Ernie Poole’s Rules

Here’s a story about a gift that goes on giving … despite the fact that it was never given in the first place!

In 1989, I joined PCL Construction as their first-ever training and development professional. At the time, they were (and still are, BTW) Canada’s largest general contractor, operating in the commercial, industrial and civil construction industries.

I was challenging myself to join them, moving as I was from an educational institution (The Banff Centre for Management) into the fray of the private sector. Adding to my interest was the fact that PCL is employee-owned, so the work environment was quite different to what I had observed of the private sector in my time with The Banff Centre.

I only came to understand what employee-ownership at PCL really meant as I worked and lived with my fellow owner-operators over the next 20+ years. What I had observed in 10 previous years of presenting leadership and management courses to the public, private and not-for-profit sectors is that the private sector is all about generating opportunity for innovation, growth, profit … pretty exciting energy! I had also observed that many managers and leaders in the private sector saw themselves as competition to their colleagues for the next step up the ladder, which of course occasionally led people to stray a bit away from teamwork and more towards self-service. Would construction be the same, I wondered? It’s a pretty tough industry. Would I be up for it?

It turned out that employee-ownership makes a tremendous difference in the power of shared values in a constructive work environment. Here’s what I learned in my time with PCL and how I learned it:

A couple of years into my relationship with with PCL, I was asked to start a series of videos on “PCL Legends”, the many leaders who had made PCL into what it was. Of course I already knew some of the history of the company:

• started in 1906 by Ernie Poole, who had come out west from PEI on a harvest train and never went back. Built a farmhouse in Stoughton, SK, never looked back;

• Ernie sold Poole Construction Ltd to his sons John and George in 1948;
• who in turn sold the company to Bob Stollery and 24 other trusted, hard-working employees in 1977-78; and

• today, there are 4,500 employee-owners!

We had already produced a video of Bob Stollery, who had led the employee purchase of what was now known as PCL and my assignment in this instance was to interview and record some John Poole historical perspective. Having had some experience in writing and acting, I felt comfortable with the assignment and assumed I would be scripting, directing and editing the final product. Well, I certainly did those tasks, but the experience was not quite like I had imagined.

I quickly learned that the John Edward Poole perspective uncovered a truly astonishing man. In my work with him, I tried to be organized, intelligent and diligent. He more than matched that and taught me additional lessons in how to be prompt, courteous, prepared, attentive, responsive, curious, honest, humble, respectful and professional. In all of my career, I cannot think of a series of interpersonal interactions that have left me in more human awe.

And that’s not even the story here! But I think you will see why I needed to set the stage this way, because of what happened during our rehearsals (yes … the gentleman demanded we rehearse before filming and I had thought I would have to talk him into taking that step!).

At any rate, during one of our filming sessions, he arrived with a single piece of paper covered with hand-writing in pencil, said he had found it the night before, while he was going through his father’s papers, just to make sure he wasn’t forgetting something important for us to talk about. Here’s what he showed me …

On the left is the piece of paper John brought to the recording studio; on the right, a typed-out, more legible rendering (we did this later). John told me that his father must have started working on these values and guiding principles in the 1940’s, but had never published them for his employees to see, he just kept them amongst his business papers, to refer to, like personal maxims. And John thought us seeing them now might help explain his father’s legacy and what John and brother George were trying to use to Model the Way in their time as company leaders.

You could have knocked me over with feather! These behavioral guidelines were exactly what I had been ‘feeling’ in my short time with PCL, so I knew the Poole family and many of their chosen leaders over the years had been acting in concert with the implied values … BUT!!! how much more could we say and do, I thought, if we were to let everybody in the company know what behaviors we expected of them as they lived and worked with PCL?

And what about our business partners: the owners, the designers, the engineers, the trades, the suppliers? Shouldn’t they explicitly know what dealing with PCL meant? If we published these as corporate behaviors, we would have to actually live up to them, day in and day out. Pretty good pressure!

And that’s just what we’ve done. I am persuaded by my work with helping people articulate their own personal values, attach specific behaviors to them, then publish them in their lives, that this is the greatest gift a leader, an organization can offer (more on this in another blog). And Ernie didn’t offer it up for all to read, he just lived it. It took his son John to make the gift official some 50 years later. Thank you John, you were and are an exemplary PCL role model!

P.S. The other little thing I noticed about Ernie Poole’s Rules, and you can only see it if you can view the original document, is that this was a ‘working document’ for Ernie. You can see places where he erased some words and replaced them with others … this was perhaps the first PCL personal journal! Subject of another blog, another time …