Delivering on the “One Firm” Promise | Jim Lee and Greg Kanz of Shive-Hattery

Thanks Susan. It's great to be back at kaconnect. Great to see some familiar faces and I know Greg's been here many times more than I have, but great to see everybody and looking forward to telling you a little bit about our journey that we're currently on. So as Susan said, I'm Jim Lee, grew up as a mechanical engineer out of college and been in the business of this crazy AE business for 41 years. 34 years at Shive Hattery and the last 7 years as CEO and President. And Shive Hattery is a 400 person AE firm primarily located in the Midwest.

I'm Greg Cans. I'm one of the history majors who was mentioned earlier. So just want my parents to have this on video that I got a job. They weren't sure about that. Been with shive hattery for 20 years. Kind of worked my way through corporate communications and then became marketing director in 2008 just in time for the recession. But the beneficial thing was Ka Connect was starting in Chicago in 2010 and this has been a great forum to be a part of and I really appreciate that. So I'm happy to get back today and share a little bit of our journey. So we're from Iowa, so usually when we mention Iowa they ask me how Ohio is. So I just gave up. And we're using this ray gun map as a clothing store in Cedar in Des Moines, we're in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, all the I states. We might get crazy and go to Nebraska, you never know. But again, we have seven offices and as we expand and add more people, we're trying to get more connected as one firm and we want more of this to happen. The IMT headquarters that we just finished in Des Moines, it was a multi office approach to this project. A young architect heard about the lead. She got people from Chicago and two other offices together to help sell this. Before there was an RFP started the design, it was a multi office effort that the client really got better creative solutions, more value. And plus our staff in Des Moines really got some great experience in workplace design by that collaboration. So happy to see that instinct where we look across the offices and and use that multi office approach. So we want more of those opportunities to happen.

So today we're talking about the one firm philosophy that we kind of adopted a couple years ago and has kind of become part of our dialogue and it's kind of a cultural shift for us. We're kind of going to talk about the evolution through the stages at Chive Hattery. To getting to this point along the way. But ultimately this is what we're trying to accomplish. As Greg said, trying to make more connections through all seven of our offices to really think like a one firm, act like a one firm. And of course, the one firm label isn't necessarily new. We didn't create it. Actually. It was coined back in 1985 by David Meister. I know some of you have read some of his books about managing professional service firms and true professionalism and other things like that. So he really coined the term the one firm firm. And we really started talking about it and became part of our dialogue a couple years ago. And today we're just going to kind of share our journey a little bit with you and some highlights of that. So why focus on that? It's really. We wanted all our employees to feel like they're part of something bigger. We have offices ranging in size from 18 employees to 110 employees. And collectively with 400 employees, we really wanted to create some better opportunities, some more exciting project wins. And so, so really that's why we're really looking at the one firm philosophy, is thinking like a 400 person firm, acting like a 400 person firm, as opposed to seven independent offices. And if we do that, we should be able to win bigger work. We should have more engaged employees. We should be able to put experts in one office with interns in another office. So we get that skill and time compression to where they're learning from our experts on a quicker pace than they might learn from somebody across the across the way. So that's really why we're doing it. And if we're successful at all that we're hoping that it will help accelerate our growth. But more importantly, we'll just have more engaged employees and really loving what they're doing.

So we know KA loves good maturity models. So we did some soul searching, kind of looked at our history, put our evolution into a bit of a maturity model that we'll go through here. We'll call this the pre dawn era when you went to work on a horse. 1895, we had two owners, a couple college buddies from Cornell University that started our firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. One of them left about five years later and then it was a sole proprietorship for about 50 years. So the Runway for our growth is pretty long. It wasn't until the mid-50s that Phil Shive bought the company and his son Jim joined us. And they're both in the military, so they brought a military command and control approach to our organization. So to their credit, they really grew the firm. But it was again a command control process where we had performance reviews, top down decision making over that time. But they did grow the firm rapidly over that time.

