How to Engineer Opportunities: Growing People from Strength to Strength

We had a leader when I first started that used to have the saying, they said, it's okay to have selfish goals.

as long as you're willing to achieve them through unselfish means.

It's kind of a weird saying, but it's something that we've embraced in our company, and I think that example will sort of weave into what I have to say today.

So we all aspire as a goal to progress through our careers and move from stage to stage in our career and have a really, really fulfilling career growing along the way.

What I want to introduce to you today is the concept of really not only thinking forwards for yourself but also thinking backwards and thinking about how can you engineer opportunities for those who follow you and think just as much about that as you are thinking about moving forward in your own career.

That's growth leadership and the concept is engineering opportunities.

First, I'm gonna give you a little test, a little example, one of the P's of Evergreen, pragmatic innovation.

So everybody just quickly think of this.

Can you think of just one thing that you're doing in your role today that you think is an improvement over the person who did the job before? One improvement that you've made.

Can you think of that? Raise your hand.

A lot of hands came up pretty fast.

Okay, that's great.

So you're an innovator.

We have lots of innovators here.

My question is, are you thinking about that if you ask for advice from the people who work for you, how many of you think they have an even better idea than that right now? That's really the concept of the opportunity for personal growth that you have and that others have really in tandem with you.

So our company is a structural and civil engineering firm or one of the largest firms in the country that do what we do and we're a privately held company like all of you.

So we know we know everybody here is part of a private company but I think there's some key differences in our model that give us some unique opportunities and some unique challenges.

Many of you are family owned businesses which means you're pretty closely held by a small group of people and like it or not you don't get to choose your family.

And many of you are a part of ESOPs where the model is to offer some stake of ownership to many many people or all of your employees and so once again while you're incenting through people through an ownership stake you're also really not making a conscious choice of who you're offering ownership to in the company.

So our organization is a privately held principal model.

The ratio is about 14 to 1.

And so what we're doing is we're offering ownership to our most talented and accomplished people.

We're picking that group of people to be the owners of our business now and in the future.

So here's the unique challenge about the engineering business, is that when somebody gets an engineering license and is licensed to practice engineering, the vast majority of people make a choice to go do this on their own.

If you look at the data that I'm showing there, the average engineering firm in the country is less than 10 people.

We had a leader when I first started that used to have the saying, they said, it's okay to have selfish goals.

as long as you're willing to achieve them through unselfish means.

It's kind of a weird saying, but it's something that we've embraced in our company, and I think that example will sort of weave into what I have to say today.

So we all aspire as a goal to progress through our careers and move from stage to stage in our career and have a really, really fulfilling career growing along the way.

What I want to introduce to you today is the concept of really not only thinking forwards for yourself but also thinking backwards and thinking about how can you engineer opportunities for those who follow you and think just as much about that as you are thinking about moving forward in your own career.

That's growth leadership and the concept is engineering opportunities.

First, I'm gonna give you a little test, a little example, one of the P's of Evergreen, pragmatic innovation.

So everybody just quickly think of this.

Can you think of just one thing that you're doing in your role today that you think is an improvement over the person who did the job before? One improvement that you've made.

Can you think of that? Raise your hand.

A lot of hands came up pretty fast.

Okay, that's great.

So you're an innovator.

We have lots of innovators here.

My question is, are you thinking about that if you ask for advice from the people who work for you, how many of you think they have an even better idea than that right now? That's really the concept of the opportunity for personal growth that you have and that others have really in tandem with you.

So our company is a structural and civil engineering firm or one of the largest firms in the country that do what we do and we're a privately held company like all of you.

So we know we know everybody here is part of a private company but I think there's some key differences in our model that give us some unique opportunities and some unique challenges.

Many of you are family owned businesses which means you're pretty closely held by a small group of people and like it or not you don't get to choose your family.

And many of you are a part of ESOPs where the model is to offer some stake of ownership to many many people or all of your employees and so once again while you're incenting through people through an ownership stake you're also really not making a conscious choice of who you're offering ownership to in the company.

So our organization is a privately held principal model.

The ratio is about 14 to 1.

And so what we're doing is we're offering ownership to our most talented and accomplished people.

We're picking that group of people to be the owners of our business now and in the future.

So here's the unique challenge about the engineering business, is that when somebody gets an engineering license and is licensed to practice engineering, the vast majority of people make a choice to go do this on their own.

If you look at the data that I'm showing there, the average engineering firm in the country is less than 10 people.