Leadership, management, and intellectual riots
Thinking about the legacy of engineers, architects, and planners of the built environment
As an industry, as employers, or as managers who want to be leaders—stop rewarding loyalty and conformity. Loyalty programs are for airline points, not for professional services.
Reward people who have the audacity to serve the public interest.
In public or private sector, it’s common to be put on the management path after a certain number of years. Management is overseeing a vetted and approved process. You take the reins and make sure the team follows the path that’s been blessed before them.
Leadership is different than management. A leader can’t be fully prepared for anything. Being fully prepared means it’s been done a million times.
I’m not saying management is bad, just that it’s a different role with different purposes. Managers can help achieve wonderful advancements in planning and engineering by following the leader into new territory. But let’s be honest…look how little planning and engineering has changed its design philosophy in the last 100 years. Serving the public interest is going to take an intellectual riot.
One way to stir up a sense of urgency is to think about your professional legacy.
Think about legacy as an individual, as a company, and as an employer. Think about legacy as someone whose work ultimately serves the public (making townhomes legal, reducing crash energy on the big arterials, etc.).
It’s hard for experts to stomach the thought that standards need to be raised because after all, we're professionals. It’s natural to trust someone who's highly educated, so there’s a constant subtle message that things are fine, or at least as good as they can be. If modern standards for the built environment are lacking, then wouldn’t the professionals before us have done something about it?
It’s agonizing when you discover your profession delivers ongoing physical, mental, and financial harm to communities. So what should smart people do when they discover systemic deficiencies in their profession? I suppose that depends on the person. Writing a substack is free. Publishing a podcast is free. Giving a guest lecture at a local college is free.
Imagine someone reading your bio 5, 10, or 50 years from now. Maybe your legacy be something like “earned good grades and was a loyal company employee.” Or maybe it’ll be something like “did their part to improve the human experience, even when it deviated from the industry norms.”