Stantec’s talkin’ ‘bout my generation… At work

By Graham Senft, Associate, Buildings Engineering (Vancouver, BC)

Stantec’s Graham Senft talks about some of the qualities that earned Stantec a coveted place on the list of Canada’s Top Employers for Young People.

Graham Senft

I joined Stantec in 2007, following the completion of my master’s degree in urban studies. I had spent the first several years of my career as a planner in the public sector, and I was ready for something more dynamic, more collaborative and, perhaps most importantly, more engaging.

I was intrigued by Stantec’s significant presence in the BC market, its entrepreneurial, growth-oriented business model, and with the opportunities inherent in working with a large integrated design services firm. With a background in planning, project management, and sustainable urban development, a consulting role with Stantec’s multi-disciplinary Sustainable Solutions (S3) team in Vancouver appeared to be a natural fit.

That’s why I came to Stantec. But the more important story is what made me stay.

The Vancouver-based S3 group is young, passionate, and collaborative; my project work is innovative and diverse, and the firm’s sustainability practice crosses scales, sectors, and geographic boundaries, satisfying my innate intellectual and organizational curiosity.

But there are broader, more fundamental things going on at Stantec that keep me excited about working for this organization, and make it a great place for young employees.

For a firm of more than ten thousand people, Stantec is a tremendously “flat” organization. It lacks much of the centralized hierarchy, process, and structure that suffocate many large firms. In my short time with the company, I have seen how this relatively loose corporate culture—described by one member of the leadership team as ‘creative chaos’—serves as a springboard for the growth and advancement of younger staff, rewarding innovative thinking, hard work, and initiative, regardless of job title, discipline, or seniority.

The Young Leaders group in Vancouver is just one example of the initiatives in place to support young employees and, more specifically, to ensure that rising stars stick around long enough to fill future vacancies in key senior technical, managerial, and leadership roles. As part of the first cohort of the Young Leaders group (YL1), I have had the opportunity to experience Stantec’s approach to leadership development first hand. It has been a career highlight.

With the support of an external professional development consultant, the Young Leaders group brought together twelve young employees from multiple offices and backgrounds, and challenged us to determine what leadership development meant to us, and to build a program and a work plan that would get us there.

The result was an informal and largely self-directed series of projects, exercises, and discussions around team building, leadership, career planning, and business development. I have described it as one part capacity building and personal development, one part mentorship and career planning, and one part applied leadership training.

The strength of the YL experience is the flexibility and responsiveness of the program to the needs and interests of the group, which served to more deeply engage all of us in our work and in the direction of the company. That’s creative chaos at work.