A civil engineer by training, Michael Kennedy has always gravitated toward project management rather than nuts-and-bolts engineering. He joined Stantec in 2002 as a project manager and by 2005 was running the project management group. He is now regional vice-president for Stantec’s B.C. operation, which employs 1,800 people.
Through his experience managing large teams and complex projects, Kennedy said he learned how – and how not – to get people to agree to try a new way of doing things.
“I call it the importance of not being right,” he said.
It’s a lesson he learned while working on the construction of a large building in the early 2000s. He developed an innovative solution to price the work and hire a general contractor.
“Typically in B.C. for provincially funded projects, you just issue lump-sum tenders,” he explained. “We broke it down into components and looked at it on a piece-by-piece basis.”
“It became pretty standard on many provincially funded institutional projects.”
However, selling the idea to his team was a challenge.
“Through this nine-month-long discussion, it became clear to me that being right wasn’t going to sell this idea to people. The way to go about it was to get everyone to come up with the answer.”
Ever since then, Kennedy has used a consensus-building method that involves getting suggestions from the team and generally “coming at it backwards” instead of the my-way-or-the-highway approach.
He reflected that this lesson is something most people likely have to learn while on the job, not in school.
“When people come out of university, they’re conditioned to say well, you analyze the question and then you present the answer. It’s all about proving, almost through a scientific process, that you’ve got the right answer.
“The difference is as you get more into your career and as you get to be more responsible for leading people, that doesn’t work as purely as people make out when you first start your career.”
on learning Management lessons from his kids | “One of the things that happened in the middle of that first project was getting married and having kids, and the importance of not being right is never truer than when you’re trying to coax kids to do the right thing. If you tell them, this is what you’re going to do, it’s more than likely the case that they’re not going to do what you want them to do. But if you give them options, they figure it out in the end.”
