Season nine of Pave It Black returns and we're diving into the topic of leadership. To kick things off, we sit down with Pat Nelson, newly elected NAPA Chairman and President of Lehman-Roberts, a Granite Company. Pat reflects on his path from fieldwork to industry leadership, the role of mentorship, and why advocacy is essential for shaping the future of the asphalt pavement industry. Don’t miss this deep dive into what leadership looks like in action.
You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or read the full conversation below.
Published March 4, 2025
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and journey to where you are today?
I'm Pat Nelson with Lehman-Roberts Company which was acquired a little over a year ago by Granite Construction. I have been here for 33 years now and my story is pretty simple. I went to school in Memphis, Tennessee, and met a beautiful Memphis girl whose family happened to be in the asphalt business. I wanted to marry her, and one thing led to another, and I got offered a job and I've been here ever since. Not sure it means I had any qualifications for it or not, but my journey here has been quite literally from the bottom: worked on a drill crew; worked in the lab; shook a lot of samples coming out of our mining business. I probably worked in our mining business for the first 10, 11, 12 years and ran dirt crews and managed production for a little bit. Then it wasn't until probably my thirties, I moved over to the asphalt side of the business.
When you think about the way that you lead, your style to leadership, can you put your finger on the people or experiences that have influenced your approach to leadership?
I've been really privileged to have some great mentors and peers who have had an outsized influence on me and the way I lead the business. I plagiarized this from one of my dear friends in the industry, but it's values-based leadership. It's leading around a set of values that I believe in, that we believe in as a company and expecting behaviors to flow out of those and show up in a positive way to influence the organization. I think probably my core definition of leadership is leadership equals influence.
And so, leaders are those people who can influence our behavior, can influence the direction of an organization they're able to guide and offer direction, and they're able to see what that looks like. I am really fortunate to have peers in the industry who really influenced me in a very positive way.
What are you most excited about in this leadership role? How will it differ from other leadership positions you've held within the organization?
I'm most excited about having the platform to celebrate what I think is just an amazing industry. The influence that we get, or we have gotten to have on the economy of this country is pretty remarkable. Over Christmas. I was reading a book by Stephen Ambrose and it was about the building of the transcontinental railroad and I just pulled up this quote: “For the people of 1869, especially those over 40 years old, there was nothing to compare to it. The Transcontinental Railroad. A man whose birthday was in 1829 or earlier had been born in a world in which President Andrew Jackson traveled no faster than Julius Caesar, a world in which no thought of information could be transmitted any faster than Alexander the Great. In 1869 with the railroad and the telegraph, that was beside it. A man could move at 60 miles an hour and transmit an idea or a statistic from coast to coast almost instantly.” I jotted down that quote because I thought, that's what we've done as an industry. Yes, the Transcontinental Railroad changed the world in the early 1870s, but the interstate highway system did too. The companies that we represent have had a chance to do that, we got to build that. It's an amazing story.
How did you decide that you're going to make that commitment to the industry and to the association to be Chair in 2025?
I mentioned earlier all the mentors and leaders who've had a huge impact on me. I think outside of family, every one of those men that I'm thinking about, I met at a NAPA meeting, or some offshoot of a NAPA meeting. I got to meet amazing men and women in this industry that in some ways help set the trajectory for my own career and certainly had an amazing impact on this organization.
I appreciate you recognizing that my involvement in NAPA has been a lot of meetings and volunteering and I don't get compensated for it, but I really think I've received more than I gave. I think the influence that the organization had on me, and, the friends that I made in this association are lifelong friendships and I really mean that. So, to take on the role as Chairman, I wanted to do it for all the reasons I said earlier, but for me it was a way to be able to give back to an industry that I really love and to an association that I love.
You announced that one of your goals is to really raise the status of NAPA PAC and raise the amount that the industry contributes to it. Why are you so passionate about the PAC? And why do you think it's so important for NAPA to lead in this space more than it has in the past?
NAPA is the only association that represents asphalt specific needs. We have lots of peer organizations that we're in the Transportation Construction Coalition with but they have their own issues that are specific to their industry. NAPA is the only one that solely represents the asphalt industry which is great--we're unified as an industry for the things that we're going to advocate for.
It's been primarily funded for the last, I'll call it 10 years, by the Board. We've not really engaged the PAC as rigorously as we could have. If we're the only association doing this, and this is our mode of having a voice, well we need to pull that lever. The PAC is our ability to be able to build relationships to have influence in the circles of government. It's the mechanism for doing that. It is the way to build relationships and have influence with people that are at the table and are making decisions.
