For today’s facility managers, wearing multiple hats isn’t a career anomaly—it’s the job.
Beyond maintaining buildings and systems, these professionals often are also responsible for capital planning, staff supervision, stakeholder communication, budgets and cross-department coordination. In municipal and institutional environments especially, the role often expands faster than resources.
Brandon McCullough’s career is an obvious example. As the City of Novi, Michigan’s first facility manager, he built a facilities management division from the ground up, overseeing City Hall, police and fire facilities, public works, parks and an ice arena.
Within a few years, his responsibilities grew to include parks maintenance, managing over 30 employees, and leading capital projects totaling more than $11 million. Today, McCullough balances facilities leadership in Charter Township of Northville, with public service, serving as a city council member in Livonia, Michigan, and a statewide municipal board representative.
Dr. Alicia Hart’s experience reflects a similar breadth of responsibility at the executive level.
As deputy county executive of Government Operations, Performance and Innovation for Prince William County in Virginia, Hart oversees Facilities alongside Human Resources, Procurement, Information Technology, Performance Management and Strategic Planning, bringing a portfolio-level perspective to the role. However, rather than treating these responsibilities as silos, Hart approaches them through disciplined prioritization, project management and stakeholder communication.
Together, Hart and McCullough exemplify that success in the facilities management world is driven by balancing strategy with execution, trusting their teams, and adapting constantly as responsibilities evolve.
When everything feels urgent, these experts say effective facility managers must learn to distinguish between perceived urgency and actual risk.
“I like to categorize items in my mind as either must do, nice to do, or would like to do,” Hart explains. “Must do activities are activities that, if they are not done, will negatively impact life and safety or overall organizational wellbeing.”
For managers like McCullough, this mindset is essential when balancing daily work orders with large capital projects and public accountability. Life safety issues and mission-critical operations must always come first. Everything else must be intentionally scheduled or delegated.
One reason multi-hat roles become overwhelming is tasks blur together. Hart avoids this scenario by approaching nearly everything as a project. She credits this capability to earning her Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.
“I always fall back on my skill set as a Project Management Professional,” she says. “Earning that designation enables me to look at everything as a project. Being able to compartmentalize every task into a project helps me to stay organized.”
This certification helps Hart define scope, timelines, budgets and stakeholders, whether the task is a building modernization or a workflow improvement.
McCullough applied this discipline to managing Novi’s $9.8 million Public Works building project. Doing so kept the project within scope and within budget as he balanced his other responsibilities.
Hart strongly encourages project management training for all facility managers. “This training helps you look at any task or deliverable, as a project,” she says. “It makes it easy to identify your stakeholder group, the outcomes you hope to achieve, and keeps projects on track.”
Managing multiple hats requires visibility. For this, Hart relies on simple, repeatable systems rather than over-engineered tools.
“I use Excel often, or Google Sheets to list all the tasks that I have going on at the time, their due dates, and their statuses,” she says. “Later, I can go back to that task list that shows me where I am at with each project.”
For larger teams, both experts recommend a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) that manages work orders and a project management tool. McCullough implemented centralized work-order tracking and preventive maintenance programs to gain insight across facilities, which he says helped save thousands in energy and maintenance costs.
Hart has used Monday.com, a cloud-based project management and work management platform that helped her collaborate with her team, manage tasks and streamline workflows. “This tool can be used across multiple industries. It’s not just project management software either. It has the ability to manage anything you put into it as a project,” she says.
She’s quick to note that other tools can achieve the same results. Microsoft Project, Asana and others work just as well. “You need to find something that is user friendly, intuitive and something that you will go back to regularly to monitor your progress,” she says.
Facility managers wearing multiple hats often lead teams with different technical backgrounds and communication styles. It’s vital in these circumstances, they say, to adapt rather than standardize communication.
“It’s important for you to know the communication styles of those that you are leading and how they best receive information,” she says.
Some team members prefer in-person conversations, while others may prefer quick calls, texts or Teams messages. Hart asks each team member about their communication preferences. “You should always be in the role to support and advocate for your employees, and not necessarily to make them conform to the way that you like to do things,” she says.
This flexibility mirrors McCullough’s success working with elected officials, department leaders, and frontline staff; each requiring a different communication approach.
The key is to have standardized templates, such as a standardized meeting agenda, that you follow when meeting with employees. “This helps you capture the same buckets of information for each employee and each department activity,” she says.
Hart has used Google Meet and Zoom for video calls in the past, she now uses Microsoft Teams. Her other go-to is text messaging. “We need means of communication that are quick and to the point,” she says. “Supervisors must be amenable and flexible to using multiple forms of communication.”
Delegation is essential in multi-hat roles, but poor delegation can create more work. The most successful approach, they say, is to assign tasks based on capability.
“It is careless of a manager to delegate a task in an area that may not be an employee’s potential strength,” she says. “Ultimately, you could set that person up for failure.”
Hart identifies strengths by listening to employees and reviewing their skill sets. Then she assigns employees to tasks within those identified areas. For example, she has strong writers handle documentation, and has extremely personable staff manage community-facing responsibilities.
Burnout is a constant risk when responsibilities pile up. Here, Hart stresses the importance of self-awareness.
“I like to make sure that I am cognizant of when I am getting to my bandwidth being stretched too far,” she says.
That includes having honest conversations with leadership about the workload, and before taking a job, choosing organizations that genuinely support work-life balance. McCullough encourages facility managers to ask candid questions during interviews to understand expectations before accepting a role.
Perhaps the most important mindset shift for facility managers wearing multiple hats is letting go of the need to know everything.
“It’s OK to not be an expert in everything,” Hart says. “The people who work for you are the experts. Trust in their expertise. Allow them to do the work that they’ve been hired to do.”
McCullough’s success reinforces this approach. By focusing on leadership, coordination and advocacy, he was able to elevate facilities management within multiple communities. This would not have been possible if he had tried to personally master and perform every function.
Wearing multiple hats is now a defining feature of facilities management. Leaders who succeed are those who prioritize well, manage work as projects, communicate intentionally and trust their teams.
As Hart notes, trying “to just know everything about everything… is just unrealistic.” The real skill lies in leading well.
Ronnie Wendt is a freelance writer based in Minocqua, Wisconsin. She frequently writes on the interpersonal aspects of facilities management. See an archive of her articles here.
