Watch Me, Then I Watch You

The problem in one breath

You handed the new guy a nail gun and pointed at the roof. Six months later a valley he ran is leaking over somebody's bedroom, and you're eating the callback. He wasn't lazy. Nobody ever actually showed him how you want a valley cut — he got "trained" by being told to go do it.

Why it happens

On most crews, training is "watch that guy and figure it out." Nobody's got time to teach, so the new man copies whatever he happens to see — the good habits and the bad ones both. And the details that cause callbacks are the ones you can't see from the driveway: what's under the valley metal, how far the ice-and-water runs, whether the pipe boot was set right. Those are exactly the ones that get learned wrong. A bad roofer is almost always a man who was never trained right — not a man who doesn't care.

The play

Three rungs, on the roof, one detail at a time. Pick the details that come back to bite you — valleys, pipe penetrations, flashing terminations, step flashing — and run each one through all three.

1. Watch me — and I talk the whole time. You or your best foreman does the detail while he watches, calling out every step as your hands move: "I'm running the ice-and-water a full course past the wall here, because that's where the water backs up." He's not just watching hands — he's hearing the why, the part that keeps him from cutting a corner on the next one.
2. You do it — I watch, hands in my pockets. Now he does the next one while you stand there, hands literally in your pockets so you can't grab it out of his. He has to work through it himself. When he's done, you say what's wrong and hand him the fix (M3-02) — the behavior, the exact fix, then the praise. What you don't do is take it back and finish it for him. That just drops him to rung one.
3. You teach the next guy — I listen. The last rung, and it's the real test. He teaches the detail to the next man while you stand back and keep quiet. If he can teach it clean, he owns it. If he fumbles the why, you just found the hole in his training — before a leaking roof found it for you. Teaching it back is the quality check.

This is how you quit redoing the job at midnight (M1-02) without eating callbacks for it. You don't hand a detail off on a hope — you hand it off once the man can teach it, which means you're trusting a proof instead of a prayer.

Do this this week

Pick the one detail that causes you the most callbacks, and run rung one on it with one man this week — you do it slow, talking through every single step, while he watches. Just the first rung, one detail, one man. That's the start.

The tool

Two pieces: a card in the truck, a spreadsheet in the office.

The training card — one page, one per man per skill. Print a stack and keep them in the truck:

TRAINING CARD

Roofer: ____________________

Skill / detail: ____________________  (e.g. valley cut · pipe boot · step flashing)

   [ ]  Watched me do it         date: __________
   [ ]  Did it while I watched   date: __________
   [ ]  Taught it to next guy    date: __________

Signed off by: ____________________     Date: __________

When all three boxes are checked and it's signed, that detail is trained — and you've got a written record of who can do what, no guessing. A Spanish version of this card lives on the Spanish cards page — same card, plain jobsite Spanish.

The training matrix (the-training-matrix.xlsx) — the office roll-up of every card. One row per man, one column per skill, a dropdown for the rung he's on. It counts who can teach each skill and flags any skill only one man — or nobody — can teach. That flag is your training priority: the detail that walks off the job the day that man quits or gets hurt.

If your crew is 1099

Stop here and be careful — this whole play is employee machinery. Training a man step by step, standing over his hands, and signing off on his methods is exactly the kind of control that says employee, not subcontractor. Run it on a 1099 crew and you can knock out his classification and land the tax bill on your own desk. Where that line sits — how much training and direction tips a sub into employee territory — is a test you want your accountant or a labor attorney to walk you through.

With a sub, you don't train him at all — you hire a crew that already knows the detail and buy the skill instead of building it. If a sub's men can't cut a valley to spec, that's a hiring-and-contract problem to fix at the front end — not on the roof by teaching his crew.

One more thing: this play is how we run a shop — it's not legal advice. Rules change by state and by contract, so before you act on the legal-sounding parts, run them past your own attorney or accountant. It's your business, and what you do with any of this is your call and your responsibility.