Brian Conlin on the special nature of employee-owned firms and the skills needed to grow them

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Brian Conlin has been an important advisor to Ibbaka from its TeamFit days. He has deep leadership experience and an enquiring mind. We went to him for his knowledge of the civil engineering industry, but he brings insights across the boundaries of leadership, innovation and the development and governance of employee-owned businesses. He is part of the inspiration for our service led growth strategy (more on that in 2021).

Learn more about Brian’s current work at Waterfront Partners and his book with Natalie Michael, Your CEO Succession Playbook.

We spoke with Brian in early December.

Ibbaka: Can you tell us about your background, your passions and the path that led you to where you are today?

Brian: I worked at Golder Associates, an employee-owned engineering firm, and was there for 34 years. (In December 2020 Golder was acquired by WSP to create a global powerhouse in environmental engineering). I worked my way from entry-level engineer/scientist up to the CEO suite. One of my passions is employee ownership and perpetuating the ability to have highly engaged employee-owned firms that are able to focus on running a strong business, making a large contribution without being burdened by quarterly reporting.

Transitioning out of the CEO role in 2015, I followed my passion for executive coaching and I am now coaching eight executives, mostly CEO’s, and sitting on several boards. Two are private company boards and one as an advisory board member.

I do strategy work with companies as well. I’m a big proponent of Roger Martin’s strategic choice cascade and use that as a framework. I like helping people transition to and from the C-suite and into their next chapter. That has been rewarding work.

Ibbaka: What is it about employee-owned firms that gets you excited and interests you?

Brian: It is a complex operating environment because you want more people to be involved in decision making and setting the direction. It gets a lot more complicated and challenging than a simple top down model, but it is more rewarding because they are involved in setting the direction with the possibility of owning the outcome.

Employee-owned firms give great opportunities for engagement and participation. The employees are charting their own course. One can create a very different work environment. One that is quite different from many public firms.

Ibbaka: What are skills and skill sets that employee owned firms need, in addition to a privately-owned or publicly traded firm?

Brian: There is an opportunity for people to use their critical thinking skills and apply their curiosity. If there is something of interest to you and a skill you want to develop, then employee-owned firms will typically support that in ways that most other firms cannot.

Employee-owned firms need more people that are financial savvy, client savvy, technically competent. They need to help engineers become comfortable with the business piece. Engineers are often focussed on the intrinsic motivation that says you want to be the best software engineer in the world. We need that of course. It is one of the things that drives engagement. But we also need people who want to develop their business skills. The other critical set of skills involves teamwork. Learning how to be part of a team and making a contribution to the team without letting your biases run over top of you is pretty important.

Let your curiosity out and get out there. There were certain types of work, pieces of work, government agencies, that were actually almost the most profitable business areas for the firm. It really depended on what area you went after, what type of work you did. Rather write off the government as a sector, is to look at it in a little more detail. That example of being curious as to why and not just blindly broad-brush things is critical. Private consulting industry requires broad skill development.

 Ibbaka: How do engineering firms approach this challenge of building new capabilities and new skill sets?

Brian: Historically, even today with many firms, the firms would map out a series of milestones they want you to achieve. Then people are put through a series of experiences, training and on the job skill development. For a consultant, client development and client interaction are important skills to develop.

A simple way to get this started is to invite young people to a client development meeting and have them watch and listen. They learn really quickly by that exposure. Targeted training is another approach. Something I’m intrigued with now is with micro-training where they do “smaller bites.” Along with this comes micro credentialing or badges. That can be a big opportunity for many firms. When the word ‘training’ comes up, most firms think of a bureaucracy being built up with a training function and people in seats. There are better ways to approach this.

I’m optimistic that more and more firms are going to create thoughtful development paths that aren't forced on anybody. People are opening their minds to different ways of skill development, but the question is, how do you develop and train common sense? Either people have it or don’t have it. The people that have it, they just seem to do better.

Ibbaka: How do you think the civil engineering firms are thinking about adaptation to climate change, and how would they go about activating that as a new capability? This is an area that Ibbaka is involved in and we are supporting the ResiliencebyDesign Lab at Royal Roads University in its development of a competency model for adaptation to climate change. (See Open Competency Models).

