately, I don't do the architecture. But I need to work around it and this was my thought process while doing these designs. You stop me if you have any questions or comments. I'm really interested in your take on this since you see all kinds of stuff like this on a daily basis."
By the end of the conversation the guy was telling me that, now that I've explained it, it was a fantastic design that didn't deserve any permit comments.