So then about 1995, there was a series of leadership changes that was occurring in our firm. And the new leadership recognized that we needed to adopt a different model. The command and control model wasn't going to be favorable anymore. The new employees were looking for something different. Our new leadership was looking for something different. So in 1995 there was a whole shift. So we read a lot, we talked a lot. We hired experts from Zwag and PS and J and other entities to help us reorganize. And we started sharing a lot of information before we were very tightly held and a lot of the corporate decisions were made at corporate and we wanted a different kind of company. We broke into market sector focused programs and that was when we first started our leadership development program. So 1995 was really a turning point from we went to a highly centralized organization to highly decentralized decision making. And that was kind of the start of a different phase of an evolution in shive hattery. And that continued on through the 90s as our leadership transitioned into the new top management of the company. And we started trying a lot of different things. We started measuring employee satisfaction through a series of surveys. We developed our communities of practice or putting disciplines together across our offices to really work on standardization of details and procedures. We came up with a way to share revenue across offices so that any employee could work on any team in any location and still get the credit for the revenue as it followed the employee to various locations. And then an ongoing coaching program that we'll talk a little bit about later, as well as some boots on the ground loca market squads. So I mentioned the ongoing coaching program. One of the best things we ever did was we got rid of the annual performance reviews. People hated them, the leaders hated doing them, the employees hated being part of them. The only people that liked them was HR because I was able to check a box that, yep, we did an employee annual employee review with that individual so we can move on. So we ditched that 25 years ago and we really focused hard on an ongoing coaching program. So our goal today is to have every individual in our company meet with their supervisor three or four times a year. And it's the employee's agenda. What does the employee want to talk about? How do they feel their career is going? What kind of things are they interested in? What kind of goals do they have? What kind of experience would they like to get at Chive Hattery? And how does that fit in the overall company's needs? And also how does that fit in with what our clients need? So by, by having that ongoing dialogue routinely three or four times a year to discuss an individual's desires and passions, it really in our attempt to get an engaged employee really enjoying what they're doing and knowing how they fit within the organization, as some of the other presenters have talked about earlier today.

So we're in our adolescent phase of the one firm journey. So since we're all friends, we're going to talk about our adolescence period. Is that okay? Appreciate the support. First is the market sector teams. Of course, we've had those for a long time. But this is my one firm Tribes. I've got six different market sector teams that are our one firm champions and they do a great job of making connections across the firm. Instead of having an annual strategic planning event, we meet quarterly and we look at intended strategies, things that we plan to do and then emergent strategies, things that are bubbling up in the market. And we have that constant communication that can be pushed to the offices and back and forth. And we challenge them to get rid of the thick strategic plans and create a strategic activity map. So again, this idea of visualization so employees can see what the plan is for the education sector, for instance, so you can see the areas of focus, thought, leadership, partnerships, client intimacy is our value proposition. Talent development and then niche services. They've started a lot of different niche services that have helped us grow the business, including sports and district energy. So again, employees appreciate that each bubble has a group of activities people are going to do activities that are going to help move these things forward. Next is Business Development University. So we have a leadership development program. So we thought how do we accelerate our business development skills in a similar path?

So I mentioned that we started a leadership development program we ran recognize that the pipeline of future leaders was really kind of dry and non existent in a lot of firms like ours. So 1995 we created a program that I talked at Kaconnect three years ago when I was here and through the results of that and it's ongoing today, we have about 100 alumni that have gone through our leadership development program and Shive Hattery still working for us today. So we have a whole cadre of other individuals that can step into leadership roles and it's really all about creating change agents. Similarly to that, we also recognize increasing need for more marketers and seller doers and also creating more rainmakers in the organization that can be our future marketers for our company. So we kind of spun off our leadership development program and Greg and I primarily Greg, leading the effort of really starting to develop a business development university to really enhance the marketing and sales tools of our individuals on a quicker pace. It's been going very well for us.

