Let’s Celebrate Weekley And Pulte As Fortune Great Places To Work

Left: David Weekley, Chairman of David Weekley Homes
Right: Ryan Marshall, CEO of PulteGroup

Who’s more capable of getting the job done right now? Who’s less? At the company homebuilding level – and for all of the business partners part of that ecosystem – capability in the form of technically competent, 100% engaged, striving, team players will answer the two questions above.

A brief digression.

It was late Spring 2010. After what were the worst couple of years of the Great Recession’s toll on new home starts and sales, many people in the business were tentatively emerging from a fetal position. Many homebuilders – the ones who had made it alive through the worst of it – were a sixth or a quarter of their former enterprise selves. A sparsely attended annual executive conference of the community’s leaders was a petri dish of traumatized survivors. Most of them felt good and sorry for themselves.

Among the event’s speakers, somebody had to go last.

For people who program and produce live, in-person executive business events, cracking the code of who goes in that final bookend program slot is a kind of Holy Grail. That year, in a darkened auditorium, the handful of people who were still left to hear the final speaker at the two-and-a-half day executive homebuilding conference in Scottsdale had their roller-bags packed in the back of the room, and they couldn’t wait to just get away. Crickets.

David Weekley’s eyes shone as they pierced directly back into the glare of the spotlight as he spoke on the stage. He’d drawn the short straw as the event’s closer.

He talked as he talks, plain and simple. After a couple of days of listening to his peer executives’ war stories of business and financial hardship, his message was not about the plight of David Weekley Homes. Rather, he reminded the few of us still sitting there to hear, the people the company tries to serve as customers and what they’d had to endure, and the people whose livelihoods took a hit during the housing crash, and their loss.

This is not ever about us,” David told a far-too-sparsely-filled room of his home building company executive peers. “This is always about our customers.”

That David Weekley and his 22-year partner and ceo John Johnson tend to say the kinds of things that etch forever into people’s minds and hearts would not by themselves make this truly one-of-a-kind brand name in American homebuilding a perennial – for 16 years running – on Fortune magazine’s top 20

America’s third-largest homebuilder has a laser focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. PulteGroup created internal committees to work on recruiting and training a diverse talent pool of employees and to sponsor cultural awareness programming with live, interactive webinars that spotlight the achievements of a diverse range of individuals. Externally, in keeping with the company’s values, PulteGroup is working to create homeowning opportunities for lower-income families and minorities through affordable housing and down payment assistance initiatives. Part of the company’s emphasis on inclusion includes a flexible workweek. Once fully implemented, employees will work in the office two days per week and remotely for the other three.”

Ryan Marshall, PulteGroup ceo and chairman, whose own way into homebuilding came through his embrace of accounting, which he felt growing up was a way to understand, unpack, and ultimately improve a company, says this of the organization he leads:

We and our partners get to play a major role in one of the most meaningful parts of people’s lives, their homes. Getting to do what we do for the benefit of people who need homes, need communities, need the kind of connections we’re good at—it adds a level of purpose and mission to our company.”

It’s clear, too, that he more than says it. As Seth Godin would say, Marshall and the Pulte leadership “show up as pros, keep their promises, even when they don’t feel like it … especially when they don’t.”

They’re making a capability culture.

There’s never been a time when that kind of culture has been so important as it is now if you want to attract, retain, and grow talented people,” says Carpitella.

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