The Coordinator Who Never Coordinated: A Year of Covering Someone Else's Job

 My role on this project means I end up reading almost everything, structural drawings, architectural layouts, underground utilities, M&E systems, the as-built condition of structures that were built years before I ever joined. Cross-checking across disciplines nobody else is really looking at, on top of actually managing the BIM data and model itself. It's a lot by design. I've made peace with that part.

What I hadn't made peace with was covering someone else's job on top of my own for the better part of a year.

The Coordinator Who Never Quite Coordinated

Our previous M&E coordinator left, and the replacement who came in was older, technically senior in title, but had almost no real coordination experience behind that title. Meetings with the client and the services-wide contractor kept going the same way, him getting pushed around by whoever spoke loudest, unable to hold a position or answer a direct technical question without stalling. I started jumping in to answer for him mid-meeting, not because anyone asked me to, just because the silence was getting uncomfortable and someone had to say something coherent.

There's a particular kind of exposure that comes with meetings involving the client directly. The services-wide contractor negotiates hard, and if your own coordinator can't hold ground on a technical point, the client notices the gap immediately, and it reflects on the whole design team, not just the one person who fumbled the answer. That's part of why I kept stepping in instead of just letting him struggle through it in front of everyone, it wasn't really generosity, it was closer to damage control.

That became the pattern. Meeting after meeting, I'd end up fielding questions that were technically his to answer. My own workload didn't shrink to make room for that, it just piled on top, on top of the cross-disciplinary review that was already mine to begin with.

Eventually I sat down with our design manager and laid it out plainly, here's what's happening, here's how often I'm covering for him, here's what it's doing to my own deliverables. That conversation felt necessary but also slightly humiliating in a way I didn't expect, like admitting a problem I should have somehow fixed myself without needing to escalate it.

What made it worse wasn't the skill gap itself, everyone starts somewhere. Age wasn't really the issue either, I've worked with older colleagues who ran circles around people half their age. It was specifically the refusal to close a known gap once it had been pointed out clearly, more than once, in plain language. I'd walk him through something completely, folder locations, document naming, who to contact for what, and a week later he'd be asking the exact same question like the first conversation never happened. Not because the information was hard to find, it was two clicks into a shared folder, but because he never seemed to actually look. He just waited for someone else to hand him the answer again. I started keeping a rough mental tally of how many times I'd re-explained the same three or four things, and somewhere past the fifth repeat I stopped being patient about it internally, even while trying to stay professional on the surface.

The Meeting Where I Actually Raised My Voice

It came to a head in a meeting room, just the three of us, him, our design manager, and me. I don't remember exactly what triggered it that particular day, something small probably, another vague non-answer to a question he should have owned. What I do remember is telling him, more sharply than I usually let myself speak at work, that if he was a senior coordinator he needed to actually act like one and do the studying the role required.

His response was that he wasn't under me, which was technically true on an org chart and completely beside the point I was making. I wasn't trying to pull rank. I was trying to say the job wasn't optional busywork someone else could permanently absorb.

He stayed almost exactly a year, long enough to collect his AWS bonus, and left not long after. I didn't think much more about it until a colleague on site sent me a screenshot a few days ago, a review he'd apparently posted online afterward, one star, describing the workplace as poorly run, the hours brutal, management inexperienced, everything essentially someone else's failure. Reading it, I laughed, not because it was untrue that the hours were long or the environment had real problems, some of that was fair. But there was nothing in it about his own side of the year, no folder he never opened, no question he asked five times, no meeting he needed rescuing from.

What I Actually Took From This

I don't think the lesson here is simple, and I'm wary of making it sound like one. Workplace conflict rarely has a clean villain, and I've replayed that meeting room moment enough times to know I wasn't entirely graceful in how I handled it either, raising my voice probably didn't change anything he wasn't already choosing not to do.

What I do think is true is that covering for someone quietly, for months, without escalating clearly and early, just teaches them there's no real cost to coasting. I escalated eventually, but eventually was later than it should have been, and the year in between cost me more hours and patience than I like admitting.

Since then, our team actually changed how we structure handovers for coordination roles, a short written checklist of what the role actually owns week to week, reviewed with the design manager within the first month rather than assumed. It came directly out of that year, a small procedural fix for a problem that started as a personality clash but was really a structural one, nobody had clearly defined what "coordinating" meant until its absence became impossible to ignore. A written checklist doesn't fix someone who doesn't want to grow into a role, but it does make the gap visible early instead of letting it hide behind vague job titles for a year.

If there's a practical takeaway for anyone managing multidisciplinary coordination here, it's this, the moment you notice yourself consistently answering for someone else's role in meetings, that's the moment to flag it upward, not six months later once resentment has already built. It's not about being harsh. It's about not quietly absorbing a gap that isn't yours to fill indefinitely, and it's about recognizing that no amount of documentation or patient re-explaining fixes a gap someone isn't actually trying to close on their own end.

Related reading:

The Duplicate Family That Cost Us Two Weeks on a Tunnel Ventilation Shaft

Getting Through LTA's BIM Submission Process Without Losing Your Mind