How Are Partnerships in Construction Being Redefined?

Anita Nelson opens the episode by describing the essential mindset for today's construction leaders. She emphasizes the need for people who can have "their head on a swivel and their feet on the ground," meaning they're grounded in outcomes, values, compliance, and financial responsibilities while simultaneously staying aware of everything happening around them.

This superintendent mindset, she argues, needs to translate across all levels of the organization. It's about being rooted in what matters while maintaining the flexibility and awareness to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Anita Nelson shares her transition from Chief Strategy Officer at Skanska (a role she held since 2019) to Regional Executive Officer overseeing national operations. Her previous role focused on looking to the future, including data strategy and customer partnerships.

In her new position, she now has operational oversight over two national businesses: Skanska Advanced Technology (servicing semiconductor and data center customers across geographies) and Skanska Integrated Solutions (their program management, project management, and consulting arm). As she describes it, she's "doing everything everywhere all at once."

The conversation explores the fundamental shift happening in owner-contractor relationships. While technology's potential to evolve this relationship has been discussed for years, the actual transformation is now taking shape in meaningful ways.

The discussion moves away from traditional transactional dynamics toward genuine partnership-based approaches. Anita provides insight from the general contractor's perspective on what's changing, what's evolving, and what owners now expect that they didn't demand a decade ago.

Anita explains that unprecedented pace requires unprecedented solutions. Today's customers don't want contractors to simply answer questions—they want partners who solve problems, often before the customer even anticipates them.

This means contractors engage earlier in projects, ideally across entire campuses (whether fabrication facilities or data centers) so they understand what to anticipate. For first-of-its-kind projects, contractors need to know where potential challenges lie and build in capacity to iterate.

The approach is fundamentally solutions-oriented rather than contractually obligated. Contractors sit with owners, understand what's keeping them up at night, and anticipate what will keep them up tomorrow night—then solve for both.

This partnership mindset isn't limited to high-tech or fast-paced industries—it's everywhere. Commercial development, healthcare, and higher education all seek partners who bring solutions and strategy, not just in the boardroom but on the jobsite and in the trailer.

Owners facing significant challenges want contractors who iterate with them on delivering the best outcomes for their end customers, whether those are students, patients, or data center clients. The demand for strategic partnership spans across all construction sectors.

Anita emphasizes that the key to strong owner-contractor relationships is transparency. While responding to scope has always been standard practice, true connection happens over coffee after an OAC meeting, iterating on what's next and solving problems together at the whiteboard.

Both contractors and owners need to break down the transactional wall and have transparent conversations. This means being vulnerable—admitting when you're nervous about something or under pressure. When owners come to contractors saying "we don't know how this can be done, can you help us?" the response can be "we're not sure, but let's iterate. Let's get in a room and solve this issue together."

The transactional approach persisted because it worked—a case of "success inertia." If something's working, why change it? But current circumstances have made the old way impossible.

With the pace required today, combined with labor costs, supply chain challenges, the shortage of skilled trades like electricians, and global complexities, there's simply no time for the traditional back-and-forth. Organizations can't afford to send emails, wait for invites, schedule Teams calls, then schedule in-person meetings. They need to get it done. There's no time for walls, so in most cases, the walls are gone.

The conversation shifts from measuring productivity as a KPI to focusing on outcomes. Sasha and Kris discuss how clearly defining and agreeing on outcomes with owners creates opportunities to redefine how work gets done to achieve those outcomes.

This approach aligns better with owners and allows contractors to think differently about project delivery, moving beyond traditional productivity metrics to results that truly matter to the client and their end users.

Anita explains that while outcomes can be measured through time, quality, building performance, and budget (especially when projects come in under budget with shared savings), the ultimate measure of success is simple: repeat business.

If you're energizing a building and the owner is already talking to you about the next building, you're saving them time because they don't have to reinvent the procurement wheel. This benefits everyone—the contractor's leadership is happy, and customer outcomes are being met across all fronts.

The most successful projects lead to another project with the same customer. When trusted relationships develop, owners make one or two calls instead of ten, reducing uncertainty. When Skanska doesn't get the next project or the call, they go back and ask what they can do better or what broke down in the relationship.

