Monica Jacobs

Someone in your organization is going through a change right now. A restructure. A new system. A shift in leadership. A process nobody asked for, or hell, maybe you did; you just aren’t making the correlation. And somewhere in a conference room or a Teams chat or a one-on-one that ran ten minutes too long, a well-meaning leader said some version of this:

Last month, I wrote about the drinking culture embedded in construction. The unspoken career tax, the inherited defaults, the equity problem nobody wants to name out loud. That conversation broke records. Which told me one thing: you're paying attention. And you're ready for the harder conversations. This one is harder.

Let me say the thing nobody wants to say out loud at the company meeting: We have normalized alcohol as the primary way we connect, decompress, and reward people in the construction industry — and it's costing us more than we think.