We saw that this year, the PAC increased its giving little over three times in 2024 and we did 15 plant tours. That's a record by far. We saw more engagement from members, and we saw more engagement from politicians. All of a sudden, folks are showing up at our plants just because we offered an invitation and because a PAC check that went with it. That means you've got somebody who's influential on Ways and Means or T&I or EP&W who is showing up at your plant, putting on PPE, shaking hands with your employees, seeing their constituents at one of your facilities. They see the big pile of RAP. They see the sustainability.
I know some politicians locally who've done that tour with Lehman-Roberts or Memphis Stone over the years, and they still talk about it. It is a really powerful mechanism that we have, but the PAC is the channel to do more of that and having a louder voice in D. C. for our issues. The biggest issue for our organization is funding. Our members tell us that survey after survey—"Hey, here's our number one issue, it's funding”–so, not to put too fine a point on it, it's time for us to put our money where our mouth is.
In your opinion, what differentiates a good leader from a great leader?
If I have to boil it down to maybe two or three things, I would say trust is at the bottom of that. It is really hard to follow somebody you can't trust. I would say it's impossible. And so, at the foundation of leadership, I think you've got to have this element of trust that when a leader says they're going to do this, they do it. And if they don't, they're super-fast to apologize and they own it. Leaders are going to make mistakes and the ones that I respect the most, admire the most and want to follow are the ones that are willing to admit that. And that builds trust. So, I think owning your mess is a big deal.
Another one for me would be humility. And there's an element of that in the first, but I think it's knowing you don't have all the answers. Some of the biggest help I've received is somebody who helped me go by saying “Here's a way to get from here to here and here's the path you can follow.” Having the humility to look and hear and listen to those things.
Thirdly, I would say, and this may sound like a little bit of an odd answer, but I think it's somebody who's willing to lean into conflict. One of my character flaws, I call myself a recovering people pleaser in that my first step in any relationship is for you to like me. Even on this podcast, trying to figure out how I can come across as likable.
And it's just the way God made me, but I know it about myself. And so often for me, I have to lean towards conflict because it's just not natural for me. Being willing to hold people accountable and not run from that, comes full circle. It builds trust in an organization.
What's a piece of advice you would have given yourself with the experience that you've had now?
It would be to embrace patience. I think when I look back on my twenties and thirties, I was very ambitious. I was very hungry, but very impatient to let the process play out. I was always looking for shortcuts, trying to figure out what's the quickest path. I probably short-circuited some really valuable learning and lessons. And I think what I would tell 21-year-old Pat. You're going to figure all this out, but take your time, learn the business, and build the relationships.
You were talking about an area of personal growth and the self-realization that you have a tendency to be a people pleaser. What’s that process self-evaluation process like for you? How do you identify those challenges?
I've put people around me that I trust and they fall into maybe a couple of different categories. One is my wife, who is absolutely amazing. She is not afraid to tell me when I'm not toing the line. She is certainly a first line of defense for that, and she is really good at holding up a mirror to my face.
I've put some other relationships in place. I formed a peer group of other industry leaders probably a decade and a half ago who've become some of my dearest friends in the world. And most of them will probably be, if not all of them, will be pallbearers at my funeral one day. Those men I trust, they say it. It's super confidential, but they'll be like “Hey, Pat, have you thought about it from this side?” And so those men are really helpful.
Then my Executive Team, we've worked really hard to build a trusting relationship. They can say anything to me. and most, I won't say every employee feels comfortable doing that, but everyone has the right to do it.
Then finally I usually have a coach in my life, I hired an executive coach. I haven't always. My most recent coach, we’ve been working together for about a year and a half, two years. And so that relationship is important for me. I like the executive coaching model because, it's going to sound bad, but it's a transactional model. In other words, I'm paying him to coach me. And so that means there's no emotional entanglement. He just calls it like he sees it and it's really helpful for me having that person in my life.
If you could pull something that you would put forward as advice for listeners that are advancing their careers, that have aspirations to take on more leadership responsibility. What is one takeaway that would be worth putting in the front of their mind.
One of our core values here is continuous improvement. When I reflect on what that means for me, it means that I want to continually be hungry for improving myself, improving those that I get to work with. I want these amazing men and women when they retire from here, I want them to be awesome human beings, not that they didn't start here as that, but I want them to be better human beings because of the culture, the things we teach and talk about. I want that kind of improvement and I want it organizationally as well. I want us to continue to get better at what we're doing. I think as a leader, that means, if I'm going to lead that means I've got to constantly be working on myself.
The other one there would be a spirit of lifelong learning, which for me is reading. I have a saying that ‘Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers’ which means you've got to have a hunger for developing yourself and read broadly. That would be the one thing. to have a spirit of lifelong learning and continuous improvement that you grow in yourself.