A recorded conversation among Christopher Parsons and BWBR staff about BWBR's learning and development strategy. They discuss creating firm-wide onboarding ("foundations/essentials"), project- and phase-specific training (including short videos called "BWBR shorts"), upskilling tracks for specific market sectors, cohorts for emerging professionals and mid-level leadership preparation, and the tension between specialist and generalist career paths. Participants also raise succession concerns about how the program will persist beyond a central figure (Dan) and how to replicate his judgement and feedback-oriented leadership style. The discussion includes a recommendation of the books Leadership Pipeline and Specialist Pipeline as useful frameworks.
Chapters
I don't know if you're going to call it foundations or essentials or figure out what your language is, but something that all new BWBR people should go through over time. And then you're going to need some that can be delivered depending on what type of project or what phase of project you're in. And then you're exploring BWBR shorts. Do I have this right? This sounds like this is your world right now. Is there anything big I missed?
When you put it to us that way though, it sounds kind of overwhelming.
So.
No, I mean I, I think you're, you're right on there. I think we've done a great job of putting together content. We've done an okay job at putting in a place that's accessible to everybody. And I almost feel like I should write down BWBR foundations or BWBR essentials for that. For that. Quick.
Those.
Quick 12. Do you have it? Okay, I was like. Because otherwise I feel like I'm. Tomorrow I'm going to ask Carrie.
What was that? What was that?
Chris Coleman.
Well, this will be available on YouTube. I think there's also to me a question about like what happens with the people that have been at BWBR for longer and or have more than five years of experience. Like, it sounds like the most acute problem is emerging professionals. That's why you've put so much time into it. Is it fair to say that like there's not as much need and that's therefore you haven't spent it there? Or have we just not talked about the learning development program for that other audience within bwbr?
We have a lot of other stuff that I think this has been a catalyst for and the inspiration for others. We've got other now upskilling programs for specific market sectors. So if somebody is new to healthcare, new to behavioral health, there's a series of upskilling videos that walk you through the project type and some of the common things that you'll see in that project type. One thing that's sort of top of mind for me is thinking through. We've got a couple of potential cohorts that we could do something similar to this emerging professional group. But the one sort of in the mid level, how do you start to prep folks for leadership roles? Is something that we've talked about and that's a lot of soft skills. Yes, you need to know your way inside and out of the technical role to be able to mentor others in that role. But there's a lot of new soft Skills that you don't necessarily learn. So how can we be more intentional about that? And then once you're in that leadership role, I've heard some anecdotal feedback that there needs to be more self awareness because you still need to learn and practice your skills in terms of communication and directing folks and mentoring folks. Once you are in the leader roles, one is helping you understand the business and how the business works and the new things that you would be privy to and responsible for if you become a leader and then that continued like development, how do you really start to get the most out of your teams? How are you continuing to develop in that role?
There's a book that you might like, if you haven't already read it, called the Leadership Pipeline, which I've heard about from multiple companies in our community. And it kind of is exactly that. It goes through these kind of predictable turns from being an individual contributor to managing a team, to managing a market. It's not AEC specific, but it's very, it's professional services specific. And it kind of talks about all these like almost changes of identity you have to have as a person at all these different forks in the road, you know, that you go through. He's written a new book that I've just finished called the Specialist Pipeline, which kind of takes that a little bit further. And it's like people that go down a technical contributor route. And how do you create the right career opportunities for people that want to specialize in ambulatory care or whatever. The thing is, how do you set up an organization that can let people specialize in a really effective way? So good stuff there.
I'd be interested in reading that. You should send that over after this.
Will do. We'll put it in the show notes too.
All right, thank you.
But sort of the converse of that specialist I keep thinking about. Maybe I'm jumping ahead to one of your future questions, but this program, living on past Dan's retirement, let's say he wins lottery tomorrow and he's like, see you later. Yeah, I'm off to travel the world. I feel like so much of the success of this program is because of who Dan is as an individual. Like I said, he's a master at getting feedback from folks. He's very self aware and very willing to take commentary on what he can do differently. I think you genuinely, Dan, want to show up and be the best for your team and support your team and help people succeed. And you made a comment the other day about how you, because of recessions and things that you lived through. You wanted to make yourself the Swiss army knife. You wanted to experience everything and be able to be useful in every area of the business. And I feel like we don't have as much opportunity for an individual to do that now.
People have to hyper specialize more, is your thinking or that or.
Yeah, it's just a harder jump, especially as we get bigger. Right. Maybe you had the advantage of doing this stuff when the firm was a bit smaller, so there was more flexibility to sort of like wear different hats. But I keep thinking about especially the way we're organized now. Like somebody comes up through an architecture track. If they want to switch and become a project manager, they're jumping to a whole nother track. There needs to be, obviously the need within the firm, but it's. It feels more formal of a jump. And if they want CA experience, like we have a dedicated CA team. So how does an individual start to get some exposure to some of that stuff? I don't have an answer for it, but I'm thinking how do we find more people like Dan that maybe we don't need a bunch of Swiss army knives to do our project work, but we definitely need somebody like Dan who can lead something like this because he's so good at weeding through what doesn't matter to get to what does matter. He cuts out all the clutter really well. And he hears what people are saying. He's like, oh, I see what the problem is. The problem is here we're going to do some training on this or we need a new process improvement here. There's got to be a better way to do this. And I feel like that's such a unique thing that I'm trying to figure out how to bottle that or replicate.