So each layer of the onion has a wiki page that you can go to and read more about these topics. Again, it has four different sessions. Market research and planning, client business development proposals, presentations and promotional activity. And then we have the leadership component in that because it takes intestinal fortitude to move things these things through.

So the wheel diagram, if you want to flip back and just mention that, is another part of our one firm initiative was to really have clear career paths for each of our employees. So this wheel is kind of a visual of the skills and knowledge and attributes that we're trying to develop in each of our individuals. So they can really take each any one of their career paths, whether it's technical or design skills, whether it's project management, whether it's business development or whether it's operations or managing people. And they can go into any one of these attributes and learn more about how they can develop skills in those areas to further their career. Becomes a great tool for discussions in our ongoing coaching program with each person.

This guy's getting a lot of recruiting calls. We'll call him Fred. He came back from Denver three years ago and he took advantage of LDP Business Development University. He's really accelerated his skill development and has really developed a good business. He's a go to commercial civil engineer in our marketplace. So he's going to be successful either way. But he's taken advantage of these things to compress that skill. Time compression period. The next one is our plus one campaign. Again getting us in the language of our company. So when somebody is going on a client visit or a site tour in the language we say, hey, where's your plus one? We're trying to figure out how to make the company car not start unless there's somebody in the passenger seat. We're still working on that. Get them involved in the meetings, take meeting minutes, be involved in that. And it's really made a difference in terms of career development.

This is vitally important. So here's another story relating to that. You met Fred before. Let's just call. Let's call her Ethel. And again, in case there's any recruiters in the crowd, but Ethel is a young rising star as an electrical engineer. And I took the opportunity. I had a routine marketing call to a major hospital a couple months ago, and I thought, you know, keeping our plus one campaign in mind, I'm like, you know, Ethel could really benefit from going along with me and meeting this client. So I just stopped by her desk and said, hey, are you available? Can you come with me on a marketing call? She loved it. She did a fantastic job. You know, I found out more about Ethel. Thank you. I ever knew before because she was able to communicate with the client really well, talk a lot about her health care experience and what she could do for them, and she really enjoyed it. She really appreciated that primarily getting that attention was the main thing, that she really just loved being taken along and introducing to some of our clients. So, you know, we're really trying to get all our employees to think before they leave and jump in a car. Where's your plus one? So I don't know if anybody has ever heard Ken Blanchard speak. Have you ever had an opportunity? I think he's best known for his book the One Minute Manager. But if you have an opportunity to attend one of his seminars, please do. He has a lot of good takeaways that you can benefit from. But I love this quote from him. And it's really about getting engaged employees, because, frankly, if you take care of your employees, they'll take care of the clients and the profits will take care of themselves. And if you reverse the priority and start focusing on the profits first, you're probably going to make some poor decisions and you're probably not going to have very many engaged employees. So take care of your people, they'll take care of your clients. And the profits is the applause at the end.

You know, as a full service company, we have a lot of niche services that we provide. So getting people aware of everything that we do is a big challenge. So we were inspired by Dr. Chris Parsons and borrowed the. The royalty fees are very high on this, but we put all our niche services into this document for our intranet. So you can click on each of these services, go to a page about more information. And it's really been a fun way to get employees to dig in to look at these different niche services, be aware of those things. And we really try to communicate that everybody's a marketer, needs to be aware of what we can do and go to the market and communicate those things. Now I play drums for a lot of theaters in the area, so I get to know a lot of Characters. And one is Corey Bassett. He's a local comedian. And so I was telling him about our initiatives here and he came up with the idea of interviewing our people and looking at what they do on the job. And use this as an internal communication tool to encourage employees to have some fun and. And talk about what they do. And this is a trailer to that little movie. Greetings and welcome to another episode of you do what.

Roundabouts Bike trail.

Yep. On street bike.