Kris raises an important point about outcomes: sometimes the owner's priority isn't necessarily cost, but speed or quality. Understanding which matters most is crucial for delivering the right outcome.

Anita's approach is direct: ask "What matters most?" Do you want this by December 31st? Do you want this under $250 million? Do you want this to be a beacon of quality and housekeeping? Or do you want all three? Her job is to make sure they're realistic about what's possible within reason.

She emphasizes cutting out corporate speak and marketing fluff to ask directly: What matters to you? What matters to your business? What matters to your success as an individual? This directness comes from having the transactional wall down, allowing honest eye-to-eye conversations. That transparency comes from holding people accountable and being reliable.

When asked how often she says no to owners, Anita's answer is simple: often. She's accountable to a board and shareholders, so she must be able to say no. There are finite amounts of resources, power, water, people, time, and money.

She believes in being honest about what's possible. While she walks a tightrope between what her company expects and what owners demand, the best outcome comes from honesty about what will fail. If an owner wants to hire a contractor who will say yes when nobody can actually deliver, they should prepare for claims management. That conversation typically goes over well, unless the owner truly needs somebody to say yes without options—which isn't the right posture.

Anita stands by the principle of knowing when you shouldn't be in a room. If you're sitting at a table and something doesn't feel right, you have to walk away. That's very hard to do in a tough market, but the industry has seen the pitfalls of the "yes and" approach.

Sasha observes that for Skanska to show up consistently and make guarantees, operational shifts within the business are necessary. The company does extensive scenario planning to anticipate market changes, align markets to those scenarios, and define clear trigger points with planned responses to potential shifts like interest rate changes or new legislation.

From the owner's side, the goal is for portfolios to be data-rich, with project information essentially advocating for itself. This requires fundamental changes to how contractors organize and operate internally.

Skanska is organized as a regionally-divided business, but they created a national P&L with people in national roles who must collaborate across Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Oregon, and New York. When different groups are measured on different incentives and performance standards, collaboration becomes difficult even when everyone shares the same values.

A major part of the solution is operationalizing values throughout the organization. They develop playbooks for customers and ensure superintendents in Atlanta and Phoenix manage jobs the same way and handle logistics consistently. In many cases, they're building the same building in different locations, so consistency matters enormously.

What truly brings people together is connecting on a deeper cultural level. One of Skanska's core values is "Care for Life," making safety paramount. They have a safety lead overseeing accounts across all locations, watching for best practices and evolving their playbook rapidly—for example, implementing different cord management approaches from Phoenix across all sites to prevent slips and trips.

Anita discusses how human integration with AI is crucial, using Skanska's "safety sidekick" as an example. This AI tool is based on thousands of pages of vetted best practices from across their business.

Workers can tap into the safety sidekick for immediate guidance. Meanwhile, Tony (their national lead for Skanska Advanced Technology Safety) serves as the "human sidekick," identifying what he's seeing across projects and ensuring those best practices get into the AI system.

The power of this approach is that someone in New York working on a Port Authority project might look something up and discover a solution from a data center project that applies to their situation. Clean room housekeeping practices, for example, apply across hospitals, life sciences, and data centers. By leveraging AI, they put expertise in people's hands while maintaining human integration through people talking about solutions and pointing others toward the tool.

The safety sidekick has been Skanska's most successful tool launch. Anita attributes this success to multiple factors: safety is tied to worker well-being and protecting lives, the tool is useful and easier than previous methods, and safety operates within a highly structured reporting environment.

Currently, the sidekick helps users become more informed—it's AI-informed. Soon it will become AI-assisted, not just providing solutions but helping write appropriate reports or structure operational procedures for jobsites. This will help people move better and faster.

The success comes from a "triple whammy": holistic human interest in safety, expediting expertise to solve problems, and making jobs easier for users.

Kris highlights why the safety sidekick works: Tony, the human expert, feeds information into the AI. As new use cases emerge and new ways to solve problems or avoid risks are discovered, those get fed into the sidekick. Users have confidence because they trust Tony—they know he's vetted the information.

This human-AI symbiosis builds trust in the technology because there's a known, trusted person behind it. The industry needs more examples like Tony—people the field trusts who put their names behind tools and vet the information, creating confidence in AI-powered solutions.

