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BUSINESS NEWS BURNS & MCDONNELL TO DOUBLE LOCAL WORKFORCE WITH NEW OFFICE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES Burns & McDonnell joined clients and partners to cut the ribbon on its new office in downtown Los Angeles, which will allow the company to accommodate its growing team and create up to 20 new jobs by 2023, doubling its local workforce. “We’re excited to be in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, near our key clients, and playing a role in the economic growth of the city,” said Renita Mollman, vice president and general manager for Burns & McDonnell in California. “As the demands for clean energy increase and as airport passenger travel continues to rise, our clients look to Burns & McDonnell to solve of the world’s most complex challenges. We’re laser focused on making our clients successful.” The growth in the California region is part of the firm’s nationwide effort to hire more than 1,000 professionals annually. The power sector remains strong for Burns & McDonnell as there is an increase in demand for greenhouse gas reductions, clean energy, and transportation electrification systems in California. With a need for greater resiliency in the essential infrastructure our country depends on, the federal budget includes significant funding increases for the Department of Defense and other agencies, to help rebuild and modernize aging facilities. Airline passenger traffic is at record levels with growth in the double digits, stressing commercial service airports in North America and the world.

To accommodate its growth, Burns & McDonnell is leasing a 7,000-square-foot office on the second floor at 617 W. Seventh St., near Union Station, the city’s largest railway station. The office space features an open design, outdoor courtyard, game room with basketball and workstations, which will allow Burns & McDonnell to continue its growth momentum and increase its environmental, design, and construction services for clients in the Los Angeles metropolitan region. The firm’s presence in California was established in 1923 when Burns & McDonnell opened its first regional office in Los Angeles. The office served clients for 10 years, providing waterworks, sewer, sewage disposal, electric lighting, and public utility appraisal services for nearly 45 clients until it closed in 1933, during the Great Depression. Today, the firm has more than 200 employees in its offices in Los Angeles, Brea, San Diego and San Francisco and more than 6,000 globally. Burns & McDonnell is ranked No. 1 in engineering and design in the U.S. by Engineering News-Record , serving the electrical power industry. Burns & McDonnell is a family of companies made up of more than 6,000 engineers, architects, construction professionals, scientists, consultants, and entrepreneurs with offices across the country and throughout the world. Burns & McDonnell strives to create amazing success for its clients and amazing careers for its employee-owners. Burns & McDonnell is 100 percent employee-owned and is proud to be on Fortune ’s 2018 list of100 Best Companies to Work For.

1200 North College Ave. Fayetteville, AR 72703 Mark Zweig | Publisher mzweig@zweiggroup.com Richard Massey | Managing Editor rmassey@zweiggroup.com Christina Zweig | Contributing Editor christinaz@zweiggroup.com Sara Parkman | Editor and Designer sparkman@zweiggroup.com Liisa Andreassen | Correspondent landreassen@zweiggroup.com

MARK ZWEIG, from page 1

setting. In an ideal world, THEIR managers are working with them to set realistic and attainable goals for their units. But in the real world, this doesn’t always happen. Some- times (and fairly frequently in the AEC world), individual managers have no formal goals or expectations given to them from those higher up in the organization. With no goals, guess what? No one knows if the manager is achieving anything – including the manager! Obviously, that isn’t an acceptable situation. The manager needs to set their own goals and inform their management of what they are and how they are performing relative to them. I had to do this many times early in my career because in some cases, I wasn’t working for experienced managers who knew what their real jobs were. ❚ ❚ Staffing. Managers have to take control of who is and who isn’t on their teams. This is easily said but never easily done in the AEC world, and for a whole host of reasons. Managers usually inherit their teams versus starting with a clean slate. It’s difficult to hire people today so it’s easy to accept lower-than-desired performance. The firm’s culture may not be one that demands high performance from anyone. Rewards and the ability to pay high performers what they are worth are constrained. Despite these impediments to building a high-performing team, none of them exempts the manager from doing what they have to do in order to build that team. It is still up to the indi- vidual manager to make this happen. I could keep going, but you should be able to see now how easily we let individual managers “off the hook” for poor performance when what we need to do is insist that they do the jobs they were assigned to do. Make sense? MARK ZWEIG is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.

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THE ZWEIG LETTER December 3, 2018, ISSUE 1274

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