Building More: Slow, Fast, or Consistent. What is Tempo?

Words: Corey Adams

It was a drizzly midweek day when I rolled up to the project we were working on just outside of town. The foreman paced the scaffolding, rain hood half-zipped, barking at two laborers who were sprinting bricks like they were late for a flight. Forty feet away, a pair of masons leaned against the wall, scrolling phones, waiting for mud. Same crew, same clock, but completely different beats, and the wall both looked and sounded like it.

The scene reminded me of the racket in my own driveway the night before. Two of my four teenage sons are convinced the NBA should be scouting the Adams family. The oldest ran the fast break like he’d swallowed a Red Bull; the other stood near the foul line, dribbling in slow motion, trying to perfect some YouTube-worthy crossover. They love the game, but if you filmed them with the sound off, you’d swear it was two separate highlight reels spliced together. Job sites are no different. When a crew has no shared tempo, the project turns into a driveway ball—plenty of hustle, very little scoring.

Construction companies worship “production rate,” so masonry companies fixate on how fast they can lay block. Speed is seductive—until it isn’t. Too fast, and we end up with crooked joints, sore backs, and callbacks that erase the seconds we thought we saved. Too slow, and overhead devours profit before the wall even hits elevation. A healthy tempo, on the other hand, is a sustainable cadence, like a runner’s stride, set to the capacity of the crew and the constraints of the site. On eight-inch CMU, the practical maximum might be 140 units an hour with a seasoned four-man lead; the minimum to stay on schedule might be 90. The sweet spot lives between 105 and 120, where quality stays high and bodies stay safe. The goal isn’t to spike above 140 during “hero moments” but to surf within that band all day, every day.

The costs of whiplash hide in plain sight. When mud men outrun mixers, equipment sits idle while tubs refill, and every reset is wasted motion. Errors discovered later force rework that kills both morale and schedule. Sprinters ignore housekeeping, leaving tripping hazards for the next lift, and trades that drift out of rhythm clog corridors and steal crane time. Like my boys’ scattered rebounds, each disconnect looks small until you stitch them into a scoreboard and wonder how the other team put up all those points.

So how do you bring back the beat? First, run a morning metronome. Start every shift with a five-minute tempo talk and a number everyone can see: “Today we’re shooting for 110 block an hour, three lifts before lunch, scaffold bump at 1:30.” A shared scoreboard turns an abstract pace into a concrete expectation. Second, stage materials like sheet music. A drummer doesn’t hunt for cymbals mid-solo, and bricklayers shouldn’t hunt for brick mid-lift. Stock the scaffolding the exact same way every time because predictability lets muscle memory play the tune. Third, swap yelling for visual timers. A ten-dollar digital clock taped to the wall marks hourly checkpoints; crews self-correct when they can see drift early instead of hearing about it late. Fourth, spend coaching energy on lulls, not peaks. Everyone cheers the hand laying ten units a minute. Tempo management is about raising the floor, not sharpening the summit.

Inevitably there are drops in tempo: the boom truck won’t start, half the crew calls off for the opening day of deer season, or a GC decides the schedule he approved last week was just a suggestion. My rule is simple—never chase lost time at a pace you can’t hold tomorrow. Add headcount, light the site for extended hours, or trim non-critical scope. Tempo is a long game; blowing it up today mortgages tomorrow’s production, just like letting my sons sprint full-court for twenty minutes thanks to their legs for the second half.

Focusing on tempo instead of chasing speed will raise your overall production and profit, even if it is the long game: less callbacks, less employee strain, and fewer schedule slips. It all adds up.

Tomorrow morning, stand back ten yards and listen to your job site. Does it feel like a driveway pickup game or a tight rhythm section? Your job as conductor isn’t to crank the volume; it’s to tune the instruments so the song can run all day without cracking the speakers. Set the tempo, protect the tempo, and let efficiency make the music. Now grab the baton and start counting off.

Building More: Slow, Fast, or Consistent. What is Tempo?

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