Concrete pavement management Drone Aerial surveying.

It's a Top Gun takeoff.

Arc flash analysis.

Hey, Owen. And again, this was meant to be internal just to have some fun and feature our people. But we actually put it out on social media on Facebook so you can look at some of those videos. And the Federal Highway Commission or agency contacted us and wanted to use the roundabout video in their national workshops is icebreaker. So you might see that if you go to a federal highway event. So you never know with social media.

Another way we changed things around to try to focus on the one firm approach was really through our company operations group. Routinely we get our office leaders together along with our corporate directors every couple months. And in the past we focused. It was a lot of reporting. It was like, you know, get this office report, then this office report. What's Des Moines doing? What's, you know, Bloomington doing? What's Chicago doing? And it really was dry meetings. It was very boring. There wasn't really a lot of conflict. Everybody just kind of reported what was going on. Again, we decentralized to the point where really we created a bunch of silos. Every one of our offices was operating independently. There wasn't any communication between our offices going on. In some cases we had multiple offices going after the same RFP and they didn't know about it with each other. I'm sure that's never happened with anybody here. So, you know, so the challenge moving forward now is how can we maintain that autonomy of having that highly decentralized decision making model, but also think as one firm and adopt that one firm philosophy. So we really had to change our approach of our company operations group and starting them to really work together as a team at the top in a workplace team. So now our company operations group, when we get together, we don't do any reporting. All those reports go on in advance. You can read them if you're really bored and want to read them. But we actually have taken some of the market sector strategies and some of our feedback from our employee surveys and started to workshop those. So now we really are working together as A team of, you know, how can we take a good company that we have and make it a great company? So it's become a lot more dynamic group. We're having good discussions, we're making change for the good of the company and we're moving in the right direction and we're all collaborating together as one firm instead of independent business units. Another idea we have. Well, actually, you've got to give. Krista Murphy, where are you? She here? Oh, there she is. We stole this from affiliated engineers, Krista, so thank you for that royalty payments. But they for many years have had swarming events where they bring all the individuals across their company into one location. And we copied that. So thank you very much, Affiliated. But last year we brought all our mechanical engineers into one location for a two day event. We brought all our structural engineers into one location for a two day event last year. And we're hoping to have other disciplines follow through with that this year. But the night before we had a social event. There was a lot of adult beverages involved, there was a scavenger hunt. And then the second day we got down to some really technical matters and they were worked together to really develop some discipline wide standards, some standard procedures, worked on specifications and things of that nature the next day. So the number one benefit we got out of these swarming events, I think, as Krista will attest to, is the social bonds, it's the connections, it's the relationship that many of these engineers are developing with each other across our company that have probably never had a chance to work together on a project before now. Now they got to know them, they got to socialize with them and they also started to get some boots on the ground the next day and work on some tangible things where each of our offices can work more seamlessly across boundaries and not be in conflict by figuring out together of how do we want our details and how do we want our specifications to look like and what kind of tools can we implement in that engineering field? So it's been a great event. I hope to have two more swarming events this year. And again it takes somebody to step up as a leader and really put together a good agenda and we'll finance it if they'll just come to us and say, you know, we want to have a swarming event. And I think I just heard a couple days ago, then maybe now our healthcare team wants to have a swarming event and bring all our healthcare designers into one location and provide a company wide workshop. Again, it's about making those connections and if you get those connections made, you get more engaged employees that are going to stick around for a long time. And also we switched from before we were measuring employee satisfaction. Now we're measuring employee engagement because you can have satisfied employees, but they still might not be engaged. So we really switched our survey tool and we switched to employee engagement. And we hired employee engagement group led by Bob Kelleher out of Boston. And they have a survey that they've put together. And this is our measuring stick of how we're doing as far as employee engagement goes. And we just recently got results back, as you can see, in February 19th. And very proud to say that we either stayed the same or improved in all categories except one. And one just dropped one percentage point. So we can compare how we've done since over the last four years. We also can compare to a norm category. So the column on the left is all other AE firms in the nation that use the employee engagement tool. So we can compare ourselves to all the other AE firms. And then the best in class category on the far right is all companies in the nation could be auto manufacturers, it could be insurance companies, it could be banking systems, but that's the top 10% firms in all areas of business. So we like to improve. Our goal is to improve. We love being better than the norm. But our goal someday is to try to be best in class in all categories. So this is just some of the questions that are part of the survey. The blue bars are what the norm is for all the other AE firms that use this survey result. And then the gray bar is where Shive Hattery's fallen this February. And so this just gives you a flavor of some of the questions that they ask that kind of of relate to employee engagement about career opportunities. I'm informed about what's happening. We got quality training opportunities. And also this survey, you can customize your questions. So the last question is a question we created because since we have multiple offices, we wanted to get a sense, do you feel that there's adequate communication between our office locations? So we can measure that at 43% and see if we improve in that area. And as the more we work on the one firm philosophy and thinking as a 400 person firm, we hope to see those results improve in that area as well.

