1264

HELP WANTED Zweig Group is looking for a few good Engineers and Architects with signicant Project Management and Training experience to join our team as an outside training consultant for our Education and Training division. If you are a strong communicator and have a desire to help others discover the skills necessary to be a great Project Manager, we want to hear from you.

To learn more, please email: rwilburn@zweiggroup.com

JAMES A. LEE, from page 11

We currently have 110 LDP alumni in our ranks, many of which have already stepped into leadership roles. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT UNIVERSITY. Similarly, since most clients today value the seller-doer model of marketing, we, like many firms, recognized the need to have more individuals in our company taking an active role in business develop- ment. These skills certainly can be developed over time in our profession, however, our director of marketing, Greg Kanz, wanted to develop a group of individuals’ BD skills quicker than they could hope to learn on-the-job. In 2017, Greg put together a curriculum and assembled a group of seasoned BD veterans to beta-test our newly formed Busi- ness Development University. After tweaking a few things, we have the first group of employees underway this year, and will be teaching a second group this fall. INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY. Technology will drive innova- tion; how to learn it, how to apply it, and how to market it. Whether it’s the fourth or fifth dimension of building information modeling, 3D scanning, aerial surveying (drones), 3D printing, artificial intelligence, or what can be dreamed up next, all we know is that technology will improve and change our business. We all need to be nimble and adaptable to learn and develop skills in these changing times or risk being left in the dust trying to catch up. In- vesting our resources into the next leading-edge technolo- gies excites our people, adds value to our clients, and can easily be a differentiator for our future. Learn, teach, develop, innovate, and improve – it’s all part of “the smell of the place.” JAMES A. LEE is president at Shive-Hattery. He can be reached at jlee@ shive-hattery.com.

abilities to advance their career along that path. Our career paths are not a checklist of accomplishments. They are a resource to start a conversation with a supervisor about career development. COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE. Our communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting regularly. Many of our COPs are discipline based, such as architecture or structural engineering, and hold virtual meetings on a monthly basis over lunch to trade knowledge, discuss a pertinent topic, share lessons learned, and teach best prac- tices. Some are market focused, such as our healthcare COP, and some are practice based, such as our project management COP and our sustainability COP. The singular purpose of a COP is to transfer knowledge within a community of people by linking people together. LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM. Twenty-three years ago, our company president recognized the need for future leaders. Many of our peer firms lacked a new generation of leader- ship to step into the roles of the senior partners looking to retire. For that reason, we started a leadership develop- ment program to develop the leadership skills, knowledge, and abilities of an individual quicker than they would learn through on-the-job experiences. To this day, we have had two classes running concurrently. Each class will meet about five times every three months to discuss a series of reading assignments, articles, leadership-based videos, and case studies to enhance the natural leadership attributes they have already exhibited.

THE ZWEIG LETTER September 17, 2018, ISSUE 1264

Made with FlippingBook Annual report