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ON THE MOVE WARE MALCOMB
ANNOUNCES
leadership and management, said Jason Dooley, regional vice president. “Her strong skills and dedication to the team and our clients make her the right leader to guide our team to continued success in the future.” Leyrer has joined the firm as civil engineering manager. In this role, she leads the overall growth and management of the Atlanta office’s civil engineering team. A licensed professional engineer in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, she brings more than 10 years of land development and civil engineering experience to her new role at Ware Malcomb. “We welcome Lauren and look forward to her contributions to the firm,” said Ed Wilkes, P.E., regional director, civil engineering. “Her technical expertise and strong business development skills will facilitate the growth of our Atlanta civil engineering team and further solidify Ware Malcomb’s civil engineering prowess throughout the Southeast.” Before joining Ware Malcomb, Leyrer was a civil engineering group leader for a
regional land planning, civil engineering and landscape design firm. There, she led various commercial development projects throughout the state and focused on building market share in the industrial and healthcare space. Leyrer received her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition, she is a graduate of the Urban Land Institute Center for Leadership, a past chair of ULI’s Women’s Leadership Initiative, and active in other industry organizations such as the Association of Medical Facility Professionals, and Women in Healthcare. Engineering Georgia Magazine recently recognized Leyrer as one of the “35 Under 35 - Women to Know in Georgia Engineering.” Established in 1972, Ware Malcomb is a contemporary and expanding full- service design firm providing professional architecture, planning, interior design, civil engineering, branding and building measurement services to corporate, commercial/residential developer and public/institutional clients throughout the world.
PROMOTION KOURTNEY PENNYCOOK, HIRE OF LAUREN LEYRER IN ATLANTA Ware Malcomb, an award- winning international design firm, announced the promotion of Kourtney Pennycook to studio manager, interior architecture and design in its Atlanta office. The firm concurrently announced that Lauren Leyrer, P.E. has joined the Atlanta office as civil engineering manager. OF Pennycook, in her new position as studio manager, will be responsible for the growth and management of the interior architecture and design studio. With more than ten years of experience in the interior design industry, she has a strong background in project management, space planning, furniture, and construction documentation and coordination. Her project resume includes various project types, including corporate office, landlord, industrial, retail, and multifamily. “Since joining the office as a project manager in 2021, Kourtney’s contributions have been instrumental to the team’s
simplify your plans, and then share them and talk about them with everyone in the business. Paint the picture for how achieving those goals and that grand vision is going to help improve the life of the individual employees in the business. Connect the dots! 4. The top leaders don’t believe in the vision nor see their jobs as selling everyone else. AEC firms are usually owned and run by highly intelligent people who each want to do things the way they want to do them. They don’t always agree on direction. And then on top of that, even if they do (agree on direction), they may have some rigid ideas about what their responsibility is (or isn’t) for selling everyone else on that direction. It’s a problem. The CEO has to get all of their managers to embrace the plan and then go sell it. Any cynicism or outdated thinking about roles has to be confronted! 5. The place is too structured and stratified, and the middle- and lower-level managers are over-relied upon to communicate the vision. Some top-level firm managers have the dysfunctional idea that they only need to communicate with the people who report to them and then those people have to pass things on to those who are their direct reports – instead of top management communicating directly with everyone at all levels. Have you ever played the game “telephone,” where someone whispers something in the ear of one person, who in
turn passes it on to the next person, and so on? Once the message goes through 10 or 20 people it is usually completely distorted. Stop thinking your managers are doing an effective job passing things down, especially when it comes to the big picture of what the firm is trying to accomplish. Too much is at stake to rely on them. 6. There’s too much measuring and reporting at the micro or unit level versus the overall firm performance. AEC firms really tend to do this. Project financial performance is overly scrutinized versus how the firm does on all work for any given client. Individual geographic office location performance is measured versus how the firm performs in market sectors across all offices. Individual staff utilization is the primary measure of contribution without considering the overall revenue generated by a given team. Bonuses are based on individual performance. None of these practices encourages cooperation nor big picture thinking about how the overall company is performing. ALL of these things are why, over the long haul, I prefer using the ownership carrot over all other motivators to promote big picture thinking. Creating value in the company stock or ownership interest takes a relentless focus on overall firm growth and profitability. And that’s the “big picture” right there! Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
THE ZWEIG LETTER AUGUST 19, 2024, ISSUE 1550
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