Brian:  I think that a lot of firms are now looking at the sheer level of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) in the environment and would like to find ways to help their clients adapt to this. Most civil engineering firms understand this as degradation of infrastructure, erosion issues, shorelines under threat or water shortages. What are the options and what are the scenarios? What do I have to monitor to know if that scenario is going to occur? It is the risk assessment piece that is most important.

Most civil engineering firms are saying this is going to create an immense opportunity for restoration needs, infrastructure, and other areas. In the built environment, it is going to create all kinds of opportunities for efficiency, reduction in greenhouse gases. Solar and wind will become more and more popular over time in the right locations. Maybe hydroelectric will continue to be important, maybe even one day nuclear, but that remains to be seen. The boards I sit on, they see this as an incredible opportunity, but they worry whether governments can actually afford to do anything about it, particularly after COVID-19.

One of the areas that is going to differentiate one firm to another, is the ability to communicate with the public. Facilitating conversations with regulators, industry, and the public is a core skill set.

I think the basic engineering and science around adaptation is already well known, but how to apply them and create the right teams to get the confidence of the public that you can pull it off, that is the critical thing. Most of this is repackaging of existing knowledge, rather than creating brand new untapped territories.

Ibbaka: Are there other areas you can see over the next five to ten years that engineering firms are going to need to build new capabilities in? You have mentioned cyber-security, what are some other areas where new capabilities might be needed?

Brian: If history repeats itself, the disruption that will come to the industry will come from outside. The competitive threat will come from unexpected directions. For example, AI is all about prediction, and the companies with ongoing access to data are creating tools to predict all sorts of different things. In some cases, these companies will use data for everything from traffic planning to water management to the layout of airports. Traditionally, that work would’ve been done by an engineering firm, but now it’s done by somebody else with access to data who has built the relevant algorithms.

I think a lot of firms now are thinking that, if you scroll ahead ten-to-twenty years, they are going to need people who can combine creative and critical thinking. Something the computer or bot can’t do. The computer can put a square box there for a few cents, but it’s only the creative person that says a box will or won’t work or how it gets connected to other parts of the environment. Computers don't, at least at this point, understand what people appreciate or what beauty looks like. Creativity and beauty may be in great demand in decades to come. This is behind the surge in demand for design thinking that Ibbaka has been leveraging. 

Maybe the workforce will get smaller. When there are autonomous cars and trucks there are going to be hundreds and thousands of truck drivers without work. What opportunities will we provide for these people?

I think skills will be what differentiates people in the future. It won’t be just getting hired because you have a degree. It will be about the skills you have acquired, how you have applied them, and who you have used them with.

Hopefully, universities will be able to adapt to the changing needs of industries and be able to make skill-development part of the curriculum. There has been some progress here with things like experiential learning but there is a long way to go. Learning is not something that stops when you graduate.

Ibbaka: If you were talking to either the younger version of yourself or a person in their first years of their career, what advice would you give?

Brian: Jump at every opportunity you can get. Anything you look at that looks interesting, try it out and don’t sit back. Find the opportunity and sniff it out. When any young person showed up at the door and asked if I needed help, I would say absolutely; they are keen to lean in and they want to do it.

Trying different things, searching, looking over the horizon and seeing what is coming are important skills to develop. I mentioned curiosity earlier, I am not sure if curiosity is a skill, but it is critical to success. 

I think people are going to start appreciating the mentoring up as opposed to mentoring down. The new graduates come in and show what it means to be on social media, how it works, explain what the advantages of it are.

A story told by the BC firm Urban Systems is that they weren’t being as effective on recruiting as they had hoped. They went to their people and asked them how they would go about finding new people. The answer was LinkedIn and Facebook. They now put out interesting lures from their projects to engage potential candidates. They are able to find new people through social media while spending a fraction of what they spent in previous years on recruiting. 

Ibbaka: What strategies have you, your family and community been finding to cope and thrive in this environment at the moment?

Brian: We miss the social interaction, no doubt. I think people are having trouble with client development and struggling to build relationships visually instead of in person. A lot of what is needed for resilience is attitude. Waking up every morning and thinking about how we are blessed with what we have gives us a reason to find ways to get going and make a difference.