Sasha notes that just one year ago, Anita mentioned they were starting to capture knowledge from retiring superintendents as an AI test case. In just twelve months, they've gone from testing how to apply AI to actually launching and leading with a product that allows widespread knowledge capture and application.

This rapid progression from concept to deployment demonstrates how quickly AI implementation can move when organizations commit to it and find the right use cases tied to genuine business needs.

Sasha references the Future State of Construction report showing that about 70% of digital transformations fail—a number consistent across industries, not just construction. Today's jobsites have approximately five generations working together under one roof.

Anita's work requires people who thrive in ambiguity and are truly in love with problem-solving. The question becomes: is this a new requirement driven by the next generation coming in with certain non-negotiables, or something else driving this need for problem-solvers who embrace uncertainty?

Anita explains that in the field, problem-solving personalities have always driven the work. It's bread and butter for field personnel. However, as you move into project management ranks, there's much more process and tradition—a sense that "we're going to do it this way because it's working."

This is where success inertia emerges. In an industry where things have worked a certain way for 20 years, there's no provocative need to evolve unless someone explicitly says you must change. And even when told you must, there's often resistance.

What has shifted is the pace of work. Some traditional approaches simply won't work in today's environment. Anita looks for people who can have their head on a swivel and their feet on the ground—grounded in outcomes, values, compliance, governance, and financial responsibilities, while simultaneously staying aware of everything happening around them. That's the superintendent mindset, and it needs to translate everywhere in the organization.

Kris notes that Anita's perspective is unusual—most people describe field personnel and superintendents as the hardest to change because they're rooted in their ways and subject to success inertia.

Anita agrees that cultural resistance exists, but emphasizes that if field personnel see a better solution and it's working, they're all in. Construction is "not a tell-me business, it's a show-me business." You can't tell someone in the field that a digital solution is better, or that a new way of working is superior, or that they need to communicate differently. But when you show them it works, they adopt it.

Sasha asks Anita to look forward to 2040 and consider what will seem obvious about the owner-contractor relationship that today feels radical.

Anita's answer is simple: "We're on the same page." She extends this to the contractor-architect relationship and all construction relationships. Because they're based on contracts, people think of them as adversarial. But marriage is also a contract, and it's a partnership.

Everyone has the same goals: better communities, faster project delivery, more efficient construction, safer sites, healthy air quality. While each party has their own interests, they share the same outcomes. The future will recognize that alignment rather than maintaining adversarial positions.

Kris suggests maybe the industry shouldn't even use the term "contractor" anymore—perhaps "partners" is more appropriate. Anita agrees, noting she doesn't like the term "subcontractor" and prefers "trade partners." It's a partnership, and everyone's in it together. Yes, contracts exist for risk management, but fundamentally, it's collaborative.

Kris asks how far away teams are from being fully enabled and supported by AI-driven decision-making and tools like sidekicks.

Anita outlines three stages: Currently, teams are increasingly informed by AI—it provides information to support decisions. The assistant level is emerging within 12 months, where AI provides prompts pointing users in the right direction rather than users always generating prompts themselves.

True agentic AI—where things happen autonomously in the background—is a three to five year window. At that stage, systems will handle routine tasks automatically so people can focus on what's most important.

However, this requires bringing everyone along. Whether it's superintendents, office leaders, or owners, everyone must trust what's happening in the background. The industry can't fall into the 70% failure rate for digital transformation. Without trust in background processes, partnerships erode, performance suffers, and outcomes disappear.

Favorite Book: Anita is currently reading Strong Ground by Brené Brown, which she finds incredibly relevant to this moment in construction.

Source for Different Perspectives: "The last person who openly disagreed with me." Anita emphasizes that valuable perspectives come from those willing to challenge your thinking, whether it's someone today or someone yesterday.

Advice to Younger Self: "Say yes. Get on the plane. Take the job." Embrace opportunities rather than hesitating.

Trend That Will Shape Construction's Future: Vulnerability. This unexpected answer highlights the importance of authentic, transparent relationships in the industry's evolution.

Industry Tagline: Quoting Elle Woods from Legally Blonde: "What? Like it's hard?" This playful response captures both the complexity of construction and the industry's can-do attitude.