Effective Leadership Development in a Civil-Engineering Culture: Finding the Balance-Point between Experience and Experiment

In the late 1990s, in the midst of a period of rapid growth and dramatic organizational change, PBS&J, a 40-year-old, employee-owned engineering/consulting firm, recognized the immediate need to focus company resources on the development of a new generation of leadership both for company assets recently acquired and those expanding internally as well as for future expansion and long-term success. With little shared learning available within the civil-engineering profession for creating a leadership development curriculum, the company set about the task of learning how to establish its own internal program for identifying and nurturing future generations of civil engineering leaders. This article summarizes the efforts involved in establishing the PBS&J Leadership Development Program. It offers insights gleaned from five years of operation, which have produced nearly 120 graduates and have led to profound changes within the company’s organizational structure and within its internal culture.