Topic(s)
- People-centric leadership
Story has combined scientific thinking (Kata), job relations and work standards to significantly accelerate and improve the intentionality of individual career development for all employees. Employees use the career development storyboard, a fillable PDF combining career goal setting and actions underpinned by a work standard that guides the employee through the improvement thinking pattern. Supervisors are using job relations as the means to follow-up/coach the employees as they take actions/experiments to meet their short and long-term career goals. Using our lean planning system, to incorporate the individual's actions/experiment into their daily work to significant accelerate the pace of development for the individuals and to create stronger relationship between the supervisor, the individual and the team the individual is part of.
1. How is scientific thinking serving as the pattern for individuals’ career development?
2. How are Story’s supervisors using JR to facilitate the individual’s application of scientific thinking for career development?
3. How are work standards principles being applied to aid the individuals with their use of the improvement routine and our career development storyboard?
4. How Story incorporates the individual actions/experiments into their daily work to accelerate their development.
Founded in 1934 as James Thompson & Sons, Story Construction has been in business in Iowa for more than 90 years. These days, Story Construction is an employee-owned merit shop serving a variety of markets, including commercial, industrial, manufacturing, warehouse, senior living, churches, schools, higher education facilities, research labs, government buildings, treatment plants and food processing facilities.
Story Construction has utilized the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) since 2012. If you’re familiar with the system, you’ll know it is a company with a direction and a plan to get there.
Within this system, the company identifies its core focus:
Purpose: Its reason for being
Building: Because people matter
Niche: What it does better than anybody else
Leading projects
The Story Construction team believes there’s a better way to design and build better employee retention, better quality of life, safer worksites, reduced project waste and greater project value. They believe in growing opportunities for their people and partners who share their ideals through high-quality performance. With this in mind, the team has developed a lean construction system called Construction Production 2.0. Read more about the lean construction journey here: www.storycon.com.
After graduating from Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in construction engineering, Pat Geary spent 32 years at Story Construction Co., a $180M general contractor and design/builder in Ames, Iowa. Geary spent three years as a project engineer, four years as a project manager, five years as an operations manager focused primarily on water and wastewater treatment plant work and the past 19 years as Story’s chief operating officer. With the exception of business development, the balance of the Story organization reports to Geary to include pre-construction, operations, finance and human resources. Geary led the transition of Story to a 100% ESOP-owned organization in September of 2022 and the acquistion of L&L Builders from Sioux City, Iowa in 2024.
Eleven years ago, Geary and Story’s president, Mike Espeset, led the transition to EOS as Story’s corporate operating system, which is still in use today. Geary also led the development and deployment of Story’s lean practice. The first five years of lean work focused on the tools, process and conformance of its employees so they could use those elements correctly. Geary continues to lead the further growth of Story’s lean practice with what is called “The Story Way.” The company’s focus over the last five years has shifted to creating the necessary culture to maximize the growth of its employees as it shifts away from directive leadership toward facilitative leadership and fearless participation that promotes respect, trust, collaboration and teamwork, “The Story Way.”
The Story Way comprises Story’s core values, insights and guiding principles from Shingo, Toyota Kata, TWI and Work Standards that focus its employees on the necessary behaviors in well-designed systems that produce record results in many areas of the business. 