So that's our adolescent phase we're in. And there's different groups in the company that are into full adulthood with the one firm approach. And this is the picture of what we're trying to get to, is more exciting opportunities for employees, best value for clients, and the most creative solutions and keeping all those offices and new people connected as we add new, new offices and people to the company. So the question we've been talking about is how do we measure progress on the one firm approach? And we have a few thoughts that we've been working on.

So for a long time. Remember way back when we created a revenue sharing agreement where we could share people across offices and the revenue follows the person so their office still gets credit no matter what project or where they're working at. So this is just a graphic that kind of shows how much work is shared between our offices. Every one of our offices imports work from other offices. Every one of our office exports work to other offices. So there's a lot of sharing of work back and forth. Some of it's due to availability. But I think as we adopt this one firm philosophy of really selecting the best team members, you know, from Shepley Bulfinch, earlier this morning, they got a process of how to put the best team members in place for a given project and create learning opportunities. I think as we look to put the best team members together, no matter where they're sitting, to give our clients the best value and create the most innovative solutions, we should see our revenue sharing numbers go up too, as we continue to reach out to across boundaries and really put best team members in place. So that's our goal. Some other things we're hoping to measure in the near future is actually tracking the number of projects that we have multiple offices involved in selling and winning and also the number of projects that we actually deliver from multiple office approach, just to see if we did 200 projects last year that had multiple offices involved. Are we doing 300 projects next year just to see if we're making improvements and putting the right team members in place? And also we're going to create a way that we can actually track some entering time. Again, this whole idea of getting a junior intern to work with a senior expert, no matter where they're located. So if we can get that senior expert a separate way of tracking that time that they spend mentoring somebody in another office and developing their skills and turning them into the future expert. By tracking that independently, we can look at their performance at the end of the year and say, well, how many hours did Sally work with Fred last year to really develop his skills in roundabout design? So that's another thing we're hoping to measure. Again, those things that get measured, get attention. So by measuring some of these things, we hope more people will be thinking. As the one firm philosophy and Greg's periodic table, we're going to kind of gamify that a little bit and make it kind of a fun Jeopardy kind of a practice so people can learn in a fun way about all the niche services that our firm provides and be more knowledgeable. So if they are out talking to a client or the contractor, they're aware of all the different things that we do that we can do. No matter what's in their local office, if we have them somewhere in the firm, we can provide those services. So with all things considered, in this crazy AE industry that we're in, if we continue to work on this and evolve, it's a very interesting practice being in architecture and engineering because there's. There's no end game, there's no final score, there's no winning. So the main goal for all of us probably is to stay in the journey. Right. And continue to tweak, continue to work in improving, continue to take a good firm to a great firm. And I think our one firm philosophy is going to help us get there. So thank you for listening and certainly be open to any questions anybody has.